Abstract
What's the Import? is both a broadside against what Kerry McSweeney considers to be the current orthodoxy within nineteenth-century literary studies, and a proposed model with examples for a new critical direction. McSweeney's complaint is that literary theory on the one hand and cultural contextualisation on the other have fostered an exclusively interpretative critical discourse in which aesthetic considerations and ‘intrinsic literary history’ (p. 3) are marginalised and devalued. This is especially damaging, he implies, to readings of poetry, as it leads to a neglect of poetic technique, affective power, and the intertextual dialogue between different poems. There is undoubtedly something in this, and McSweeney is able to cite many examples of the kind of criticism he dislikes. His book is a sound warning against the imposition of a priori readings on texts which do not sustain them, and against claims of unique legitimacy for any one interpretation of a complex poem. Although he does not raise this point himself, it is also a telling indictment of an academic culture in which the pressure to publish forces scholars towards novel and minute arguments at the expense of more nuanced or broadminded readings. As is the nature of polemic, however, McSweeney tends to overstate his case. Many of the leading critics of nineteenth-century poetry, including Helen Vendler, Isobel Armstrong and Angela Leighton, are anything but oblivious to aesthetic considerations. Likewise, the kind of intertextual criticism which reads poems alongside their poetic antecedents has never gone away and appears to be thriving. McSweeney can take comfort that he appears to be swimming with the tide and not against it.
Published Version
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