"Literary criticism" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... act so detrimental to his interests as I have done in this unfortunate publication; and I shall be too happy when the lapse of time will allow of my utterly forgetting the occurrence. I am already indifferent to literary criticism, and had almost forgotten Abel's approaching competition." The work went through two editions.] but is pleased with Macleod's [Footnote: "Narrative of a Voyage in His Majesty's late ship Alceste to the Yellow Sea, along the Coast of Corea, and through its ...
— A Publisher and His Friends • Samuel Smiles
... including much of Carlyle's work, all of Macaulay's except the early "Essay on Milton," the religious polemics of Frederick Dennison Maurice and John Henry Newman, nearly all of Ruskin's discussions of art and social history, most of Leigh Hunt's literary criticism, and Matthew Arnold's important early critical essays. This, too, is a notable showing. But if we turn to the two realms in which Browning excelled, poetry and drama, we find different conditions. During the central period of his career, there was, aside from ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning
... And the testimony of Papias to its authorship, and to the spirit and purpose of the author, is significant and memorable. Evidence of this nature would be regarded as decisive in any other case of literary criticism. ...
— Who Wrote the Bible? • Washington Gladden
... Literary criticism (so called) in America had been hitherto mere puffery—puffery for the most part of weak, prolix, commonplace scribblings of little would-be authors and poets. A reformation in criticism, therefore, Edgar Poe conceived to be the only remedy for the prevalent mediocrity in writing that ...
— The Dreamer - A Romantic Rendering of the Life-Story of Edgar Allan Poe • Mary Newton Stanard
... Milton's sonnets with a paragraph, while he devotes sixteen paragraphs to "Paradise Lost," he indicates by the greater mass the greater value he ascribes to the epic. So again, a very good proof that he did not intend this essay to be a literary criticism primarily, another evidence beside the closing paragraph, is found in his division of the whole essay. To Milton's poetry he has given forty-one paragraphs, and to his character fifty-two paragraphs. The most common ...
— English: Composition and Literature • W. F. (William Franklin) Webster
... As a mere literary criticism on Smith's writings, it would appear that he had a habit of transferring to his own career notable incidents and adventures of which he had read, and this is somewhat damaging to an estimate of his originality. His wonderful system of telegraphy by means of torches, which he says he ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... child to admire me for being taller or writing more cleverly than she; but how can I ask my superior to say that I am a wonder when he knows better than I? In Addison's days you could scarcely show him a literary performance, a sermon, or a poem, or a piece of literary criticism, but he felt he could do better. His justice must have made him indifferent. He didn't praise, because he measured his compeers by a higher standard than common people have.(75) How was he who was so tall to look up to any but the loftiest genius? He must have stooped to put ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... humor. The volume was heartily praised by the critics and his reputation as a new poet of convincing distinction was established. In the following year appeared Conversations on Some of the Old Poets, a volume of literary criticism interesting now mainly as pointing to maturer ...
— The Vision of Sir Launfal - And Other Poems • James Russell Lowell
... before, but we enjoy it more, because we understand in some degree why we feel it. Say what we will, we are never really content with an admiration which cannot render to itself a reason. What are all the thousand works of literary criticism called forth by, unless it be by that perpetual question which nags for an answer in all intelligent minds, the question "What is the gift which, behind all mere diction, behind all cadence and rhythm and rhyme, behind all mere lucidity, behind ...
— Platform Monologues • T. G. Tucker
... thought of Sir Roger, and however many little touches may have been added by other hands, he remains Addison's creation: and furthermore it does not matter a snap of the fingers whether any actual person served as the model from which the picture was taken. Of all the bootless quests that literary criticism can undertake, this search for "the original" is the least valuable. The artist's mind is a crucible which transmutes and re-creates: to vary the metaphor, the marble springs to life under the workman's hands: we can almost see it happening in these Essays: and we know ...
— The De Coverley Papers - From 'The Spectator' • Joseph Addison and Others
... hopefulness which at that time pulsated in my veins. Though his teaching was essentially only a repetition of that in Heinse's Ardinghello, the forces that then surged in young breasts were given full and eloquent expression. The guiding spirit of this tendency was followed in literary criticism, which was aimed mainly at the supposed or actual incapacity of the semi-classical occupants of our various literary thrones. Without the slightest mercy the pedants, [Footnote: Zopfe in the German text.— TRANSLATOR.] among whom Tieck for one was numbered, ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... the philosophical faculty as a sort of preparatory course to the others remained in force in Austria until 1850. It is not surprising, then, that Austria should have compared so unfavorably with Germany in philology, history, philosophy and literary criticism until ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - February, 1876, Vol. XVII, No. 98. • Various
... proof of the lasting and deserved popularity of this Essay, than the numerous quotations from it, not only in works on rhetoric and literary criticism, but in our ordinary intercourse with men. Couplets and lines have become household words wherever the English language is spoken. How often do we hear the sciolist condemned ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... Shakespeare and Webster have been stirred, after so long converse with things that stopped their ears, whether above or below the soil, at his exquisite appreciations of them; the souls of Titian and of Hogarth too; for, what has not been observed so generally as the excellence of his literary criticism, Charles Lamb is a fine critic of painting also. It was as loyal, self-forgetful work for others, for Shakespeare's self first, for instance, and then for Shakespeare's readers, that that too was done: he has the true scholar's ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... conceived and adequately executed translation of an ancient author must be founded upon some conscious theory or some unconscious instinct of literary criticism. As is the critical spirit of an age, so among other things will be its translations. Now the critical spirit of every age previous to our own has been characterized by its inability to appreciate sympathetically the spirit of past and bygone times. In the seventeenth century criticism ...
— The Unseen World and Other Essays • John Fiske
... far as feasible has naturally precluded the possibility of gathering all the important utterances together. The basis of division and grouping of the selections is made sufficiently obvious by the headings. In the division of literary criticism the endeavor has been to illustrate Arnold's cosmopolitanism by essays of first-rate importance dealing with the four literatures with which he was well acquainted. In the notes, conciseness with a reasonable degree of thoroughness has been ...
— Selections from the Prose Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... example of Cervantes directly and Shakespeare indirectly among the moderns, and of the poetic fiction-writers of old. It is perfectly clear that he had thought widely (and perhaps had read not a little) on the subject of literary criticism, in a sense not common in his day, and that the thinking had led him to a conception of the "prose epic" which, though it might have been partly (not wholly by any means) pieced out of the Italian ...
— The English Novel • George Saintsbury
... In prose literary criticism, he keeps his place with Poe at the head of American writers. Lowell's sentences are usually simple in form and easily understood; they are frequently enlivened by illuminating figures of rhetoric and by humor, or rendered ...
— History of American Literature • Reuben Post Halleck
... of character. The historical revelation is the more complete, precisely because Dante was not a commonplace or average person but a man of unique force, mental and moral. The remark may suggest what is the special value of the literary criticism or its bearing upon history. We may learn from many sources what was the current mythology of the day; and how ordinary people believed in devils and in a material hell lying just beneath our feet. The vision probably strikes ...
— English Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century • Leslie Stephen
... steadily increasing from this period, on the part of the British press, cannot be denied, whatever we may think of the causes that brought it about. Nor did it stop short with depreciation of his works. Literary criticism, even if based merely upon personal dislike, can always resort with safety to the cheap defense that it is honest. But there were reviewers who went farther, who framed for Cooper imaginary feelings ...
— James Fenimore Cooper - American Men of Letters • Thomas R. Lounsbury
... discusses happiness, he adds a curious limitation—"as the man of sense would define." He postulates a certain intelligence of the matter in hand. Similarly Longinus, the greatest of ancient critics, says that in literature sure judgement is the outcome of long experience. In matters of historical and literary criticism, a certain instinct is needed, conscious or unconscious, perhaps more often the latter, which without a serious interest and a long experience no man is ...
— The Jesus of History • T. R. Glover
... arrived till then. I mean the positive feeling of it, which is a thing that cannot be discussed. Neither will I discuss here the regrets of those critics, which seem to me the most irrelevant thing that could have been said in connection with literary criticism. ...
— Notes on My Books • Joseph Conrad
... privileges to the orthodox clergy (exemptions from regular taxes and benefit of the clergy).... Christianity becomes a monopoly defended by the state.... Psychological power and attraction in the elaborate symbolism and ritual of the church.... Allegory put an end to all literary criticism.... Flourishing of the miraculous; any unusual or startling occurrence attributed to the intervention of either God or the Devil.... Older conceptions of disease as caused by the Devil.... Our legal expression 'act of God' confined to unforseeable ...
— Manhood of Humanity. • Alfred Korzybski
... has to go back a good way for that!" said Howard. "People can't afford now to know more than a manual of a couple of hundred pages can tell them about a subject. I can tell you some good historical books, and some books of literary criticism and biography. I can't do much about poetry or novels; and philosophy, science, and theology I am no use at all for. But I could get you some advice if you like. That's the best of Cambridge, there are so many people about who are able to tell what ...
— Watersprings • Arthur Christopher Benson
... His literary criticism is small in bulk. But though it is neither brilliant nor well written (Wesley apparently composed at a break-neck clip), it is not without interest. Pope observed in 1730 that he was a "learned" man (letter to Swift, in Works, ed. Elwin-Courthope, VII, 184). The ...
— Epistle to a Friend Concerning Poetry (1700) and the Essay on Heroic Poetry (second edition, 1697) • Samuel Wesley
... analogy presents itself with eager promptitude. When it shows signs of having been groped and fumbled for, the needful illusion is of course absent and the failure complete. Then the machinery alone is visible, and the end to which it operates becomes a matter of indifference. There was but little literary criticism in the United States at the time Hawthorne's earlier works were published; but among the reviewers Edgar Poe perhaps held the scales the highest. He at any rate rattled them loudest, and pretended, more ...
— Hawthorne - (English Men of Letters Series) • Henry James, Junr.
... very bad criticism; and that when, as sometimes happens, it is good criticism, its ways and formulas are not perceptibly distinguishable from those of criticism which is not "scientific." For the rest, it is all but demonstrable that "scientific" literary criticism is impossible, unless the word "scientific" is to have its meaning very illegitimately altered. For the essential qualities of literature, as of all art, are communicated by the individual, they depend upon idiosyncrasy: and this makes science ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... than the busy, calculating mind of a man in the business part of the community." Thus was one of his youthful dreams fulfilled. His capacity for work seemed unbounded. "He gave all his time and all his energy to literary criticism, and spending on it, too, the full resources of a richly furnished mind and infusing into it the spirit of a broad ...
— Brook Farm • John Thomas Codman
... correct, it is impossible not to admire the colossal impudence of Mr. W. H. Ireland. Dr. Ingleby, in the ardour of his honest indignation, pursues William into his private life, which, it appears, was far from exemplary. But literary criticism should be content with a man's works; his domestic life is matter, as Aristotle often says, "for a separate kind of investigation." Old Ritson used to say that "every literary impostor deserved hanging as much ...
— Books and Bookmen • Andrew Lang
... story of people and events, not a study in literary criticism; but the writing of The Scarlet Letter was an event of no trifling importance in the story of its author's life. To read the book is an experience which its readers cannot forget; what its writing must have been to a man organized as my father was is hardly to be conveyed in words. Hester, Dimmesdale, ...
— Hawthorne and His Circle • Julian Hawthorne
... our readers with something lighter than all this in the shape of literary criticism and a few specimen extracts; both of which must now, however, be necessarily brief—we are running out our space. Whoever is curious to study the lives of the saints in their originals, should rather go anywhere than to the Bollandists, and universally never read a late life when he can command ...
— Froude's Essays in Literature and History - With Introduction by Hilaire Belloc • James Froude
... public. It would also show that good judges, of apparently equal competence, still think very differently of the general merit of his art and are very differently affected by particular works. This is only to reiterate the familiar truth that literary criticism has not become, does not tend to become, an exact science. The feeling one has for poetry, or the effect produced upon one by a particular artistic individuality, is the result of a hundred subtle influences that combine to give each ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... Modern literary criticism has accustomed us to interpret our masterpieces in the light of the author's daily experiences and the conditions of the society in which he lived. The personalities of very few ancient poets, however, can be realized, ...
— Vergil - A Biography • Tenney Frank
... Zeal for the pagan authors of antiquity helped to stir up zeal for the writings of the Fathers, new editions of which were published in various centres; while at the same time the value of the spirit of historical and literary criticism, so highly prized by the devotees of Humanism, was recognised by theologians, and availed of largely in defending the authority of the documents that they cited. In the controversies with the Reformers, who rejected entirely the authority and the ...
— History of the Catholic Church from the Renaissance to the French • Rev. James MacCaffrey
... type. He introduced a new kind of criticism of the Bible—literary criticism. Deeply concerned for morality and religion, a supporter of the Established Church, he took the Bible under his special protection, and in three works, St. Paul and Protestantism, 1870, Literature and Dogma, 1873, and God and the Bible, 1875, he endeavoured ...
— A History of Freedom of Thought • John Bagnell Bury
... rational comprehension that we are permitted to expunge from the Word of God, on the ground of literary criticism, the positive and repeated statements of inspired men, and of the Son of God, and yet assume that we have an ...
— The Testimony of the Bible Concerning the Assumptions of Destructive Criticism • S. E. Wishard
... and that it is equally impossible to ignore those in which it is regarded as a present reality. Probably, however, it has even now not been sufficiently perceived that the solution of the problem is not to be found in the literary criticism of the gospels, but in the history of the phrase, Kingdom of God. This rendered inevitable the double use of the phrase. Sometimes it was used strictly, and referred to a present reality within the grasp of all willing ...
— Landmarks in the History of Early Christianity • Kirsopp Lake
... suppose them in a thoughtless moment to have carried into legislation a mildened modicum of that metaphorical language which forms the staple of debate, we should make no remonstrance. We recognize the severe justice of an ideal avoirdupois in literary criticism. We remember the unconscious sarcasm of the Atlantic Telegraph, as it sank heart-broken under the strain of conveying the answer of the Heavy Father of our political stage to the graceful "good-morning" of Victoria. The enthusiastic ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 6, No. 33, July, 1860 • Various
... to leave our readers with something lighter than all this in the shape of literary criticism, and a few specimens of the biographical style: in both of these we must now, however, be necessarily brief. Whoever is curious to study the lives of the saints in their originals, should rather go anywhere than to the Bollandists, and universally never read a late life when ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... is abused, ridiculed, and often declared to be no poet at all. The school of Wordsworth regarded him as the embodiment of the corrupting influence in English poetry; and it is only of late that we are beginning to aim at a more catholic spirit in literary criticism. It is not our business simply to revile or to extol the ideals of our ancestors, but to try to understand them. The passionate partisanship of militant schools is pardonable in the apostles of a new creed, but when the struggle ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... Tatler and the Spectator very greatly extended the range of essay-writing, and with it the flexibility of prose style; it is this extension that gives to them their modern quality. Nothing came amiss: fable, description, vision, gossip, literary criticism or moral essays, discussion of large questions such as marriage and education, or of the smaller social amenities—any subject which would be of interest to a sufficiently large number of readers would furnish a paper; as Steele wrote at the ...
— The Coverley Papers • Various
... for these two years past they have done their utmost to hasten the fulfilment of their own prophecy.' Yet, he adds, 9,000 copies are printed quarterly, 'no genteel family can pretend to be without it,' and it contains the only valuable literary criticism of the day. The antidote was to be supplied by the foundation of the 'Quarterly.' The Cevallos article, as Brougham says, 'first made ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... should ask, Why this world wide welcome to Burns, the while Pope remains a mark for literary criticism? the answer is that Burns has a most extraordinary power of touching the hearts of common men. He is one of the most democratic of poets, he takes for his subject a simple experience—a family gathering at eventide, a fair, a merrymaking, ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... I remember rightly, was made in the course of a sparring match with the late Ferdinand Brunetiere over the principles and rules of literary criticism. As was fitting for a man to whom we owe the memorable saying, "The good critic is he who relates the adventures of his soul among masterpieces," M. Anatole France maintained that there were no rules and no principles. ...
— A Personal Record • Joseph Conrad
... Irenaeus enlarges upon, but what Dr. Newman himself says of her awful and solitary dignity, always excepting the groundless assumption which, from her office in this world takes for granted, first her sinlessness, and then a still higher office in the next? We do not think that, as a matter of literary criticism, Dr. Newman is fair in his argument from the Fathers. He lays great stress on Justin Martyr, Tertullian, and Irenaeus, as three independent witnesses from different parts of the world; whereas it is obvious that Tertullian at any rate copies almost literally from Justin Martyr, and it ...
— Occasional Papers - Selected from The Guardian, The Times, and The Saturday Review, - 1846-1890 • R.W. Church
... written B.C. 14 in response (see the quotation from Suetonius above) to the emperor's request for a poem addressed to himself, after seeing that no mention was made of him in Ep. ii. 2 and the Epistula ad Pisones. These are the sermones quidam (both, like Ep. ii. 1, on literary criticism) referred to by Suetonius, and not Book i. of the Epistles, where Augustus is frequently mentioned. The date is fixed by l. 15, 'praesenti tibi maturos largimur honores,' etc., referring to the worship of the numen Augusti, which was legalized B.C. 14, and by the ...
— The Student's Companion to Latin Authors • George Middleton
... class no human being who has any faculty of criticism can say any good. They are supposed by tradition to have been composed on parishioners: they may be hoped by charity (which has in this case the support of literary criticism) to be merely literary exercises—bad imitations of Martial, through Ben Jonson. They are nastier than the nastiest work of Swift; they are stupider than the stupidest attempts of Davies of Hereford; they are farther from the author's best than the ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... joined the staff. In 1874 he became editor. He was at the head of the Revista Europea, at that time the most important periodical in Spain from a scientific point of view, for several years. During that time he published the main part of those articles of literary criticism, particularly on contemporary poets and novelists, which have since been collected in several volumes—Los Oradores del Ateneo, ("The Orators of the Athenaeum"); Los Novelistas Espanoles ("The Spanish Novelists"); Un Nuevo Viaje al Parnaso ...
— The Grandee • Armando Palacio Valds
... is hastily used and hastily dismissed, as if he were putting his own powers to the test or trying the effect of various kinds of objects on his readers; his most ambitious flights, in the shape of allegories and the like, are stiff and inanimate; and his favourite field of literary criticism is touched so slightly, as to show that he still wanted confidence in the taste and knowledge ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... sirventes which is of interest as being the first attempt at literary satire among the troubadours; the satire is often rather of a personal than of a literary character; the following quotations referring to troubadours already named will show Peire's ideas of literary criticism. "Peire Rogier sings of love without restraint and it would befit him better to carry the psalter in the church or to bear the lights with the great burning candles. Guiraut de Bornelh is like a sun-bleached cloth with his thin miserable ...
— The Troubadours • H.J. Chaytor
... was written to correct various mistakes in an unauthorized account of his life and adventures, that was largely circulated. His books are unique in literature as he is in human nature, and they give us an original account of things. As to literary criticism of his works and style, see his own opinion ...
— Southern Literature From 1579-1895 • Louise Manly
... any periodical published under the superintendence of the "Ministre de l'Instruction Publique," or of any other member of the Cabinet; but, apart from that, a literary tribunal like that formed by the members of the "Bureau du Journal des Savants" would certainly be a great benefit to literary criticism. The general tone that runs through their articles is impartial and dignified. Each writer seems to feel the responsibility which attaches to the bench from which he addresses the public, and we can of late years recall hardly any case where the dictum of "noblesse oblige" has been ...
— Chips From A German Workshop. Vol. III. • F. Max Mueller
... for making the thing described seem important and delightful, this quality of infectious gusto, this father-talent of all the talents that a critic needs, sets off his literary criticism no less than his discourse on music and musicians. Such a book as "Iconoclasts" or "Egoists" is full of useful information, but it is even more full of agreeable adventure. The style is the book, as it is the man. ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken
... 'leader' is a column in length, and is a sarcastic commentary on the 'fallacious hopes' of the Opposition; the next article is an answer to one in the London Economist, devoted to the vexed question of protective duties in the Colonies; another refers to modern 'literary criticism,' one of the strangest literary products of this busy age of intellectual development. In all we have thirty-six columns of reading matter, remarkable for literary execution and careful editing, as well as for the moderate tone of its political criticism. It will ...
— The Intellectual Development of the Canadian People • John George Bourinot
... of literary criticism from the Dictator's hand is preserved in the Suetonian life of Terence. Two of Caesar's brief but masterly letters to Cicero will be ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... suppress institutions, which already partook of the character of the modern periodical press combined with functions resembling the show and licence of the Athenian drama. Viewed from the stand-point of literary criticism their productions were not very commendable in taste, conception, or execution. To torture the Muses to madness, to wire-draw poetry through inextricable coils of difficult rhymes and impossible measures; to hammer one golden ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... lies, out of which we, looking into them, can get nothing," can draw no meaning. Such at least is our view of this passage (line 366) about which there is a difference of opinion among commentators. At any rate we catch a glimpse of Homeric literary criticism in Homer, who states the requirements of good poetry, and contrasts them with the "liar" or fabricator of yarns, which are certainly devoid of the ...
— Homer's Odyssey - A Commentary • Denton J. Snider
... and Literary Criticism. With practical Exercises and Examples. Also, a succinct History of the English Language, and of British and American Literature. ...
— Popular Education - For the use of Parents and Teachers, and for Young Persons of Both Sexes • Ira Mayhew
... end is achieved in America often excites the derision of the literary foreigner; for although most American reviews are readable enough, they often lack the critical emphasis and literary scope and color so conspicuous in the literary criticism of the British and Continental reviews. But the foreigner overlooks the fact that American reviewers usually have something to say about every publication which claims to appeal to a reading public, and ...
— The Building of a Book • Various
... book of odes, with all the perfection of style of the others, but showing a slight decline in freshness; and three more epistles, one, that addressed to Flores, the most charming in its lively and grateful ease of all Horace's familiar writings; the other two, somewhat fragmentary essays in literary criticism. One of them, generally known as the "Ars Poetica," was perhaps left unfinished ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... fame, and cared for none, regarding his capacities and productions as unworthy of notice. In 1779, at the instigation of his friends, he published a collection of his "Fables and Tales." At this time there existed not a single tolerable specimen of the fable in Russian; but by the time literary criticism did justice to Khemnitzer's work, Karamzin, and Dmitrieff had become the favorites of the public, and Khemnitzer's productions circulated chiefly among the lower classes, for whom his Fables are still published. His works certainly aided Dmitrieff and Kryloff in handling this ...
— A Survey of Russian Literature, with Selections • Isabel Florence Hapgood
... let live! That must be our motto in literary criticism as it is our motto in other things. I am not going to let myself call Byron a blackguard because of something a little hard and insensitive in him which happens to get upon my own nerves. He was a fine genius. He wrote noble verses. He ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... Deum he had left behind him. It was in Ireland, however, that his real literary career began. Steele, in the spring of 1709, had commenced the Tatler, a thrice-a-week miscellany of foreign news, town gossip, short sharp papers de omnibus rebus et guibusdum aliis, with a sprinkling of moral and literary criticism. When Addison heard of this scheme, he readily lent his aid to it, and then, as honest Richard admits, "I fared like a distressed prince who calls in a powerful neighbour to his aid,—I was undone by my auxiliary." To the Tatler Addison contributed ...
— The Poetical Works of Addison; Gay's Fables; and Somerville's Chase • Joseph Addison, John Gay, William Sommerville
... of the present work, as is indicated by its name, is to help the young student in literary criticism. It is a sort of laboratory manual, in which he will find specific direction for a comprehensive analysis of the principal kinds of literature. It is intended to show him the various points in relation to form, content, and spirit, ...
— Elementary Guide to Literary Criticism • F. V. N. Painter
... the history of general literary criticism at that epoch will reveal this fact fully. During the last decade of the seventeenth century there had taken place the famous controversy over the Letters of Phalaris, in which, against Charles Boyle and his supporters at Oxford, was pitted Richard Bentley at Cambridge, who insisted ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... our duty as translators and editors had not extended beyond such mere occasional scientific or literary criticism. But there unfortunately seemed to be one or two points where, in pronouncing on the claims of distinguished individuals, or criticizing their inventions, a doubt could not but be felt as to the perfect fairness of Arago's judgment, and in which we were ...
— Biographies of Distinguished Scientific Men • Francois Arago
... the great advantage of that purely literary criticism, which is so little practised and to some extent so unpopular, that it is able to preserve accuracy in this matter. When with the assistance (always to be gratefully received) of philologists and historians in the strict sense the date of a literary ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... and, it may well be added, Lincoln, have made a literary art, as well as a practical career, of politics. American legal writers, like Greenleaf, Kent, Story, and Parsons, are quoted in the English as in the American courts, as authorities worthy of respect and trust. In the domain of searching literary criticism, England has perhaps produced no author since the days of Gifford and Jeffrey superior in learning, acuteness, and grace ...
— The Nation in a Nutshell • George Makepeace Towle
... it is now open for discussion. We have been led to it by the onward progress of ideas. I shall endeavor to point out the causes which have brought it about; but at present I insist merely upon the fact itself, and deduce from it one simple consequence, that literary criticism has changed its ground, and can no longer remain restricted to the limits within which ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VII (of X)—Continental Europe I • Various
... France during the years 1761-1765, were well received, and when afterwards published in English (4 vols., 1770), were highly commended by Johnson. While in Italy on his travels Baretti set on foot a journal of literary criticism, to which he gave the title of Frusta letteraria, the literary scourge. It was published under considerable difficulties and was soon discontinued. The criticisms on contemporary writers were sometimes just, but are frequently disfigured by undue vehemence and coarseness. Among his other numerous ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 3 - "Banks" to "Bassoon" • Various
... will stand the test of literary criticism and at the same time prove to be popular and successful for ...
— Standard Selections • Various
... other day, in 'The Garden's Story,' by Mr. George H. Ellwanger, I came upon a piece of literary criticism which gave me a pleasurable pause in my search for quite other information. Mr. Ellwanger, a great American gardener, has observed that our poets usually sing of autumn in a minor key, which startles an American who, while accustomed to our language, cannot suit ...
— From a Cornish Window - A New Edition • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... "Ballad of Sir Thopas" by the Host. The ballad itself is a fragment of straightforward burlesque, which shows that in both the manner and the metre (Dunbar's burlesque ballad of "Sir Thomas Norray" is in the same stanza) of ancient romances, literary criticism could even in Chaucer's days find its opportunities for satire, though it is going rather far to see in "Sir Thopas" a predecessor of "Don Quixote." The "Tale of Meliboeus" is probably an English version of a French translation of Albert of Brescia's famous "Book of Consolation and Counsel," ...
— Chaucer • Adolphus William Ward
... to Euripides displayed here and in several other plays, like his attacks on Socrates, is a result of this attitude of conservatism. The present play is notable also as a piece of elaborate if not over-serious literary criticism from the pen of ...
— The Frogs • Aristophanes
... does not constitute a treatise on literary criticism, or a manual of mythology or folklore, or a "pedagogy" of children's literature as such, or anything like an exhaustive bibliography of the fields of study touched upon. It aims at the very modest purpose of immediate and practical utility. It hopes to fill a ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... '94.) the 'North American Review' published "In Defense of Harriet Shelley," a rare piece of literary criticism and probably the most human and convincing plea ever made for that injured, ill-fated woman. An admirer of Shelley's works, Clemens could not resist taking up the defense of Shelley's abandoned wife. It had become the fashion to refer to her slightingly, ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine |
