English literary criticism

A historical overview outlines the evolution of critical method in English letters, dividing its development into three broad periods and exemplifying each with selected essays by representative critics from Sidney and Dryden through Johnson, Coleridge, Lamb, Hazlitt, Shelley and Carlyle. The editor traces changing priorities—classical models and form, neoclassical correctness, and later romantic and modern emphases on imagination, expression, and interdisciplinary perception—while offering illustrative readings of poems, plays, and critical prefaces. The volume closes with Walter Pater's study of Sandro Botticelli to demonstrate the impulse to bridge literature and the visual arts.