"Literary criticism" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... suffice to say, that these documents have been examined by the ordinary rules of literary criticism, perhaps with more than ordinary care, and that the result has been to place their authenticity and their ...
— An Illustrated History of Ireland from AD 400 to 1800 • Mary Frances Cusack
... head of the Revista Europea, at that time the most important periodical in Spain from a scientific point of view, for several years. During that time he published the main part of those articles of literary criticism, particularly on contemporary poets and novelists, which have since been collected in several volumes—Los Oradores del Ateneo, ("The Orators of the Athenaeum"); Los Novelistas Espanoles ("The Spanish Novelists"); ...
— The Grandee • Armando Palacio Valds
... feeling of it, which is a thing that cannot be discussed. Neither will I discuss here the regrets of those critics, which seem to me the most irrelevant thing that could have been said in connection with literary criticism. ...
— Notes on My Books • Joseph Conrad
... reaction in favor of heathenism was the cause of the open antagonism between the classical and Christian forms of literature. The church, however, was soon enabled not only to dictate its own rules of literary criticism, but to destroy the writings of its most formidable antagonists. The last rays of heathen cultivation in Italy were extinguished in the gloomy dungeon of Boethius, and the period so justly designated as the Dark Ages began both ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... business to attend to, in order to establish Stevenson in the position of a great writer. Let us leave that foolish trick to the politicians, who never claim that they are right—merely that they will win at the next elections. Literary criticism has standards other than the suffrage; it is possible enough to say something of the literary quality of a work that appeared yesterday. Stevenson himself was singularly free from the vanity of fame; ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson • Walter Raleigh
... both the true difficulties and the true successes of the other. Diderot, unlike most of those who have come after him, had carefully studied the conditions prescribed to the painter by the material in which he works. Although he was a master of the literary criticism of art, he had artists among his intimate companions, and was too eager for knowledge not to wring from them the secrets of technique, just as he extorted from weavers and dyers the secrets of their processes and instruments. ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists - Volume II. • John Morley
... unimportant. But essays on Spenser, Milton, Pope, Gray, Cowper, Burns, Wordsworth, "Humour in Fiction," "Boys' Literature," Sir Walter Scott, Browning, the English Dramatists, showed a range and a quality of literary criticism alike surprising. Perhaps most surprising, however, is the fact that all this does not seem to have made clear to either masters or parents the true nature of Gilbert's vocation. He suffered at this date ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... literary criticism in Longfellow's review, and he does not "rise to the level of the accomplished essayist" of our own time, [Footnote: Who writes so correctly and says so little to the purpose.] but he goes to the main ...
— The Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne • Frank Preston Stearns
... necessary explanations of, or quotations from, the notes of previous editors and critics. But far transcending these reasons, although deriving from them, is the enormous value to the student of Johnson the man and the critic of a now easily accessible body of literary criticism and personal comment that is second in importance only to ...
— Johnson's Notes to Shakespeare Vol. I Comedies • Samuel Johnson
... judges, of apparently equal competence, still think very differently of the general merit of his art and are very differently affected by particular works. This is only to reiterate the familiar truth that literary criticism has not become, does not tend to become, an exact science. The feeling one has for poetry, or the effect produced upon one by a particular artistic individuality, is the result of a hundred subtle influences that combine to give each one of us his private form and range ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... concerned. The first three—the excerpt from Wilson's Art of Rhetoric, Sir Philip Sidney's Letter to his brother Robert, and the dissertation from Meres's Palladis Tamia—are, if minor, certainly characteristic examples of pre-Elizabethan and Elizabethan literary criticism. The next three—the Dedicatory Epistle to the Rival Ladies, Howard's Preface to Four New Plays, and the Essay of Dramatic Poesy—not only introduce us to one of the most interesting critical controversies of the seventeenth century, but present us, in the last work, ...
— An English Garner - Critical Essays & Literary Fragments • Edited by Professor Arber and Thomas Seccombe
... ways of popular verse; poetry for them was an arduous and exquisite toil; its service was a religion. At length, in 1549, they flung out their manifesto—the Defense et Illustration de la Langue Francaise by Du Bellay, the most important study in literary criticism of the century. With this should be considered, as less important manifestoes, the later Art Poetique of Ronsard, and his prefaces to the Franciade. To formulate principles is not always to the advantage of a movement in literature; but champions need a ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... literary criticism than to other kinds. Of most of the critics of music and art the best one can say is that there are hearty fellows among them who, with the requisite training, might one day become fit for their work. England is the home of the amateur ...
— Alone • Norman Douglas
... that we are permitted to expunge from the Word of God, on the ground of literary criticism, the positive and repeated statements of inspired men, and of the Son of God, and yet assume that we have an ...
— The Testimony of the Bible Concerning the Assumptions of Destructive Criticism • S. E. Wishard
... any summing-up of Burns, though so much is to be said in the way of fault-finding, drawing black marks, and doubtless severe literary criticism—(in the present outpouring I have "kept myself in," rather than allow'd any free flow)—after full retrospect of his works and life, the aforesaid "odd-kind chiel" remains to my heart and brain as almost ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... Shakespeare's plays (1709) is an important event in the history of both Shakespeare studies and English literary criticism. Though based substantially on the Fourth Folio (1685), it is the first, "edited" edition: Rowe modernized spelling and punctuation and quietly made a number of sensible emendations. It is the first edition to include dramatis personae, the first to attempt a systematic division of all the ...
— Some Account of the Life of Mr. William Shakespear (1709) • Nicholas Rowe
... literary criticism lived John Selden, an author of much industry and varied learning. He was a just, upright, and fearless man, who spoke his mind, upheld what he deemed to be right in the conduct of either King or Parliament, and was one of the best characters in ...
— Books Fatal to Their Authors • P. H. Ditchfield
... doubt as a part of literature, whatever the nationality, domicile, and temper of the person or persons who brought it about—I do not desire more to emphasise what I believe to be a great and not too well appreciated truth than to guard against that exaggeration which dogs and discredits literary criticism. Of course no single redaction of the legend in the late twelfth or earliest thirteenth century contains the story, the whole story, and nothing but the story as I have just outlined it. Of course the words used do not apply fully to Malory's English redaction of three centuries ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... In prose literary criticism, he keeps his place with Poe at the head of American writers. Lowell's sentences are usually simple in form and easily understood; they are frequently enlivened by illuminating figures of rhetoric and by humor, ...
— History of American Literature • Reuben Post Halleck
... the educational influences of the renaissance was the introduction of literary criticism. There was a tendency among the early humanists to be uncritical, but as intelligence advanced and scholarship developed, we find the critical spirit introduced. Form, substance, and character of art and letters were carefully examined. This was the essential outcome of the previous ...
— History of Human Society • Frank W. Blackmar
... of the philosophical faculty as a sort of preparatory course to the others remained in force in Austria until 1850. It is not surprising, then, that Austria should have compared so unfavorably with Germany in philology, history, philosophy and literary criticism until ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - February, 1876, Vol. XVII, No. 98. • Various
... of a power, the advent of a genius." "I cannot admit that the best mode of correcting a talent which is in process of development is to begin by throwing an inkstand at its head." "I am almost frightened at seeing to what an extent literary criticism becomes difficult, when it refrains from arrogance and from insult, claiming for itself both an honest freedom of judgment and the right to participate largely in the bestowment of deserved praise, as well as to maintain a certain cordiality even in its reservations." "If Diderot ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various
... it was thought to be, though the source was almost wholly German. If he had had to be a dry-as-dust in order to be a writer on politics and history, Mr. Wilson would have preferred to turn his attention to biography and literary criticism. But he promptly resolved to disregard the warnings of pedants and to be a man of letters though a professor of history and politics. I well remember the irritation, sometimes amused and sometimes angry, with which he used to speak of those who were persuaded that scholarship was in ...
— President Wilson's Addresses • Woodrow Wilson
... have done their utmost to hasten the fulfilment of their own prophecy.' Yet, he adds, 9,000 copies are printed quarterly, 'no genteel family can pretend to be without it,' and it contains the only valuable literary criticism of the day. The antidote was to be supplied by the foundation of the 'Quarterly.' The Cevallos article, as Brougham says, 'first made the ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... personal epigrams. Of this second class no human being who has any faculty of criticism can say any good. They are supposed by tradition to have been composed on parishioners: they may be hoped by charity (which has in this case the support of literary criticism) to be merely literary exercises—bad imitations of Martial, through Ben Jonson. They are nastier than the nastiest work of Swift; they are stupider than the stupidest attempts of Davies of Hereford; they are farther from the author's best than the worst ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... and we gain much of our knowledge of Balzac's political views from his letters to her when he wished to become a deputy; while she also possessed the faculty which he valued most in his women friends, that of intelligent literary criticism. She could be critical on other points as well; and, like Madame Hanska, blamed Balzac for mobility of ideas and inconstancy of resolution, which she said wasted his intellect. She complained that, in the time that he might have used ...
— Honore de Balzac, His Life and Writings • Mary F. Sandars
... Women")—"The Blue-Stockings," we might perhaps freely render the title—we present one scene to indicate the nature of the comedy. There had grown to be a fashion in Paris, among certain women high in social rank, of pretending to the distinction of skill in literary criticism, and of proficiency in science. It was the Hotel de Rambouillet reduced to absurdity. That fashionable affectation Moliere made the subject of his comedy, "The ...
— Classic French Course in English • William Cleaver Wilkinson
... indeed, seems to be the pitfall of the book designer, though there is no inherent objection to it. Where in the whole range of reference books will be found a more attractive set of volumes than Moulton's "Library of Literary Criticism," with their realization in this format of the Horatian simplex munditiis? For extremely different treatments of this book size it is instructive to compare the slender volumes of the original editions of Ruskin with the slightly shorter but very much thicker volumes of the scholarly definitive ...
— The Booklover and His Books • Harry Lyman Koopman
... fourth volume of Le Christianisme, 1884; Le Nouveau Testament. He has won great merit by the correct interpretation of the elements of Gentile Christianity developing themselves to catholicism, but his literary criticism is often unfortunately entirely abstract, reminding one of the criticism of Voltaire, and therefore his statements in detail are, as a rule, arbitrary and untenable. There is a school in Holland at the present time closely related to Bruno Bauer and Havet, which attempts to banish ...
— History of Dogma, Volume 1 (of 7) • Adolph Harnack
... remember rightly, was made in the course of a sparring match with the late Ferdinand Brunetiere over the principles and rules of literary criticism. As was fitting for a man to whom we owe the memorable saying, "The good critic is he who relates the adventures of his soul among masterpieces," M. Anatole France maintained that there were no rules and no principles. And that may be very true. Rules, principles, and standards die and ...
— A Personal Record • Joseph Conrad
... that interest us. To understand the old writers one must see as they saw, feel as they felt, believe as they believed—and this is hard, indeed impossible! We may get near them by asking the Spirit of the Age in which they lived to enter in and dwell with us, but it does not always come. Literary criticism is not literary history—we have no use here for the former, but to analyze his writings is to get as far as we can behind the doors of a man's mind, to know and appraise his knowledge, not from our standpoint, but from that of his contemporaries, ...
— The Evolution of Modern Medicine • William Osler
... way this end is achieved in America often excites the derision of the literary foreigner; for although most American reviews are readable enough, they often lack the critical emphasis and literary scope and color so conspicuous in the literary criticism of the British and Continental reviews. But the foreigner overlooks the fact that American reviewers usually have something to say about every publication which claims to appeal to a reading public, and that many of these would be absolutely ignored by foreign ...
— The Building of a Book • Various
... I started to write literary criticism, and in 1951 I published a critical biography of Anderson. It came shortly after Lionel Trilling's influential essay attacking Anderson, an attack from which Anderson's reputation would never quite recover. Trilling charged ...
— Winesburg, Ohio • Sherwood Anderson
... Flaubert too much preoccupied with the sense of form, and makes these excellent observations to him—perhaps her best piece of literary criticism. 'You consider the form as the aim, whereas it is but the effect. Happy expressions are only the outcome of emotion and emotion itself proceeds from a conviction. We are only moved by that which we ardently believe in.' Literary schools she ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... matter of literary criticism is that, as Ruskin told us, he was the first man in the literary circles of London to assert the value of Modern Painters. "He said it was a work of transcendent talent, presented the most original views in the most elegant and powerful language, and would work ...
— Sydney Smith • George W. E. Russell
... to that ostler pretty nearly all the opprobrious names in his language with which I was acquainted. "Mais, monsieur," the criminal responded, "le papier etait deja gate; vous avez ecrit la-dessus." If this had been intended as a literary criticism, it might possibly have been justified, but seeing that it was offered by a man who could not read, there was something in the frank imbecility of it which disarmed me, and I daresay that the shout of laughter with which I received it was just ...
— Recollections • David Christie Murray
... to Augustus, was written B.C. 14 in response (see the quotation from Suetonius above) to the emperor's request for a poem addressed to himself, after seeing that no mention was made of him in Ep. ii. 2 and the Epistula ad Pisones. These are the sermones quidam (both, like Ep. ii. 1, on literary criticism) referred to by Suetonius, and not Book i. of the Epistles, where Augustus is frequently mentioned. The date is fixed by l. 15, 'praesenti tibi maturos largimur honores,' etc., referring to the worship of the numen Augusti, which was legalized B.C. 14, and by the reference in ll. 252 sqq. ...
— The Student's Companion to Latin Authors • George Middleton
... unfits him to draw a comparison between the orations of Demosthenes and of Cicero. But, although his acquaintance with the structure and powers of the language may have been insufficient to enable him to venture on literary criticism, his acquaintance with the books of the Romans was considerable, and he had thoroughly studied the Greek authors who had written on Roman affairs. His own library, or the libraries to which he had access ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 27, January, 1860 • Various
... contributor to the Academy, the Athenaeum, the Nation, and the Daily Chronicle. One can hardly fail to be impressed by the mere industry of a writer of reputed slack habits of work. The published volume of his selected essays is literary criticism, as learned and allusive as Matthew Arnold's, and as nicely poised, with the advantage of being poised in more rarified heights than Arnold's wings could hope to scale. In this book is his classic and most wonderful essay on Shelley, written before his strength ...
— The Hound of Heaven • Francis Thompson
... novels, no plays, no satires, and—until the example of the Spectator had begun to work on this side the water—no experiments even at the lighter forms of essay-writing, character-sketches, and literary criticism. There was verse of a certain kind, but the most generous stretch of the term would hardly allow it to be called poetry. Many of the early divines of New England relieved their pens, in the intervals of sermon-writing, of epigrams, elegies, ...
— Initial Studies in American Letters • Henry A. Beers
... faculty of the University. The Applegates and the Goodriches were pleasant folk, rather settled in their aspect, and all of literary leanings. The Applegates were identified—both husband and wife—with a magazine of literary criticism; Mr. Goodrich ran a denominational paper with an academic flavor; Mrs. Goodrich was president of an orphan asylum and spent her days in good works. Then, intermittently, the company was joined by George Fitzgerald, a preoccupied young physician, the ...
— The Precipice • Elia Wilkinson Peattie
... fills a void, not merely in the systems of Lombroso, as he says, but in all existing systems of English and American criticism with which we are acquainted. It is not literary criticism pure and simple, though it is not lacking in literary qualities of a high order, but it is something which has long been needed, for of literary criticism, so called, good, bad, and indifferent, there is always an abundance: but it ...
— The Story of the Mind • James Mark Baldwin
... originator of that interesting feature of English and Irish journalism, the sketch of personalities and proceedings in parliament. Of the editors of the Athenaeum—for many years the leading English organ of literary criticism—one of the most famous was Dr. John Doran, who was of Irish parentage. "Dod" is a familiar household word in the British Parliament. It is the name of the recognized guide to the careers and political opinions of Lords and Commons. Its founder was an Irishman, Charles Roger ...
— The Glories of Ireland • Edited by Joseph Dunn and P.J. Lennox
... fragment of literary criticism from the Dictator's hand is preserved in the Suetonian life of Terence. Two of Caesar's brief but masterly letters to Cicero will be quoted under ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... easy. The study of right literary criticism is much more difficult than the false path usually trodden; so difficult, indeed, that you may easily count the men who have attempted to grasp the great rules and apply them to writing as an art to be ...
— On the Art of Writing - Lectures delivered in the University of Cambridge 1913-1914 • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... especially, literary and religious. His attacks on dogmatic Christianity promise to be the most short-lived of his works; and perhaps deservedly so, as here Arnold was dealing with technical matters in which he was not an expert. In literary criticism he has been and still is a vital influence, urging especially the value of an outlook over the literatures of other countries and the cultivating of an intimacy with the great classics of the past. ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... them, can get nothing," can draw no meaning. Such at least is our view of this passage (line 366) about which there is a difference of opinion among commentators. At any rate we catch a glimpse of Homeric literary criticism in Homer, who states the requirements of good poetry, and contrasts them with the "liar" or fabricator of yarns, which are certainly devoid of the noble ...
— Homer's Odyssey - A Commentary • Denton J. Snider
... 1852, Paul Bourget was a pupil at the Lycee Louis le Grand, and then followed a course at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes, intending to devote himself to Greek philology. He, however, soon gave up linguistics for poetry, literary criticism, and fiction. When yet a very young man, he became a contributor to various journals and reviews, among others to the 'Revue des deux Mondes, La Renaissance, Le Parlement, La Nouvelle Revue', etc. He has since ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... that the title be used without the article, for "Die Konigskinder" or "Zwei Konigskinder" both suggest the simple German form of the old tale of Hero and Leander, with which story, of course, it has nothing whatever to do. But if literary criticism forbids association between Humperdinck's two operas, musical criticism compels it. Many of the characters in the operas are close relations, dramatically as well as musically—the royal children themselves, the witches, of course, and the broom-makers. The rest of the characters ...
— A Second Book of Operas • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... make a resume of all this. I am defending a man who, if he had met a literary criticism upon the form of his book, or upon certain expressions, or on too much detail, upon one point or another, would have accepted that literary criticism with the best heart in the world. But to find himself accused of an outrage against ...
— The Public vs. M. Gustave Flaubert • Various
... following essays is taken from the Thistle Edition of Stevenson's Works, published by Charles Scribner's Sons, in New York. I have refrained from selecting any of Stevenson's formal essays in literary criticism, and have chosen only those that, while ranking among his masterpieces in style, reveal his personality, character, opinions, philosophy, and faith. In the Introduction, I have endeavoured to be as brief as possible, merely giving ...
— Essays of Robert Louis Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... wit and humor. The volume was heartily praised by the critics and his reputation as a new poet of convincing distinction was established. In the following year appeared Conversations on Some of the Old Poets, a volume of literary criticism interesting now mainly as pointing to maturer work in ...
— The Vision of Sir Launfal - And Other Poems • James Russell Lowell |
