This important volume has been the subject of an extensive nine‐column review by Stefan Collini in The Times Literary Supplement, September 8, 2000, pp. 11‐13 entitled “How the critic came to be king”. To quote from the blurb to the volume, it “provides a thorough account of the critical tradition emerging with the modernist and avant‐garde writers of the early” years of the last century, such as T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein and William Butler Yeats, among others. It then continues with the New Critics such as I.A. Richards, William Empson, Kenneth Burke and Yvor Winters “feeding into the influential work of” critics such as F. R. Leavis, Lionel Trilling and others “who helped form the modern institutions of literary culture”. The chronological focus is on the years 1910 to 1960. However, essays make connections with the Victorian inheritance and point forward to late twentieth‐century developments.
A clearly written succinct introduction by Louis Menard and Lawrence Rainey is followed by the first of the 20 essays in the volume. Modernism and the New Criticism is divided into three sections. The first devotes seven essays to “The Modernists”. Louis Menard writes with insight on T.S. Eliot. Menard’s arresting opening sentence“T.S. Eliot became a figure in the tradition he made himself famous by attacking” (p. 17) is but one example of the insight found in his contribution. This is followed by A. Walton Litz and Lawrence Rainey’s account of the critical thinking of Ezra Pound. Steven Meyer writes on Gertrude Stein, Maria DiBattista on Virginia Woolf. Vincent Sherry in a short piece on Wyndham Lewis, while condemning Ezra Pound for “his (mostly) unrepentant anti‐semitism and fascism”(p. 150), glosses over Wyndham Lewis’s own reactionary politics, Lucy McDiarmid writes on the critical output of W.B. Yeats. Michael North, in the seventh and final contribution to the first section, discusses “The Harlem Renaissance”. North focusses his attention primarily on the writings of James Weldon Johnson, W.E.B. Du Bois, Alain Locke, George Schuyler and others.
The second section is devoted to “The New Critics”. There are six contributions. Paul H. Fry exposes the limitations of I.A. Richards’ thinking. Mark Jancovitch’s examination of “The Southern New Critics” focuses on the output of three critics: John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate and Robert Penn Warren. The distinguished poet and critic, William Empson, is the subject of the first of two contributions by Michael Wood, who stops short of making large claims for Empson. Unlike Christopher Ricks, Wood does not assert that Empson’s investigations of the ambiguities inherent in poetic language anticipated the theories of deconstruction purveyed subsequently by Jacques Derrida and his followers. The obsession with the concept of “form” is the focus of Wood’s second contribution in his exposition of the ideas of R.P. Blackmur. Eugene Goodheart, in one of the shortest essays in the volume, writes on the rhetorician Kenneth Burke. The distinguished critic and poet, Donald Davie, who died in 1995, writes perceptively on Yvor Winters.
The final section, “The Critic and the Institutions of Culture”, has seven sections. In the first, Wallace Martin expounds at considerable length on “Criticism and the academy”. Martin’s range extends from the mid‐nineteenth century to the 1960s. In another lengthy contribution to the volume, Morris Dickstein writes well on the subject of “The critic and society, 1900‐1950”. Dickstein’s focus is largely on the American scene. Josephine M. Guy and Ian Small, in their “The British ‘man of letters’ and the rise of the professional”, as their title implies, focus their attention on British developments. There then follows two discussions of influential individual figures. Michael Bell writes with authority and knowledge on “one of the most potent single influences on English studies in the earlier and middle part of the twentieth century”(p. 389), F.R. Leavis. Harvey Teres writes equally insightfully on Leavis’s American counterpart, Lionel Trilling. Lawrence Lipking’s “Poet‐critics” is one of the most rambling essays in the volume. The final essay, written by Michael Levenson, is devoted to “Criticism of fiction”.
Modernism and the New Criticism concludes with an extensive unannotated bibliography of primary and secondary sources. There is an extensive index. Well bound to withstand a lengthy shelf life and usage, nicely typeset in Sabon, with sensible margins, there is something for many differing tastes in this new addition to The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism. It is highly recommended for all libraries with collections in the humanities.
