Novels and History and Northrop Frye

Abstract

IN AN AGE when almost all known literary theorists are French, Swiss, German, or Russian, it is hard to remember that not long ago seemed specifically the province of Anglophone critics and especially of North Americans. Europe, especially Eastern Europe, supported many good theorists, of course-many more than were dreamt of in the English-speaking world-but at mid-century what stirred students of English texts was the work of such figures as W. K. Wimsatt, R. S. Crane, John Crowe Ransom, R. P. Blackmur, Kenneth Burke, Lionel Trilling, and M. H. Abrams. There, eager youths whose previous literary training was dully otherwise discovered ambition and reach in discussions of principles of literary form that ranged beyond individual texts and established notions. Much of this work sprang from the post-war relief from implication, and it seemed sui generis; its practitioners were young, idealistic, new world, and overwhelmingly male, home from protecting the hearth virtues and ready to reclaim literature from biography and history. Theory promised unsoiled ground, fresh starts, ideas untainted by old quarrels. Most of this work had a distinctively American pragmatic flavor, and some concerned itself more with social considerations than did any of the European schools except Marxism. If the ahistorical (and often antihistorical) New Criticism now seems almost the only American contribution to theory, it is because practical classroom tactics won out at a moment when large numbers of new professionals were entering the academy, and a vastly simplified kind of theory drove out more rigorous varieties that were trying to understand exactly how prevailing structures of language and form tangled with demands of time and circumstance.