Linguistics For Beginners - English

The historical life of ideas is typically one of recurrence. As the 20th century unfolded, literary theory took on a momentum that might be called progressive, each movement or trend building on the blind spots and logical flaws in those that had come before.

The history of literary theory is complicated by the simultaneous development of theoretical movements, schools, trends, and fashions sometimes interacting with, sometimes contesting each other. There were fruitful collaborations among theorists as well as many HYBRID configurations.

EARLY INFLUENCES ON LITERARY THEORY

Literary theory has its roots in classical Greece, in Plato’s ideas on mimesis, in Aristotle’s Poetics, which established classical definitions of tragedy and distinguished poetry from history, and in Longinus, whose theory of the sublime, in which language is recognized as a powerful means of transporting the mind of the listener, had a profound effect on aesthetic theory well into the 19th century.

The period from the 16th through the 18th centuries produced a number of important treatises on literary art. Sir Philip Sidney is to thank for the establishment of the importance of the literary artist as an “inventor” or “maker.” Principles of a neoclassical theory of drama were found. English neoclassicism reached its height in Alexander Pope’s Essay on Criticism.

The emergence of modern aesthetic theory in the late 18th century came at the cost of neoclassical didacticism and established the importance of sensation and imagination in artistic judgment. Some years later, Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Judgment moved away from the English empirical tradition represented by Burke and established the importance of cognition in aesthetic theory.

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