ABSTRACT
This book is written in the summer of 1955. It has often been reprinted, and seems to have had some influence on later criticism. Modern academic criticism is so abundant that it would not be easy to provide a general account of how attitudes to the themes discussed in this book, and the ways they are talked about, have changed. Over the past thirty or forty years criticism, as expounded, for instance, in the eighth volume of Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, has concerned itself for the most part with varieties of structuralism and post-structuralism, with hermeneutics and phenomenology and speech-act theory. The flourishing doctrines or attitudes of the New Historicism make little allowance for the sort of historical narrative sketched in this book or in that more remarkable book, Mario Praz’s The Romantic Agony. They would suffer under the description ‘Old Historicism’.
