INTRODUCTION

RAMAN SELDEN

In the late nineteenth century, Germanic philology initiated the rise of

scholarship in the English-speaking university world; in the 1920s, the
writings of T. E. Hulme, T. S. Eliot and I. A. Richards launched the era
of criticism. To risk a third sweeping generalization, we may regard the
period between the mid-1960s and the present day as the age of theory. The
present volume explores the major critical movements of the period since
1960, also taking account of relevant earlier developments. The critical
writings of Todorov, Barthes, Derrida and Iser have more in common with
the Classical and Renaissance philosophers and rhetoricians than with the
preceding period of British and American criticism. The dominance of
continental European philosophy and poetics over the positivist and
empirical traditions of British thought has marked a major break in
criticism - a sort of geological shift. 'Feeling', 'intuition', 'life', 'tradition',
'organic unity', 'sensibility' are no longer the dominant terms of critical
discourse. A dominant humanistic discourse has begun to give way to the
languages of formalism, structuralism, and phenomenology. Of course,
the new theoretical modes sometimes preserve humanistic perspectives:
Wolfgang Iser's reception theory, for example, is founded upon the
human experience of the reader. However, the structuralist tradition has
proved more resistant to reappropriation by humanisms of one kind
or another. It is this theoretical 'anti-humanism' which marks a real
break with the era of 'criticism'. These generalizations cannot disguise
the fact that resistance to 'theory' has been ubiquitous. 1 But if we are to
understand these controversies we must remember that 'theory' is a term
which possesses at least three meanings in this context. First, it alludes to
the scientific ambition to master and define a conceptual field. Secondly,
the term is used to refer to those critical discourses which aim to disrupt

See Laurence Lerner (ed.), Reconstructing Literature (Oxford, 1983); Geoffrey Thurley,
Counter-Modernism in Current Critical Theory (London, 1983); A. D. Nuttall, A New
Mimesis: Shakespeare and the Representation of Reality (London, 1983); Patrick Parrinder,
The Failure of Theory and the Teaching of English (Brighton, 1987).