The Birth of New Criticism : Conflict and Conciliation in the Early Work of William Empson, I.A. Richards, Robert Graves, and Laura Riding

Amid competing claims about who first developed the theories and practices that became known as New Criticism - the critical method that rose alongside Modernism - literary historians have generally given the lion's share of credit to William Empson and I.A. Richards. In The Birth of New Criticism Donald Childs challenges this consensus and provides a new and authoritative narrative of the movement's origins. At the centre stand Robert Graves and Laura Riding, two poet-critics who have been written out of the history of New Criticism. Childs brings to light the long-forgotten early criticism of Graves to detail the ways in which his interpretive methods and ideas evolved into the practice of "close reading," demonstrating that Graves played such a fundamental part in forming both Empson's and Richards's critical thinking that the story of twentieth-century literary criticism must be re-evaluated and re-told. Childs also examines the important influence that Riding's work had on Graves, Empson, and Richards, establishing the importance of this long-neglected thinker and critic. A provocative and cogently argued work, The Birth of New Criticism is both an important intellectual history of the movement and a sharply observed account of the cultural politics of its beginnings and legacy. Cover 1 Copyright 5 Contents 8 Acknowledgments 10 Introduction 14 1 - An Old Anxiety about Influence 45 2 - A Question of Conflict 67 3 - Mediating The Poetic Mind: “as many meanings as possible” 85 4 - The Limits of Poetic Consciousness 96 5 - Models of Practically Ambiguous Criticism 117 6 - Defence of Poetic Analysis 134 7 - The Ambiguous Grammar of Romantic Psychology 146 8 - Associations 168 9 - Taxonomies of Types 184 10 - Remembering Graves in Revision 189 11 - Richards and the Graves(t) Danger 201 12 - How Graves Shapes Richards’s Principles 217 13 - Conflict Theory in Science and Poetry 245 14 - Riding Corrects Richards (and Graves) 253 15 - Asserting the Poem’s Autonomy contra Richards 269 16 - From Slow Reading to Close Reading: Escaping the Stock Response 281 17 - Taking New Stock of Stock Responses 295 18 - Poetry, Interpretation, and Education 310 19 - Anthology Culture, Self-Reliance, and Self-Development 324 20 - Slow Wit, Slow Close Reading, and Paraphrase 340 Notes 352 Index 402 McGill-Queen’s,University,Press,2013,isbn,978-0-7735-4211-2,(cloth),isbn,978-0-7735-8923-0,(epdf),isbn,978-0-7735-8924-7,(epub) McGill-Queen’s University Press 2013,isbn 978-0-7735-4211-2 (cloth),isbn 978-0-7735-8923-0 (epdf),isbn 978-0-7735-8924-7 (epub) Amid competing claims about who first developed the theories and practices that became known as 'New Criticism' - the critical method that rose alongside Modernism - literary historians have generally given the lion's share of credit to William Empson and I.A. Richards. In this book, Donald Childs challenges this consensus and provides a new and authoritative narrative of the movement's origins A groundbreaking account of the origins of the twentieth century's most influential method for studying poetry.