Leitch - American Literary Criticism since The 1930s

It would be difficult to imagine a more useful guide to the contemporary critical scene than this volume Both a history of critical ideas and an analysis of the modes of critical production, American Literary Criticism should take its place for quite some time as the definitive work in its field.

American Literature

Leitchs book is an achievement of genuine merit and will contribute much to the self-understanding of the American critical institutions.

Modern Language Notes

Joining in the widespread current efforts to place literature and literary studies back within history, Vincent Leitch presents the first panoramic and all-inclusive narrative of the history of American literary criticism from the 1930s to the present. Leitchs authoritative and even-handed account is placed against the backdrop of the social, cultural and political history of the period.

J. Hillis Miller, University of California, Irvine

Vincent Leitch has managed to get the last fifty years of American Literary criticism into a readable narrative that does not unduly reduce the complexity, complication and plain messiness of the story. In all this Leitch does an excellent job of embedding the history of criticism in economic, social, political, cultural and institutional history.

Gerald Graff, Northwestern University

At once a readable and reliable guide to literary criticism and theory, one that should be extremely helpful both to students and teachers of the subject.

Stanley Fish, Duke University

Leitchs [book] really is an excellent advanced introduction to the history of literary theory in America, written in a lively style accessible even to the novice. This is a book worth recommending to students who are coming to literary theory for the first time as well as those who are interested in the historical, economic, cultural, social, intellectual and importantly, institutional contexts of contemporary theoretical debates and critical developments. The book is very user-friendly, having a full index and a good set of references.

Deborah L. Madsen, Journal of American Studies

LONDON AND NEW YORK

In the 1880s departments of literary study first began to appear in leading American universities. Within a generation multifaceted struggles were underway between advocates of an elitist, literary aesthetic and adherents of a somewhat populist viewpoint emphasizing the sociological foundations of poetic art. In the 1930s the antagonistic dialogue between conservative New Critics and Marxist literary theorists constituted an especially strong form of this struggle, which manifested itself in other vigorous forms up to the present, as, for example, in the lingering conflict today between second-generation Yale School deconstructors and leftist proponents of cultural studies. U.S. literary criticism since the 1930s has exhibited continuous struggles between various formalistic schools of criticism devoted to linguistic, rhetorical, and epistemological habits of mind and certain cultural movements committed to sociological, psychological, and political modes of thinking. At their worst these two contending wings of academic literary criticism foster characteristic disorders of reading: one discounts the reader and aggrandizes the text whereas the other empowers the reader and dominates the text. One conceives the literary work as a miraculous, semi-autonomous aesthetic artifact and the other conceptualizes literature as a symptomatic cultural production grounded in anthropological, economic, social, and political history. Characteristically, one veers toward liberal and conservative political views and the other toward left-liberal and leftist perspectives. In the final analysis, however, this large-scale dialectic and allegorical division tells us remarkably little about the detailed microhistories composing American literary criticism since the 1930s.