Literary Criticism of 17th Century England

This volume offers the material needed to understand the literary criticism of the seventeenth century, the century that records the transition from the "rhetorical" criticism of Dryden: it is the seventeenth century that gives us "critic" in its modern signification of one who does not merely judge-but judges a work art. It is during this period that we encounter literary biography, editing, and criticism agitated almost for the first time by the stirrings of the historical imagination.



And, perhaps most important of all, it is during this period that we may perceive most clearly the development of the opposed categories-scientist and poet, prose and poetry, logic and imagination, thins and words-that still dictate the shape and direction of much our thinking about life and literature. If we are ever to be delivered from such antitheses, we could do worse than to look with particular care at the century that fought its civil war in every area of human endeavor.