Cleanth Brooks and the Rise of Modern Criticism

Front Cover
University of Virginia Press, 1996 - Literary Criticism - 510 pages
During a career that spanned sixty years, Cleanth Brooks was involved in most of the major controversies facing the humanities from the 1930s until his death in 1994. He was arguably the most important American literary critic of the mid-twentieth century. Because it is impossible to understand modern literary criticism apart from Cleanth Brooks, or Cleanth Brooks apart from modern literary criticism, Mark Royden Winchell gives us not only an account of one man's influence but also a survey of literary criticism in twentieth-century America. More than any other individual, Brooks helped steer literary study away from historical and philological scholarship by emphasizing the autonomy of the text. He applied the methods of what came to be called the New Criticism, not only to the modernist works for which these methods were created, but to the entire canon of English poetry, from John Donne to William Butler Yeats. In his many critical books, especially The Well Wrought Urn and the textbooks he edited with Robert Penn Warren and others, Brooks taught several generations of students how to read literature without prejudice or preconception.
 

Contents

The Road to Nashville
3
The Campfire Still Glowing
19
Tinkum
40
A Reb at Oxford
58
The Old War Skule 193242
75
Baton Rouge
77
The Left Bank of the Mississippi
94
The Confederacy of Letters
111
The Backlash
263
The Squire of Northford
284
A Postage Stamp of Soil
307
A Moveable Feast 196485
327
Albion Revisited
329
The Attack on Tory Formalism
347
A Place to Come To
368
Claiming Criticism
395

An Extended Family
129
A New Criticism 193647
151
What Is Poetry?
153
The Man Who Knew MacArthur
175
The Mating Dance
195
South of Boston 194764
237
A Connecticut Yankee
239
Toward Sunset 198594
423
Ogden Street
425
April Is the Cruellest Month
446
Notes
463
Works Cited
477
Index
489
Copyright

Common terms and phrases

Bibliographic information