Literary Criticism - a review

Gary Day's main argument in this lengthy and impressive study is that literary criticism is like a pendulum that swings backwards and forwards in different historical epochs - at one moment emphasizing the text, and next its effect upon the reader. He traces all the main schools of literary criticism, starting with classical Greek and Roman writing on aesthetics, and he shows that many of the notions people imagine to be new have actually been around for two thousand years or more. This makes his book a good antidote to the mistaken idea that literary criticism began in the 1970s with the discovery of French structuralism ... more >>