Golban, Petru
Dr. Petru Golban is an Associate Professor at Namik Kemal University in Turkey.
2013 0-7734-4508-0Book showcases the history of British literary criticism dating back to the Classical and Renaissance Periods, all the way up through to the Victorian Age. It covers figures as diverse as Philip Sydney, John Dryden, William Wordsworth, Matthew Arnold, and even Henry James. Literary criticism is an event in the field of literature as much as literature provides an object upon which criticism can purvey its message. Yet, in recent years literary criticism has moved into the realm of a self-sustaining field detached from literature as its inspirational object. This book looks at literary criticism which was still responding to concrete poetry and literature.
2013 0-7734-4510-2Golban offers an interdisciplinary perspective involving literary theory, criticism, and literary history which will be useful to scholars and students. The main concern of the book is the British critical discourse which originates in the Renaissance and continues its developmental process until the rise of the formal approach to literature in the twentieth century.
Some of these author critics, like Sidney and Dryden, develop critical ideas based on a respectable classical tradition; others, like Coleridge and Ruskin, were more original and innovative in their critical theories. Among them, there were those who used or materialized their own artistic or literary theories in their literary texts, such as Wordsworth reifying his theory of the origin of poetry, or Pater exemplifying the principles of aestheticism. For some, criticism was a means of defending the aesthetic value of literature; for others, criticism represented the instrument to be used in an attempt to found a new genre, or even introduce into the contemporary culture and to validate a whole new literary movement, such as for Wordsworth and Coleridge.