Cultural historicism: A study of major postwar British critics, 1950--1975

Between 1959 and 1975, there appeared in Britain a number of significant critical works marked by a common concern with particular historical and cultural contexts in which literature is situated. I call this shared concern "cultural historicism," which I define by analyzing the critical practice of seven major post-war English critics: F. W. Bateson, Donald Davie, William Empson, Frank Kermode, Graham Hough, Richard Hoggart, and Raymond Williams. Though their methods and assumptions vary widely, these critics can be perceived as a group consistently addressing the same critical questions and sharing similar concerns and desires.;Chapter 1 examines the linguistic criticism of three cultural historicists: F. W. Bateson, Donald Davie, and William Empson. These critics practise a contextualist mode of criticism that rejects the split between poetic language and ordinary usage adumbrated in modernist poetics and attends to the social and historical dimensions of poetic language.;Chapter 2 focuses on the anti-modernist critiques of Frank Kermode and Graham Hough. They specifically object to three features of literary modernism: (1) its ambivalent attitudes toward its past, (2) its cult of aesthetic autonomy, and (3) the epistemological consequences of its aesthetic doctrine. In opposition to modernist "schismatism," Kermode and Hough advocate an approach to cultural history that stresses social and historical change, not aestheticism and timeless myth.;Chapter 3 analyzes the cultural criticism of Richard Hoggart and Raymond Williams. These critics move beyond the narrow protocols and political ideology of Leavisite literary studies towards an historical analysis of cultural practices and meanings inscribed within all texts, popular or literary, written or oral.;Chapter 4 defines the collective enterprise of these seven cultural historicists. All these critics attempt, in varying degrees, to right the balance between the literary text and history set askew in modernist criticism and to reinvoke the historical and cultural provenance of literature.