Praising It New: The Best of the New Criticism (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9780804011082)

Marked by a rigorously close textual reading, detached from biographical or other extratextual material, New Criticism was the dominant literary theory of the mid-twentieth century. Since that time, schools of literary criticism have arisen in support of or in opposition to the approach advocated by the New Critics. Nonetheless, the theory remains one of the most important sources for groundbreaking criticism and continues to be a controversial approach to reading literature.

Praising It New is the first anthology of New Criticism to be printed in fifty years. It includes important essays by such influential poets and critics as T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, Yvor Winters, Cleanth Brooks, R. P. Blackmur, W. K. Wimsatt, and Robert Penn Warren. Together, these authors ushered in the modernist age of poetry and criticism and transformed the teaching of literature in the schools. As the American poet and critic Randall Jarrell once noted: "I do not believe there has been another age in which so much extraordinarily good criticism of poetry has been written."

This anthology now makes much of the best American poetry criticism available again, and includes short biographies and selected bibliographies of its chief figures. Praising It New is the perfect introduction for students to the best American poetry criticism of the twentieth century.

Author: Garrick Davis
ISBN-10: 0804011087
ISBN-13: 9780804011082
Publisher: Swallow Press
Language: English
Published: 05/13/2008
Pages: 288
Format: Hardcover
Weight: 1.11lbs
Size: 8.46h x 6.15w x 1.07d

Review Citation(s):
Library Journal 07/15/2008 pg. 80
Reference and Research Bk News 08/01/2008 pg. 315