The Good Old Days

Abstract

Stefan Collini’s concern in this new book is with literary criticism as it developed in the last century, principally between the two world wars but also into the 1950s and 1960s. One of the more familiar ways in which this body of work has been characterised is by contrast with the literary histories which were in circulation in the late nineteenth century, and before the First World War. He feels this habit may have given an impression that the literary critics of his chosen period were not interested in history, one which may then have been bolstered by their supposed focus on the ‘words on the page’. He sets out to show how false all this is, beginning with T. S. Eliot’s famous assertion in 1921 that what certain literary texts illustrate is how, in the seventeenth century, there was a ‘dissociation of sensibility’. He then carefully tracks the progress of this essentially historical notion through Basil Willey’s work on the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century ‘backgrounds’, and L. C. Knights’s book on Jonson and seventeenth-century drama. It is not always the particular terms of Eliot’s claim which these critics pick up but rather the belief they imply in steady cultural decline.