ABSTRACT
Contemporary Literary Scholarship, edited by Lewis Leary (1958), comments briefly in its chapters on criticism, poetry, the novel, and the drama on most of the post-1930 books—and a few articles—of critical interest in English, but the two indispensable works are Theory of Literature (1949, rev. 1956 and 1964) by René Wellek and Austin Warren, and Literary Criticism: a Short History (1957) by William K. Wimsatt and Cleanth Brooks. Although both are much more than guidebooks, they are of great value simply as works of reference because of the range and inclusiveness of their references; the bibliographies are especially thorough. Theory of Literature is arranged by topics (e.g. “Literature and Biography,” “Evaluation”) and is in effect more or less restricted to the last one hundred years, whereas the Wimsatt-Brooks History (which is “short” only in name) proceeds from Plato and Aristotle to the present day, though tending to concentrate in modern times mainly on English and American criticism. Of the older surveys George Saintsbury’s A History of Criticism and Literary Taste in Europe (3 vols. 1900–4; English sections revised as A History of English Criticism, 1911) remains engagingly readable, but theoretically it is naïve; J. W. H. Atkins’s English Literary Criticism (3 vols., 1943–51; only completed to c. 1800) is in the same tradition, if much duller. More sophisticated and more ambitious is René Wellek’s A History of Modern Criticism: 1750 -1950 (4 vols.? 1955–65), which de- 199votes separate chapters full of meticulous detail to all the principal European and American critics; the bias is toward critical theory throughout. A detailed if often superficial account of the most recent English and American criticism will be found in Stanley E. Hyman’s The Armed Vision (1948, rev. 1955), which also has useful bibliographies. See also Murray Krieger, The New Apologists for Poetry (1956), a much abler book. For those impatient of theory, George Watson’s short and lively Penguin paperback The Literary Critics (1962) can be recommended. Encyclopaedia of Literature (2 vols., 1946, rev. 1953 as Dictionary of World Literature; general editor Joseph T. Shipley) has some good critical articles as well as many indifferent ones; William Elton’s short A Glossary of the New Criticism ( 1949, rev. 1951 as A Guide to the New Criticism) is exactly what it proclaims itself.
