English Literary Criticism: The Medieval Phase (Classic Reprint) - Tapa blanda

Excerpt from English Literary Criticism: The Medieval Phase

T is generally taken for granted that literary criticism in England really began at the sixteenth-century Renascence. This assumption, it must be allowed, has at least this amount of justification, that then for the first time there ap peared in English a considerable body of works definitely devoted to literary problems, and represented by the Artes,,the Discourses, and the Apologies of Elizabethan writers. Yet it does not follow that with these works critical activities in England had their actual beginnings, or that then for the first time Englishmen concerned themselves with problems of literature. The Middle Ages, we have learnt, were less dark than was once supposed. They reveal to-day much eager search after knowledge, besides considerable creative activity in art, litera ture and institutions. It is therefore worth inquiring, in View of the unbroken efforts at literary criticism from the Elizabethan age oaards, whether. Such critical. Activities were a product solely of modern times, or whether any evidence exists of earlier attempts to engage in those many-sided activities now known as literary criticism.

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