The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism. Volume VII: Modernism and the New Criticism (review)

The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism. Volume VII: Modernism and the New Criticism. Edited by A. Walton Litz, Louis Menand, and Lawrence Rainey. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Pp. x + 565. $110.00.

Whatever one's theoretical reservations about histories of literature and criticism, the value of a thorough and lucidly presented series like Cambridge's should be beyond question. To be sure, any wide-ranging literary history invites scepticism today. Which authors have been (inevitably) excluded? Are those critics who are included discussed within appropriate conceptual frameworks, philosophical, institutional, or whatever they might be? Are there hidden teleologies or agendas in the narratives that organize the history? What counts as "literary" and "criticism" in the first place? Questions like these hover over the Cambridge series (whose first volume appeared in 1989) even more than its most comparable and immediate predecessor, René Wellek's eight-volume History of Modern Criticism, 1750-1950 (1955-1992). Yet for all of our suspicion of literary-historical works that gesture toward comprehensiveness, we are arguably in greater need of histories of literary criticism than was Wellek's first audience. Contemporary criticism's demand for theoretically and historically informed work, for example, cries out for inquiries into the origins of current methodologies, studies that can help us rethink our own approaches and those we may not have considered fully or in critical context. Volume VII of The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, Modernism and the New Criticism, provides some of the necessary perspective for such an undertaking, in part because it concerns the recent past, the period in which literary criticism was successfully introduced into the university, where it has largely remained since.

As it turns out, one of the most thought-provoking sections of Modernism and the New Criticism is "The Critic and the Institutions of Culture." This section is the third of three parts, following the expected divisions between "The Modernists" and "The New Critics." Even readers familiar with the critics discussed in the earlier sections will find the third part illuminating; it should also quiet those sceptics quick to label the book a mere reference guide. "The Critic and the Institutions of Culture" opens with the longest chapters in the volume, Wallace Martin's fifty-three page "Criticism and the academy" and Morris Dickstein's fifty-five page "The critic and society, 1900-1950," discussions that situate critics in relation to the modern university and beyond its ivory towers. Not only do these chapters allow for considerations of authors whose criticism is more than literary, such as Edmund Wilson, George Orwell, and Lionel Trilling, but they call into question what editors Menand and Rainey call the "whiggish and necessarily schematic accounts of the development of 'theory,'" in which the New Criticism's supposed dominance in the academy is taken to be the preliminary condition for a rapid series of shifting theoretical paradigms, culminating in poststructuralism, New Historicism, and cultural studies (2). The New Criticism's most lasting stamp on the academy, practical criticism, was never solely New Critical in orientation, and often lacked in practice features for which later theorists upbraid it: "Just as [Cleanth] Brooks had accepted [I. A.] Richards's practical criticism but rejected his theories," Martin writes, "so the American teacher made use of the interpretive method of Brooks and Warren, separating it from their organicist theorising" (301). Similarly, after one grants the impact of many New Critics championing the metaphysical poets over the romantics, the changes in taste were "reflected less in the pages accorded to each poet in anthologies than in the number of articles written about them," and they were "ultimately less consequential for conceptions of 'the canon' than the entry of modern literature, the novel, and American literature into the curriculum" (303).

Even without "The Critic and the Institutions of Culture," Modernism and the New Criticism would be a valuable book for the theorist, historian, and...