Criticism: The Major Statements is about as apt a title as you are likely to come across. This book does indeed contain references
and selections to just about every single movement in critical history. The book has a historical range this simply amazing, taking lit theory from the ancient Greeks through the writings of Plato and Aristotle all the way up to contemporary (1988) feminist and race-centered theories from Sandra Gilbert & Susan Gubar and Henry Louis Gates respectively.
Some of the seminal, groundbreaking writings in literary theory can be found in this anthology, including Alexander Pope’s poem as theory An Essay in
Criticism, Percy Bysshe Shelley’s A Defence of Poetry, Edgar Allan Poe’s The Poetic Principle, Sigmund Freud’s Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming, Fredric Jameson’s Criticism in History. Anyone who has gone to college and taken critical theory classes is going to be familiar with most if not all of these and if you aren’t familiar with all of them then you should ask for your money back.
In addition to those heavyweight archtypes of critical theory, this anthology also offers a selection from Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s classic Biographia Literaria, specfically sections XIV, XIII, XV, and XVII.
Also included is Matthew Arnold’s The Study of Poetry. Arnold started out as a talented poet himself before moving on to a series of cogent and incisive essays on literary criticism and this is one of the best.
Henry James is
represented by The Art of Fiction, a companion piece of sorts to Shelley’s Defence of Poetry except that James is defending the novel as a viable art form. It may be hard to believe now, but even as late as 1884 when James wrote this, the novel was still considered to be writing from the wrong side of tracks, hardly deserving of criticism.
Other selections of note include Leo Tolstoy’s What is Art? Kenneth Burke’s Psychology and Form. Northrop Frye’s The Archetypes of Literature.
It is to the editors’ credit that they chose to focus on many of the 20th century’s great literary critics and movements so that Derrida gets represented with Structure, Signs and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences, Terry Eagleton’s classic Marxism and Literary Criticism gets two chapters into the book, Roland Barthes makes it in with his Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narratives and Paul de Man makes it in with Semiology and Rhetoric.
Along the way are pieces of criticism directed at specific targets such as Virginia Woolf analyzing A Room of One’s Own and T.S. Eliot directing his unique brand of critical thought at Hamlet.