Critical Occasions: Dryden, Pope, Johnson, and the History of Criticism

The birth or criticism out of the satire of itself is one of the great founding paradoxes of its history, and the department of intellectual and cultural life I focus upon in this volume is the world of long eighteenth-century criticism, and the kinds of stories that have come to be told about it. The enquiry emerges from the need to reorganise the history of criticism from 1660 to 1800 on sounder textual, tonal, and conceptual grounds. To such a purpose, and in response to a difficulty acknowledged but not often pursued, the objective of this work is to analyse the theoretical and practical-critical problems of eighteenth-century criticism's re-narration. My thesis, in brief, is that the thing we still call 'literary criticism' (whatever other names it may now go by) is best comprehended as a narrative of interconnected occasions.