3 Review(s)

A History of English Criticism, which was originally the English Chapter of Saintsbury’s monumental three volume A History of Criticism and Literary Taste in Europe (1900-04), was published separately in 1911 as a revised, adapted and updated edition, complete in itself. The book is the first of its kind and is thus of great historical importance. The history of English criticism, as Saintsbury sees it, passes through three distinct stages: (i) the initial stage of Elizabethan criticism “tentative, hesitating and scattered” trying to assimilate the numerous critical ideas scattered throughout the classical European literatures (ii) the Neo-Classic period starting with Dryden and continuing beyond the beginning of the nineteenth century and then (iii) the stage of “modified or modernist” criticism. It is, however, a continuous process with rise and fall of various schools, theories, movements and attitudes etc.