After the New Criticism

Northrop Frye published his monumental book in 1957, one year after Murray Krieger in The New Apologists for Poetry had summed up the position associated with the New Criticism, explored its theoretical contradictions and dead ends, and predicted-correctly, it turns out-that the New Criticism had done all that it could do for American literary critics (and the teaching of literature in the United States) and that newer movements were waiting in the wings to take its place on center stage.