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Article: Re-reading reading in eighteenth-century literary criticism (1).
- Article from:
- College Literature
- Article date:
- June 22, 2004
- Author:
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It has become a commonplace that English literary criticism emerges during the eighteenth century; indeed, its development is often taken as one of the most important aspects of the eighteenth century. (2) For at least the past two decades, eighteenth-century literary criticism has been seen as participating in the emergence of what Jurgen Habermas calls the "public sphere," and, through that, in nothing less than the creation of modern, liberal democracy. Variations on this "implicitly Whiggish story of art's democratization," as Jonathan Brody Kramnick describes it (1999, 29), can be seen in Peter Uwe Hohendahl's The Institution of Criticism (1982), (3) Terry Eagleton's ...