Introduction: Approaching literature and approaching criticism -- Renaissance criticism: The defence of poesie -- Restoration criticism: Of dramatic poesie, an essay -- Neoclassical criticism: An essay on man -- The rise of the novel: Preface to Joseph Andrews -- Romantic criticism: Preface to lyrical ballads, biographia literaria, a defence of poetry -- Victorian criticism: The study of poetry, modern painters, studies in the history of the Renaissance, the art of fiction -- Conclusion: The practitioners speak theory: British writer-critics and the movement of literary criticism
Golban offers an interdisciplinary perspective involving literary theory, criticism, and literary history which will be useful to scholars and students. The main concern of the book is the British critical discourse which originates in the Renaissance and continues its developmental process until the rise of the formal approach to literature in the twentieth century. Some of these author critics, like Sidney and Dryden, develop critical ideas based on a respectable classical tradition; others, like Coleridge and Ruskin, were more original and innovative in their critical theories. Among them