ABSTRACT
The five readings collected under this broad heading of ‘humanist’ criticism are inevitably diverse in nature. But, beginning with Proust, the influence of whose essay may be detected in the discussions of Balzac by a number of subsequent critics, all the writers represented here share a belief in the work of art as the product of an individual creative imagination, whose structuring logic provides evidence of the relationship between the writer’s inner self and the universe of which he is part. Their shared conviction of the work of art as a more profound expression of self than the writer’s everyday self permits a number of distinct developments, as in the case of Georges Poulet, whose approach, however great his opposition to Sartre’s view of the work of art as an ‘en soi’ object, possesses a definite existentialist filiation.
