‘Aren’t They All in the Literary Histories?’: English Criticism and the Dismissal of Comparative Literature

May Hawas

European Review, 2025, vol. 33, issue 3, 360-370

Abstract: The tendency to dismiss history in favour of close reading by twentieth-century British critics has cast a long shadow over critical practice. Yet the tendency to revere a formalist, a-historical, even a-political critical method primarily for its own sake seems to be singularly strong in English studies. This somewhat self-isolating tendency has not, for example, appeared as a noteworthy part of critical practice in comparative literature. Of course, the two fields have built up over time a mutual suspicion of each other’s critical methods, though it wasn’t just about the necessity of multilingualism but also about the value of history.

Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.cambridge.org/core/product/identifier/ ... type/journal_article link to article abstract page (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cup:eurrev:v:33:y:2025:i:3:p:360-370_11

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in European Review from Cambridge University Press Cambridge University Press, UPH, Shaftesbury Road, Cambridge CB2 8BS UK.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Kirk Stebbing ().