The Invention of English Criticism 1650–1760 by Michael Gavin (review)

Michael Gavin offers an incisive study of a boundless concept: criticism. Where scholars usually take criticism to mean writing that evaluates literature, this account conceives of its topic broadly as the “socially realized exercise of judgment.” In seventeenth-and eighteenth-century England, criticism sprouted within and outside writing: in prefaces, prologues, and periodical essays, as well as coffee-house chatter, stage heckling, and coterie manuscript exchange. In addition, those who commandeered these outlets often addressed topics beyond belles lettres and became controversial arbiters for determining what qualified as literary expression in the first place. Drawing on the insights of book history, The Invention of English Criticism aims neither to redraw the boundaries of early modern critical discourse nor to contain criticism within catchy definitions, undertakings to which the field has proven historically resistant. Rather, the goal is to understand what critics actually did. Behind Dryden’s idealization of criticism as a “standard of judging well,” Mr. Gavin reveals a world rife with personal quarrels, public skepticism, and self-doubt. English critics struggled to construct their authority to judge, and to answer questions that still haunt their modern counterparts: is criticism a true field of knowledge? What does it contribute to society? Why has critical enterprise seemed always so fraught, at once “vitally important” and “horribly wrong”?

Mr. Gavin asks how criticism became “recognized as a mode of writing,” not how it graduated into a stable genre that helped solidify bourgeois English culture into a public sphere. As such, he revels in the messiness of criticism’s origins without presupposing its eventual legitimatization as an authoritative discourse. Indeed, his account questions whether criticism ever achieved such a victory, arguing that the field’s “undisciplined past illuminates its ambivalent, contested, and never fully disciplined present.” Invention rejects singular narratives of generic evolution to foreground a seventeenth-century “media shift,” through which a hodgepodge of speech acts and scribal forms converged on print as their primary vehicle. Mr. Gavin labels this shift the “textualization of judgment,” and argues that it held important ramifications for the public’s perception of critics. Initially regarded as outspoken scolds, critics were later seen as polemic pamphleteers, and finally as literary peers, as animadversion came to seem like a “friendly exchange of opinions among poets.”

Mr. Gavin traces writing’s absorption of criticism across six chapters. The first locates the beginnings of “the textualization of judgment” in the world of Restoration drama, and the conduits that connected playhouses, presses, patronage networks, and a literary marketplace after the theaters reopened. It was in the “densely social world of theatrical reception, conversation, and writing,” Invention shows, that criticism first became a “program for writing and publishing books.” Mr. Gavin devotes significant attention to the roles of stationers like the Interregnum publisher, Humphrey Moseley, and the royalist bookseller, Henry Herringman, whose inclusion of prefatory essays within his editions of playbooks helped transform “the manuscript culture of the prior decades into a tradition of textual debate.”

As this debate became a fixture in the book trade, critics fashioned terminology to describe the discursive space that criticism claimed. Many found battle imagery apt, and the most vigorously contested turf became Parnassus, “a virtual realm of writing, reading, and publishing” that could be superimposed on real places in England. Mr. Gavin shows how a limestone mountain in central Greece mythologized as the home of the muses became in eighteenth-century England a venue for the “competing efforts of authors, publishers, and other participants in literary prestige-making.” He warns, at the same time, that such spatial metaphors gloss over the particularities of critical debate, the purpose of which was to “differentiate among its participants.”

Invention recovers Parnassus as a trope of critical self-conception at the same time it identifies the limits of another simulated space: the place of public communication demarcated by Habermas and shaped spherical by his English translators. A chief fault of this model, Mr. Gavin claims, is that it excludes the critical contributions of...