DAY, Gary, Literary Criticism. A New History, Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 2008, 352 p.
ISBN 978 0 7486 1563 6
RÉSUMÉ
How many people know that Aristotle thought the best tragedies werethose which ended happily? Or that the first mention of the motor carin literature may have been in 1791 in Boswell's Life of Johnson? Or that it was not unknown in the nineteenth century for book reviews to be 30,000 words long!These are just a few of the fascinating facts to be found in thisabsorbing history of literary criticism. From the Ancient Greek periodto the present day we learn about critics' lives, the times in whichthey lived and how the same problems of interpretation and valuationpersist through the ages. In this lively and engaging book, Gary Dayquestions whether the 'theory wars' of recent years have lost sight ofliterature itself, and makes surprising connections between criticismand a range of subjects, including the rise of money. General readers will appreciate this informative, intriguing and oftenprovocative account of the history of literary criticism; students willvalue the clear way in which it puts criticism into context; andacademics will enjoy getting to grips with this challenge to theprevailing view about the nature of current theory.