3 - The Zenith of Formalist and Humanist Criticism, 1949–1974

Summary

BY THE END OF THE SECOND WORLD WAR, Austen's reputation had become firmly established, so it is not surprising to find a marked increase in the study of her fiction during the next thirty years. Concurrently, during the postwar period New Criticism became a dominant mode of critical inquiry for examining fiction. Applying techniques of New Criticism to realist fiction had always posed something of a challenge, since the assumption was that the approach worked better when applied to lyric poetry than for the more socially connected genre of the novel. A look at essays by the respected American critic Mark Schorer gives some insight into how these principles could be applied to Austen's novels. In his 1949 essay “Fiction and the Matrix of Analogy” Mark Schorer uses Persuasion to demonstrate how critics might give the novel the same kind of attention they had devoted to poetry in the past twenty years. The important first step, he says, is to treat fiction as “a literary art,” a representation of life which is open to analysis of “the structure of the image” (539). His detailed examination of Austen's final novel concentrates on repeated words and patterns of imagery that reveal Austen's interests, making it clear that Persuasion is “a novel in which sensibility is subdued to property” (543).