Focusing particularly on the work of painter and critic Roger Fry, critic Clive Bell, novelist and essayist Virginia Woolf, and literary theorist I. A. Richards, the final chapter considers the legacy of evolutionary aestheticism in the first decades of the twentieth century. Although these twentieth-century writers rejected the developmental telos that defined nineteenth-century evolutionary aestheticism, this chapter argues that they inherited many of their predecessors’ ideas about the anti-utilitarian ethics of beauty, the spiritual potency of aesthetic pleasure, and, consequently, the long-term social benefits of good taste. By drawing a through line from mid nineteenth-century evolutionary aesthetics to the aesthetics of the Bloomsbury group and the principles of New Criticism, this chapter also contributes to a body of recent scholarship reassessing conventional narratives about modernism and its purportedly radical break from Victorian concerns and values.

This chapter explores Kerouac’s poetic output, arguing that he should be considered an important twentieth-century poet and poetic innovator. In particular, this chapter explores Kerouac’s book-length poetic masterwork, Mexico City Blues, and his development of an American form of haiku, as found in Book of Haikus and elsewhere. The poetic forms of Mexico City Blues and Book of Haikus are very different, and yet taken together, they demonstrate Kerouac’s range as a poet. With these major works as its focus, this chapter aims to reassess Kerouac’s poetry by reading its formal and thematic preoccupations in terms of the advent of the mid-century “New American Poetry,” which rebuked the norms of the reigning poetic establishment centered in universities and their associated anthologies and quarterlies.

In 1959, literary critic Warren Tallman published a landmark study of Kerouac’s spontaneous method that focused on The Subterraneans, a novel Kerouac wrote over the course of just three days in 1953. This chapter builds on Tallman’s work (and other subsequent scholarship) to show how Kerouac adopted the use of spontaneity from what he understood to be a jazz aesthetic, purposively repudiating the reigning New Critical norms that dictated “good” fiction must exhibit certain kinds of “unity” and “selectivity” of expression. This chapter therefore takes The Subterraneans as a concentrated case study in how Kerouac composes, rehearses and constructs a Spontaneous Prose text.

This chapter surveys the rise of New Criticism in American letters during the interwar years through the 1950s. It pays attention to the influence of two overlapping associations: the Fugitive Poets and the Nashville Agrarians. The Fugitives, a group of Vanderbilt English professors and Nashville notables, had formed in the years leading up to World War I to discuss current trends in literature and philosophy. The Agrarians, southern commentators trained in a variety of disciplines, collaborated on a symposium in the 1930s that decried the deleterious effects of industrial capitalism and promoted values that purportedly undergirded an agrarian economy. Together the two groups came to shape the tenets of New Criticism. New Critics mourned the turn away from formalist principles that had established the criteria by which one should evaluate literature. Agrarians bemoaned the demise of a set of values that ostensibly emerged from a labor system that championed family farming, property ownership, and small government. Both New Critics and Agrarians, then, engaged in reclamation projects as they sought to salvage what they believed to be all that was good and beautiful in the world.

This chapter takes stock of the various definitions and valuations the essay has accrued over the course of the history of American literary theory and criticism. Starting with the historical-materialist criticism of the Great Depression era and moving on to the New Criticism of the 1940s and ’50s, then delving into the myriad structuralisms and poststructuralisms of the Cold War and postcommunist eras, before concluding with contemporary critical trends, it tracks the discipline’s trajectory in the American context, all the while zeroing in on the essay’s shifting position therein. The chapter throws into relief the fundamental dialectic between hermetic formalism and committed social criticism that has shaped literary studies in the United States since its rise early in the twentieth century and teases out the way this perennial vacillation has rendered more or less appealing, and more or less useful, the essay as a form and object of analysis.

Moving from the more explicitly political fiction of the 1930s and 1940s to the critiques of neoliberalism that emerged at the end of the century, this chapter traces how American realist writers engaged with the political questions that challenged and transformed the United States in the twentieth century. Despite realism’s association with progressive politics during the first half of the century, this chapter explores how American writers did not present a unified political voice; the views expressed in realistic fiction were as wide-ranging as the writers who produced them. The central part of this chapter considers how midcentury writers – a group that includes Ralph Ellison, J. D. Salinger, Philip Roth, John Updike, Ann Beattie, Raymond Carver, John Cheever, and Richard Yates – embraced new forms of realism to engage with and critique the shifting political realities of American life. The chapter concludes by exploring how Chang-rae Lee and Jonathan Franzen employed realism as way of chronicling the questions and challenges that the nation faced at the end of the millennium.

This chapter discusses what happens to modernism, the revolutionary movement that dominated the first half of the twentieth century, as it becomes institutionalized, and examines the movement’s legacy after 1945. It discusses how the poetry of the post-1945 period became dominated by a major schism between “academic” and “anti-academic” poetry (or, as Robert Lowell called it, the “cooked” versus the “raw”). The chapter charts the advent of the New Criticism and explains its main principles, goals, and practitioners, focuses on examples of formalist poems in the New Critical mode by Robert Lowell, Richard Wilbur, and James Merrill, and introduces the new, alternative forms of poetry that came to be known as “The New American Poetry.”

Finn Fordham’s chapter addresses the lacuna in scholarly considerations of the early European reception of Finnegans Wake by offering a cultural historiography that focuses on England, addressing its political landscape and specific cultural traditions. Examining the wartime diaries and letters of literary figures in the United Kingdom, it traces complex ideological responses to Joyce’s last text. In doing so, it outlines events that are seminal to the development of the Joyce industry in the United States; Fordham argues that the cultural vacuum in Europe produced by the war led to the conception of a “universal” Joyce. While early reviews in the Southern Review and the Kenyon Review saw the Wake as a perfectly “impersonal work” that inspired the development of New Criticism, this study will construct an alternative account of the impact of Wake. This account centers on readers who respond privately to the text in a time of global conflict and see within its polyphony a set of tacitly political practices.

Cavell’s problematic concerning the art critic is taken to mistake imposing upon for finding meaning in an artwork, reading into it for hearing it out. Modernist artworks must diverge from traditional forms of expression and thus toward hermeticism to achieve their voices. If an artwork remains too close to tradition, it becomes automatic and thereby fails to achieve its voice. If an artwork moves too far into hermeticism, it becomes silent and thereby fails to achieve its voice. The critic discerns both what an artwork says and whether it speaks at all. Because the critic cannot fulfill these tasks simply by appeal to tradition or the artist’s intentions, she must interview the work itself with her own devices to identify elements in the work as keys to unlock its voice. Her vindication, however, comes not from a final analysis, but from the clarity she brings to the work, which is always subject to contestation. As the world becomes increasingly multicultural, we increasingly encounter unfamiliar people bearing complex relations to unfamiliar forms of life, heightening the challenge of hearing others out; as Cavell notes, our ways of regarding artworks resemble those of other people.

This chapter begins with discussions of two early accounts of the sorrow songs, by the African American activist Charlotte Forten and the radical abolitionist Thomas Wentworth Higginson. These early accounts drew on both Romantic approaches to folk song and ballad and scientific or naturalist taxonomies to construct African American song-making as both historical and ahistorical. Folklorists were excited to encounter in these songs an example of a genuine ‘folk’ culture in the United States that exemplified evolutionary theories of poetic development. The chapter discusses the ‘primitive’ ballad and the ‘evolved’ lyric, and moves on to a study of the interactions between Howard Odum, a sociologist of the New South, and the Southern Agrarians, a group of scholars based at Vanderbilt University, many of whom later became part of the movement known as New Criticism. It argues that African American song is the repressed other of the New Critical idea of the lyric, and that many of those ideas are rooted in racist ideology about a pastoral, paternalistic South. It concludes with a close reading of a song whose roots can be traced to sixteenth-century England, adapted to the conditions of American chattel slavery.

While I’ll Take My Stand is a terrible book by any standard of argumentation, it belongs in a history of the literature of the U.S. South because virtually the entire history of mainstream southern studies, literary and otherwise, is based on a distorted and selective reading of that Agrarian manifesto. The past ninety years’ profoundly opposed receptions of I’ll Take My Stand inside and outside of southern studies are thus ultimately much more significant than the book that prompted the receptions. Virtually all the critiques of old southern studies offered by the so-called new southern studies have been regularly made by scholars and critics outside the field since the manifesto appeared; conversely, even today, much allegedly “progressive” southernist scholarship continues to promulgate Agrarian ideals that romanticize the land, tradition, and the rural.

This chapter explores the ways that Seamus Heaney’s critical audiences (in Northern Ireland, the UK and the US) affected his work. As readers were ever more far-flung, local detailing played a smaller role in their appreciation of his work, and this influenced the pitch and texture of Heaney’s poetry. The chapter also considers how the Cold War conditioned the postcolonial reading of his poems, especially in the US. How did these conditions change Heaney’s own approach to his art? How does it change our understanding of it now? At the end of his career, we find poems poised at the edge of the postcolonial epoch, offering brief glimpses of the horizon beyond, that is, of global anglophone poetry.

Though modernism has traditionally been associated with aesthetic autonomy and thus has often been considered in isolation from any political, social, or cultural context, much of what is now thought of as the new modernist studies was anticipated by developments in earlier years. Marxist political criticism, feminist scholarship, restorative work on writers of color, even the sort of textual study that went into new editions, all helped to connect modernist literature to the larger world of which it was a part. Still, modernist cultural studies was a late variant of cultural studies in general, its development retarded by the prestige of postmodernism, which had established itself against a modernism defined as disengaged and elitist. Thus, it was the decline of postmodernism as an influential category that opened the way for a new modernist cultural studies.

This chapter looks at the widespread cultural backlash against the Beats, embodied by the caricature of the Beatnik. It explains many examples of negative critical reactions to the Beats, especially by New Critics. It also looks at some early positive accounts of the Beats.

Examining the Pareto Circle of thinkers who gathered at Harvard as many disciplines were beginning to articulate themselves and their methods, we look at the interdisciplinary birth of business studies and at the case study method. We argue that this history should be remembered, taught, and utliized in new interdisciplinary pursuits by management education and management studies more generally.

Jane Hedley accounts for Plath’s descriptive and interpretive practice of poems that take art as their subject. Plath’s ekphrastic poems can be seen as interventions in a conversation with canonical predecessors from Keats to Auden, and can be traced not just to her deliberate study of art history, but to the studies she made as a visual artist, before she made the decision in young adulthood to concentrate on writing.

Eleanor Spencer explores the topography of poetry in Britain during the 1950s and early 1960s, suggesting that what we find is a series of what Al Alvarez saw as reactions to and rejections of that which came before. Plath emerges from a period which saw the Movement’s repudiation of the aesthetic and intellectual confusion of the New Romantics in favour of directness, communicability, and an incisive New Critical sensibility. Just six years later, however, Alvarez’s introduction to The New Poetry (1962) disavowed the ‘gentility’ of the Movement’s ‘academic-administrative verse’, calling instead for a poetry which ‘nakedly, and without evasion’ registered the ‘forces of disintegration’ in the post-WWII and Cold War era that threatened not only a familiar English way of life, but life itself.

This essay looks at Chaucer’s fortunes from the early Victorian period to modernity, beginning with the relatively stagnant state of Chaucer studies at the beginning of Victoria’s reign and going on to the renewed scholarly interest of the second half of the century, which led to the first modern scholarly edition in the 1890s. The essay pauses with the Edwardian period, where versions of Chaucer in both scholarly and popular domains are considered, and then concludes with a summary of Chaucer reception between World War I and the present day, with a particular emphasis on criticism and editing. In the 1840s, there was hardly any Chaucer scholarship as currently understood, and very little popular reception of the poet. In this essay I examine the burgeoning of the poet’s reputation since then. But I also consider the limitations of that reputation and the contrast with, for example, the popular understanding of Shakespeare.

However well-regarded Chaucer’s works were during his lifetime, it was his immediate successors who fashioned him into the ‘father of English poetry’ they then bequeathed to the subsequent English literary tradition. In particular, the poets Thomas Hoccleve and John Lydgate not only represented Chaucer in this manner in their own, widely disseminated works, they were also instrumental in the broad dissemination of Chaucer’s works. Importantly, these activities were motivated not just by admiration but also by a politico-literary context in which Hoccleve and Lydgate, unlike Chaucer, were asked to produce works that spoke both for a prince and to a prince. Their invention of Chaucer’s literary authority cannot then be separated from their intervention into politics, and this conflation they also bequeathed to the English literary tradition, where it remained plainly visible in the works of their own successors, and where it persists, more obscurely, to the present.