A period of significant demographic, social, and political transformation produced essays marked by a deep seriousness of tone and a sense of weighty purpose that departed sharply from the playful quality of the periodical tradition and the lighter touch of the Romantic familiar essay. Essayists in criticism of this period (Matthew Arnold, Walter Pater, William Morris, Oscar Wilde) were deeply engaged in defining ideas of culture that could encompass an increasingly diverse and fragmented society. This chapter reflects on the publication contexts that shaped some of the best-known examples of the Victorian critical essay; examines Victorian critics’ emphasis on specific capacities in perception as a ground for pedagogical exposition with the aim of achieving social coherency; and highlights the deep historicism and awareness of mediation that informs the Victorian essayist’s approach to cultural criticism.

This chapter defines ‘criticism’, adapting John Dryden and Samuel Johnson, as a judicative, explicative, and appreciative encounter with literature. And in doing so, it sorts the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century ‘essay’ into three rough groupings: (1) digressive essays in the manner of Montaigne; (2) treatise essays like Dryden’s Of Dramatick Poesie; and (3) periodical essays like The Tatler and The Spectator. Following a thread of allusions to Cato the Younger through the works of Montaigne, Addison, Pope, and Elizabeth Montagu, I show how an important feature of modern close reading, the grammatically integrated quotation, grows out of the eighteenth-century critical essay.

This envoi looks at the impossible necessity of literary history. It explores the term ‘literary’, marking how it both opens ancient writing to scrutiny and obscures significant sets of connections or ideas, and it questions how narratives of the history of literature are always unfinished, partial and ideologically laden. It discusses the place of literary history within the field of classics.

The chapter begins by probing skeptical criticism, with key contributors like Stegenga (2018) questioning our unwavering trust in contemporary medicine. Next, it delves into the criticism of overmedicalization (see Moynihan and Cassels 2005; Conrad 2007; Le Fanu 2012; Parens 2013), viewed as an inappropriate use of medical resources for sociopolitical issues. The chapter also investigates the criticism of objectification related to the quality of care, drawing from thinkers like Cassell (2004), Haque and Waytz (2012), and Topol (2019). Rounding out the chapter, utilizing insights from Popper (2000) and Haslanger (2018), it identifies these criticisms as both social and internal to the practice of medicine. It concludes that medicine is falling short of its own standards, thereby posing fundamental questions about its nature and purpose to be explored in the succeeding chapters.

The overlap of poetry and essay in modern and contemporary American writing is the focus of this chapter. Covering the literary manifesto, essays on poetry, and the rise of the modern poet-critic, the chapter explores examples of formal and procedural essaying in postmodern and contemporary poetry. These include construction and deconstruction of a speaker-subject, theoretical experimentation, translation, documentary, and social critique. The chapter reflects on the position of the subjective "I" in the essay, lyric and experimental poetry, and hybrids of these and dwells in its conclusion on the problems of form and process in the lyric essay or essayistic poem.

Ostensibly, Schumann’s Piano Concerto has its origins in the single-movement Phantasie in A minor for piano and orchestra composed in 1841, which later became the Concerto’s first movement. Broadly understood, however, the work’s genesis spans some fifteen years, encompassing both Schumann’s fledgling attempts to compose in the genre and his developing critical engagement with the concerto idea, expressed in a series of articles for the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, which documented his views on concerti of his time and set out his own generic agenda. Beginning with the unfinished F major Concerto of 1831, Op. 54’s prehistory takes in the aborted Konzertsatz in D minor of 1839 and also runs parallel with the genesis of Clara Wieck’s Concerto in A minor, Op. 7 of 1833–5, a work with which Schumann was closely involved. Chapter 2 narrates this prehistory, paying attention not only to the compositional genesis of Op. 54 and the process by which it absorbed the Phantasie of 1841 but also to Schumann’s critical relationship with his predecessors and evolution of an alternative concept of the genre, which emphasised the integration of soloist and orchestra and the features of the three-movement cycle into a single-movement sonata form.

This chapter outlines the specific compositional genesis of the quartet and its private reception during and immediately following its creation. I first discuss the basis of the quartet in an unfinished piano sonata from 1829, and its compositional process in the early 1830s, before turning to some of the possible motivations for writing a string quartet in this period. The last part of the chapter concerns the somewhat-notorious exchange between Hensel and her brother carried out over the winter of 1834–5. In a letter of 30 January 1835, Mendelssohn offered a critique of the quartet, objecting to Hensel’s use of form, specifically her free use of modulation and music that is in places ‘in no key at all’. Hensel’s response – perhaps unnecessarily deferential – is a revealing acknowledgement of how she felt she remained in thrall to Beethoven’s later music.

Since the death of Pierre Boulez in 2016, the historiography of contemporary music has begun to confront the completion of one of the most remarkable careers affecting the character and context of musical life since 1945. This chapter examines the changing nature of the relationship between Messiaen and his most distinguished student. It examines Boulez’s critiques of Messiaen, and it creates a dialogue between aspects of classicism and modernism in the thinking of both composers, establishing their distinctiveness and relevance to the continuing evolution of compositional practice in the present day.

Messiaen’s relationship with the press and, to some extent, with the wider musical culture within which he lived and worked, can be divided into the period before, and after, ‘Le Cas Messiaen’ in 1945#–6, in which critical responses to his Trois Petites Liturgies de la Présence Divine and Vingt Regards sur L’enfant-Jésus sharply divided critical and popular opinion. In this chapter, I explore Messiaen’s early reception in the French press of the 1930s an‘ early ’40s, up to and including ‘Le Cas’, paying particular attention to two particular concerns: the way the critics of the time chose to understand his music as a feature in the landscape of the French music of the time, and the way his public persona, including his own journalism, intersected with that understanding.

This chapter identifies certain interesting threads of development in Messiaen criticism from a wide range of published sources, as the challenge of responding to the remarkably original and forthright character of Messiaen's compositions was confronted in the highly unstable context of musical life between 1930 and 1990. This chapter acts to confirm perceptions about Messiaen's central position during those decades, within France and beyond it, and to explain the continuing interest in his life and work during the years since his death.

When Pater’s Appreciations was first published in 1889, the chapters on Wordsworth and Coleridge were uniformly praised. Although Pater had previously published material on both poets, the chapters in Appreciations are the most oft cited. In order to assess them, we must contextualise the essays within a longer arc of Pater’s career. ‘Coleridge’s Writings’ was Pater’s first publication, appearing in the Westminster Review in 1866. Pater later contributed detailed remarks on Coleridge’s poetry to volume 4 of T. H. Ward’s English Poets (1880). The chapter on Coleridge in Appreciations consists of the first half of ‘Coleridge’s Writings’ as well as its concluding paragraphs, with the commentary on the poetry inserted in the middle. Pater’s essay ‘On Wordsworth’, which first appeared in the Fortnightly Review in 1874, may be regarded as one of the most important critical statements of his career. It is closely allied with his remarks on Wordsworth in the Preface to The Renaissance, published the previous year, and may have been designed to be included in that study. It stands as an important corrective to the Victorian Wordsworth.

This chapter surveys the major scholarly and popular culture responses to the life and work of F. Scott Fitzgerald, and, to a lesser extent, to Zelda Fitzgerald, between 2000 and 2020. The first part of the chapter discusses the films, TV and radio adaptations, stage and ballet versions, and novels based on Fitzgerald’s works or on the Fitzgeralds’ lives. The second part deals with the book-length scholarship and criticism on Fitzgerald’s life and work in the first two decades of the twenty-first century, which has greatly increased and expanded in this period in both subject matter and approach, partially because of the international conferences sponsored by The F. Scott Fitzgerald Society, because of the annual issues of The F. Scott Fitzgerald Review, which began publication in 2002, and because of the completion, in 2019, of the eighteen-volume Cambridge Edition of the Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald. The material in this second part of the chapter is divided into sections on Bibliographies and Other Reference Works, Editions, Correspondence, Biography, and Criticism, with the latter sub-divided into General Studies – Collections, General Studies – Full-Length Works, and Studies of Individual Works.

This chapter discusses the importance of rhetoric to the rise of the Sophists and the way that an attention to language as such conduces to a novel and controversial understanding of reality. Language, for the Sophists, is more than a medium for conveying meaning; it is itself creative of meaning, making the education that they offer uniquely powerful. This is the fuller sense of their professing to make their students “clever at speaking” (deinos legein). The chapter traces three specific areas on which the Sophists brought to bear their interest in logos: grammar and the issue of the correct names; the criticism of and engagement with poetry; and rhetoric and the effectiveness of argumentative techniques. We see that these explorations cannot be said to aim at a systematic theory. But they helped to inaugurate the study of language for its own sake, a topic that would play an important role in the philosophical debates of the following centuries.

We have been reading Gulliver’s Travels for nearly 300 years, and we have been arguing about it just as long. The history of the critical reception of Swift’s masterpiece begins as soon as the book was published, when Swift was charged with indecency and misanthropy, though he has always had defenders as well as detractors, a situation that continued into the nineteenth century. In the Victorian period, Gulliver was often sanitised through abridgement, especially in versions for children. In the twentieth century, Gulliver’s Travels has been the subject of numerous lines of academic enquiry, including criticism that focuses on its sources and generic identity; on its employment of rhetoric and irony in service of satire; on feminism and sexuality; on colonialism and politics; and on the histories of science, philosophy, and religion.

The Introduction offers a rationale for the first general analysis for a number of years of Samuel Johnson’s literary criticism. It sets forth the distinctive emphasis of the new volume and justifies its focus on Johnson’s “criteria of the heart.” This formulation points to the emotional foundation for many of Johnson’s literary judgments. How Johnson’s emotional demands count as criteria is then explained and the connection between the chapters is spelled out. Each explores Johnson’s critical artistry or aspects of his thought – the application of philosophical rigor to statements of critical opinion. The Introduction stresses the poetical character of Johnson’s critical prose and looks forward to the prose of the Lives of the Poets; a passage from this work has served as the basis for David Ferry’s poetical recreation of Johnson. The introductory excursus suggests that categories commonly employed to explain Johnson’s criticism in historical terms will always strike the wrong note. They make unwarranted assumptions about the nature and progress of criticism and disfigure our sense of Johnson’s place within critical history.

This chapter suggests how Johnson gained from his acquaintance with the criticism of John Dennis. Johnson’s remarks on Shakespeare, Addison and Pope are all shaped by his reflections on the older critic, whose work Johnson quotes more fully than he does any other. Johnson’s response to Dennis is usually to disagree; but there is also respect, and acknowledgment that Dennis had good points to make about Pope’s Essay on Criticism, a poem that was for Johnson a success. Dennis’s reflections on Shakespeare and his complaints that Shakespeare failed to obey decorum trigger Johnson’s most eloquent passages in the Preface. In Johnson’s note to King Lear, where Johnson is lamenting the death of Cordelia, it is to Dennis that Johnson turns when calibrating his own uncertain yet distressed reactions to the play. Similarly, Dennis’s attack on the most celebrated of eighteenth-century tragedies, Addison’s Cato, offered the opportunity for a vivid comparison between a poet of manners and a “poet of nature.” There is truth as well as satire in Johnson’s description of Dennis as a “formidable assailant.” Johnson fulfills an obligation of fairness to his critical past.

This chapter discusses the Italian critics who wrote about Puccini’s music during his lifetime. Though dilettante writers showered Puccini with praise, more rigorous music critics of his era took a rather more sceptical view of his compositional merits. Puccini’s career coincided with the development of professional music criticism in Italy and also with the rise of musicology as an academic discipline. Significant critics discussed in this chapter include Amintore Galli, Filippo Filippi, Luigi Torchi, and Luigi Alberto Villanis. Particular attention is paid to Fausto Torrefranca, the author of a denunciatory and scathing text called Giacomo Puccini e l’opera internazionale, which blamed Puccini for many of the ills of the modern musical world. Many young critics of the era, such as Torrefranca, Giannotto Bastianelli and Ildebrando Pizzetti, associated Puccini with a backward-looking bourgeoisie and were keen to promote avant-garde Italian music, as well as non-commercial music from the more distant past. Puccini found approval amongst a new generation of pro-Fascist critics during the 1920s. Time and again, Puccini found himself dragged into debates about politics and national identity that went far beyond music.

Over the last twenty years, the growing diversity in content and artistic innovation in graphic novels, comic books, and web comics combined with the popularity of films based on comics material have made comic art newly attractive to curators, museums, and university galleries. More artists identified with comics are getting big budget retrospectives, collecting institutions are mounting rich historical shows, and exhibits capitalizing on the popularity of all types of comics are popping up around the world. The chapter maps out the history of influential shows of original comic art from newly rediscovered shows of the 1930s to contemporary blockbusters like High and Low: Modern Art, Popular Culture and Masters of American Comics, as well as the critical dialogue surrounding these shows, who some of the pioneers were, and how exhibition standards have developed over time.