Authors and Authority

"Authors and Authority" is a one-volume history of Anglo-American literary criticism from the neoclassical period up until recent trends in modern literary theory, feminist criticism and cultural history. Focussing on the work of major critics such as Johnson, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Arnold, Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Leavis, Frye and Lionel Trilling, Parrinder traces the connections between authorship and critical authority, and between literary debate and the changing forms of culture and society. Surveying the development that leads from the creative manifestos of the Romantic poets to the current interpretative theories of stucturalism, deconstruction and new historicism, the author asks whether there is a future for a distinctively literary criticism, and whether the gulf between creator and critic can be healed. -- Back cover.