Invention of English Criticism

Michael Gavin is an assistant professor in the Department of English Language and Literature at the University of South Carolina. Before joining USC he was a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Humanities Research Center at Rice University.

• Introduction: the textualization of judgment; 1. Criticism and the institutions of drama, 1645–75; 2. Politics of Parnassus; 3. Women among critics; 4. Criticism and the poetry of Anne Finch; 5. Disciplining the dunces: literary knowledge in The Dunciad Variorum; 6. Boswell and Co.: conversation and criticism in the age of print; Bibliography.

'In The Invention of English Criticism Michael Gavin addresses an important subject with a shrewd awareness of traditional interests of literary study; contemporary concerns with the continuities of oral, written and printed media; and a current appreciation of the ways in which gender issues trouble and complicate the broad literary marketplace of the Restoration and eighteenth century. The book features a wide variety of literary players and sites, and deploys a welcome mixture of literary genres to rewrite the history of English critical discourse in an altogether compelling way: a book of significant argumentative reach and of impressive critical and historical sophistication.' Steven Zwicker, Stanley Elkin Professor in the Humanities in Arts and Sciences, Washington University, St Louis