Texts Analyzing Literature as Argument- From Philip Sidney to Henry James

Golban 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.