The Twentieth-Century Humanist Critics: From Spitzer to Frye

These eight critics share a number of traits. Like the New Critics, they all rebelled against the then-dominant academic orthodoxy of philology and literary history; on the contrary, they insisted on the autonomy of literature and of criticism, the necessity of reading literary texts in only literary terms and not as autobiography, history, or anthropology. Thus, they practised the close reading of texts and what we call practical criticism. Unlike many New Critics, they were solid scholars, they knew their history, and they accepted the role of intuition, sympathy, Erlebnis, and presence in their work. They reshaped but also enlarged the canon rather than narrowing it; eschewing narrow specialization, they worked on several literatures, or on several literary periods, or both. Each contributed a personal, path-breaking new vision of literature and of its history.