criticism

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(krĭt'ĭ-sĭz'əm)
n.

1. The act of criticizing, especially adversely.
2. A critical comment or judgment.
3. 1. The practice of analyzing, classifying, interpreting, or evaluating literary or other artistic works.
   2. A critical article or essay; a critique.
   3. The investigation of the origin and history of literary documents; textual criticism.

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in everyday use means 'finding fault', although strictly criticism can be favourable as well as unfavourable. The sense is more neutral in terms such as literary criticism and textual criticism.

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The beginnings of literary criticism in Australia are inextricably bound up with the early history of magazine publishing in the colonies. As Frank S. Greenop's History of Magazine Publishing in Australia (1947) makes clear, the early decades of the nineteenth century are strewn with short-lived journals, some of which at least made a gesture towards disseminating literary views and information. The first magazine published in NSW, the Australian Magazine, appeared in 1821 under the editorship of the Rev. Ralph Mansfield as A Compendium of Religious, Literary, and Miscellaneous Intelligence; it laid greater stress, however, on religious than on literary matters. The Australian Quarterly Journal paid equally slight attention to literature from its inception in Sydney in 1828; the Hobart Town Magazine, produced 1833-34 by Henry Melville, was rather livelier in tone and content. Meagre as it was, most of the literary material that found its way into the early colonial magazines was largely derived from and concerned with English writing; a good deal of it, indeed, was reprinted from English sources.

As early as 1838 James Martin, then only 18, published his Australian Sketch Book, a collection of essays, one of which, 'The Pseudo-Poets', was an unflattering account of some Australian versifiers. In spite of Martin's Sketch Book most of the still rudimentary criticism of colonial writers appeared in magazines or newspapers of the day. In 1855-56 the Month caused some stir in Sydney largely by virtue of the controversial style of Frank Fowler, a young visitor to the Colony, and by the contributions of 'Peter Possum' (Richard Rowe). In 1856 the Leader began publication as the weekly companion of the Age, to be followed in 1864 by the Australasian produced in the office of the Argus. These were early examples of the close connection between criticism and journalism which continued in Australia to the end of the nineteenth century and beyond. A Sydney counterpart to the Australasian was the Sydney Mail, which had a close association with the Sydney Morning Herald. Almost contemporaneously with these ventures, there were attempts to reproduce in Australia the success of the London Punch. Melbourne Punch appeared in 1855, the first Sydney Punch in 1856, and for the rest of the century there were sporadic attempts to emulate the British journal.

In the 1860s much of the liveliest literary discussion was centred in Melbourne, and especially within such groups as the Yorick Club and the Cave of Adullam, some of whose leading members are recollected in Hugh McCrae's My Father and My Father's Friends (1935). Melbourne Punch, for instance, included among its founding writers R.H. Horne, Marcus Clarke and Frederick Sinnett. Sinnett is especially notable for his essay The Fiction Fields of Australia (q.v., 1966), first published in two instalments in the Journal of Australasia in 1856. This early conspectus of the Australian novel included comments on Clara Morison (1854), The Emigrant Family (1849) and Tales of the Colonies (1843), as well as taking up the general problem of developing a native literature in a derivative culture, an issue which has continued to exercise Australian criticism ever since. Some of Sinnett's remarks about the thinness of the social materials on which fiction might be based quite remarkably foreshadow Henry James's more celebrated remarks in his Hawthorne (1879) of more than twenty years later.

While Melbourne was developing a lively literary community, Sydney was also discovering new ways of supporting cultural activity. The University of Sydney was founded in 1852, and soon began to help the fostering of the arts, which before that time had rested largely on the efforts of individual patrons like Nicol Drysdale Stenhouse. In the 1850s, furthermore, a revived Mechanics' School of Arts provided another forum for literary discussion and debate. Yet it was not until 1864 that there appeared what Cecil Hadgraft has described as the 'first piece of literary criticism published in Australia as a separate work'. William Walker's Australian Literature was first given as a public lecture in the Windsor School of Arts, 20 July 1864. Restricting his survey to NSW, Walker argued that, while no great Australian author had yet appeared, 'Australia certainly has a literature, though it is a circumscribed one'. In support of his case, he gave some account of magazine publication in the colony as well as of historical writing and verse.

Two years later G.B. Barton produced The Poets and Prose Writers of New South Wales (q.v., 1866), among the first examples of a kind of work - the chronological review of the national achievement in creative literature - that has consistently attracted the attention of Australian critics. In association with his survey, Barton compiled a companion work, Literature in New South Wales (q.v., 1866). By the late 1860s, too, the time was ripe for the appearance of another mode of criticism by which to interpret a literary tradition already more than half a century old. J. Sheridan Moore's Life and Genius of J.L. Michael (1868), in its own right a minor study of a minor poetaster, nevertheless initiated a kind of critical activity important to the repertoire of any culture. Sheridan Moore began contributing to literary journalism in Sydney at much the same time as Marcus Clarke was writing for the Melbourne newspapers. Clarke collected some of his journalistic pieces in The Peripatetic Philosopher (1869); several of his more explicitly critical essays, e.g. on 'Balzac and Modern French Literature' and 'Charles Dickens', are included in A Colonial City, High and Low Life: Selected Journalism of Marcus Clarke (1972), edited by L.T. Hergenhan.

Probably the best-known single piece of Clarke's critical prose is, however, his introduction to the posthumous edition of A.L. Gordon's Sea Spray and Smoke Drift (1876). In spite of propagating much misinformation about Australia's 'trees without shade' and 'flowers without perfume', Clarke's essay made three significant contributions to the stock of critical ideas about Australian writing: it stressed the gothic element in the Australian literary imagination, identified the response to landscape as an abiding issue, and lavished high praise on Gordon. From the year of Gordon's death (1870) at least until the end of the nineteenth century, Australian critics consistently placed him at the head of their country's roll of poets. Arthur Patchett Martin, for example, included some highly laudatory remarks about Gordon in his Fernshawe (1882), as did Francis Adams in The Australians: A Social Sketch (1893). Gordon was the only poet allotted a complete chapter in Desmond Byrne's Australian Writers (q.v., 1896), while Martin repeated his praise in The Beginnings of Australian Literature (1898) at the same time as he assigned Marcus Clarke an equivalent place in fiction. The Beginnings of Australian Literature was originally delivered as a lecture in London, 27 March 1898, and in their The Development of Australian Literature (1898) H.G. Turner and Alexander Sutherland identify Martin and Douglas Sladen as prime movers in developing a London awareness of Australian writing. By 1898, however, significant forces were generating a critical response to Australian writing on its own soil. The best known of these was the Sydney weekly the Bulletin, founded in 1880. From 1894 to 1906 the literary voice of the Bulletin was A.G. Stephens, who instituted the paper's famous Red Page on 29 August 1896. Stephens's personal self-confidence, critical astuteness and wide knowledge of literature gave the Bulletin an influence and importance in literary matters probably unmatched by any Australian weekly before or since. Stephens himself was arguably the first great critic to have been produced by Australian society. He certainly assisted the careers of virtually every important writer of his generation, e.g. Joseph Furphy through the acceptance of Such is Life (1903), as well as providing a forum for wide-ranging, often competing, critical ideas and attitudes. The writers of the 1890s did not, nevertheless, have to depend entirely on the Bulletin for periodical publication. The latter years of the century were as rich in ephemeral magazines as any earlier decade. Eighteen eighty-eight was an appropriate year for the Centennial Magazine to appear in Sydney; it was followed two years later by the Australasian Critic (1890); in 1899 the Australian Magazine carried work by Christopher Brennan and John le Gay Brereton among others; the Antipodean appeared in Melbourne 1893-97. During the 1890s also, several collections of essays appeared, some carrying pieces on Australian writers and writing. In 1893 C.H. Pearson published National Life and Character and in 1896 Reviews and Critical Essays. A.H. Carney's Land of the Dawning (1894) combined belles-lettres with some critical comment, while A.G. Stephens rounded out his Bulletin years with The Red Pagan (1906). The closing years of the century were also marked by some efforts to provide reliable texts of major writers. Charles Harpur had been poorly served by the posthumous edition of his Poems (1883), but in 1886 Alexander Sutherland made a more successful attempt to present an accurate text of Henry Kendall's verse. Douglas Sladen's anthology A Century of Australian Song (1888) offered a practical signpost to achievement in poetry, but among the most characteristic critical work of the 1890s were historical surveys of the kind exemplified by Barton's earlier studies. Among these, Desmond Byrne's Australian Writers offers a sensible and moderate account of Australian literary achievement up to the time of its publication. Turner and Sutherland's The Development of Australian Literature is a better-known work of the same kind. Nearly all the nineteenth-century historians of Australian literature, however, pick out the same writers for praise and attention: among the poets, Harpur, Kendall, Gordon, J. Brunton Stephens; among the novelists, Clarke, 'Rolf Boldrewood', Henry Kingsley. If any theoretical theme pervades their judgements, it is likely to be that voiced by Barton in 1866 in the opening pages of his Literature of New South Wales: 'What is Australian Literature?' Variations on the same question have continued to dominate a large proportion of Australian criticism up to the present time.

During the 1890s questions about the nature and limits of truly Australian writing were answered largely but not entirely in nationalistic terms: genuinely Australian work was that which, written by the native-born, expressed a recognisably Australian subject matter in an essentially Australian way. There were, to be sure, countervailing views. Christopher Brennan expressed some of his personal enthusiasms in a series of seven Bulletin articles on 'The Newer French Poetry' (1899), while A.G. Stephens himself had an impressive acquaintance with contemporary English and European writing. Recent scholarship, furthermore, has suggested that European theories about fictional realism, among others, were quite deeply assimilated into the critical ideas and literary expression of the time.

Brennan was a classical scholar as well as a student of contemporary French and German literature, and his years as associate professor of German and comparative literature at the University of Sydney (1920-25) gave him a platform for the exercise of his scholarship. The University of Sydney has enabled a number of scholar-critics to develop areas and kinds of interest which might otherwise have been difficult to cultivate in Australia. The Sydney tradition of English Renaissance scholarship and criticism is especially note-worthy; it is exemplified by such figures as Mungo MacCallum, J. le Gay Brereton, A.J.A. Waldock, R.G. Howarth, Wesley Milgate, H.J. Oliver and G.A Wilkes. Similar traditions of scholarly and critical specialisation can be associated with the other Australian universities, of which the excellence in French studies in the University of Melbourne, fostered by A.R. Chisholm's long occupancy of the chair (1921-57), is a good example.

Balancing the growing cosmopolitan awareness of Australian criticism at the end of the nineteenth century was an understandable and necessary concern for some of the grass-roots elements of the indigenous literary culture. A.B. Paterson's collection of Old Bush Songs (1905) was an important recognition that since 1788 Australia had developed a rich folk literature which needed to be incorporated into critical interpretation of the country's culture. In the twentieth century the need met by Paterson's collection has been served by Bill Wannan's several anthologies, by Douglas Stewart and Nancy Keesing's Australian Bush Ballads (1955) and Old Bush Songs (1957), as well as by collections and historical research by writers like John Manifold, Hugh Anderson and John Meredith (see also Folk-Song and Ballad).

It is often said that Australian literature and culture generally went through a trough in the period between Federation and the First World War. The same point might be made of literary criticism. Several phenomena, however, can be noted which indicate that critical activity was not completely stagnant. After breaking with the Bulletin, Stephens edited The Bookfellow. Another important magazine, the Lone Hand, was joined in 1915 by the Triad which had originated in NZ and which appeared, under a variety of editors and towards the end of its existence as the New Triad, until 1928. In the years after 1901 Stephens also wrote a number of brief lives of poets with whom, for the most part, he had been personally acquainted. Even in 1897 he had contributed a memoir to Barcroft Boake's posthumous Where the Dead Men Lie. His later work in this vein includes Victor Daley (1905), Henry Kendall (1928) and Chris. Brennan (1933).

During the post-Federation period the mode of belletristic criticism was maintained in T.G. Tucker's The Cultivation of Literature in Australia (1902) and Archibald T. Strong's Peradventure (1911). Probably Australia's best-known practitioner of the graceful essay, not uncommonly applied to literary appreciations, was Walter Murdoch, whose Collected Essays came out in 1938. Bertram Stevens's An Anthology of Australian Verse (1906) added to the list of representative selections, while in 1909 Bernard O'Dowd produced Poetry Militant, an example of a kind of criticism comparatively rare in Australian writing: the practitioner's manifesto of what should be the aims and methods of his art. O'Dowd, who had corresponded with Walt Whitman in his youth, argues for a set of democratic, egalitarian values in large measure derived from the American poet, and demands a deliberately didactic poetry to put them into effect. Norman Lindsay's Creative Effort (1920) resembles Poetry Militant in being an artist's passionate statement of the nature and purposes of his art, but in almost nothing else. Where O'Dowd had promulgated the values of a democratic literature, Lindsay was unashamedly élitist, taking his stand on the special value of the artist's energy, talent, will. Creative Effort was the first full-scale expression of that Nietzschean element in Australian literary thought which has subsequently attracted a good deal of attention, most thoroughly in Noel Macainsh's Nietzsche in Australia (1970). Lindsay's ideas did not have to wait fifty years, however, before they filtered into many areas of Australian culture. The force of his personality had an enormous effect on poets like R.D. FitzGerald, Kenneth Slessor, Douglas Stewart and 'Seaforth' Mackenzie. It was an obvious element in the best-known literary magazine of the 1920s, the shortlived Vision (1923-24) edited by Frank C. Johnson, Kenneth Slessor and Jack Lindsay, Norman's son. In spite of its notoriety, Vision was only one among many 'little magazines' which appeared and disappeared in the years between the two world wars. The magazines most important to the history of criticism in that period and beyond are dealt with in John Tregenza's Australian Little Magazines 1923-1954 (1964).

Book-length criticism during the 1920s continued to serve much the same ends as those established in the 1890s: the provision of a coherent historical account of Australian writing within the framework of nationalist democratic values. Zora Cross's Introduction to the Study of Australian Literature (1922) conforms to this pattern, as does Nettie Palmer's Modern Australian Literature (1924). Of particular interest to this article are those figures whom Nettie Palmer considers to have made a genuine contribution to Australian criticism. They include Arthur Adams, Hilary Lofting, David McKee Wright, Frank Morton, T.G. Tucker and Walter Murdoch. Throughout her life Nettie, along with her husband Vance Palmer, spared no effort in advancing the cause of Australian writing and Australian writers, especially those who, like Joseph Furphy and 'Henry Handel Richardson', had been unjustly neglected. Even by the end of the 1920s the Palmers were established as the leading partnership in Australian writing, critical as well as creative. For them and their contemporaries the generation of the 1890s was far enough in the past to be susceptible of idealisation as the fountainhead of all that was best in the Australian literary tradition. This historiographical enterprise was reinforced by such works of first-hand reminiscence as George Taylor's Those Were the Days (1918) and A.W. Jose's The Romantic Nineties (1933). By 1930 one of the most significant results of this trend in criticism was the general acceptance of Henry Lawson as the representative Australian writer, par excellence.

In a number of ways 1930 proved to be a fulcrum year in the history of Australian literary criticism. In that year, for instance, J. le Gay Brereton published Knocking Round, combining belles-lettres with personal recollection. In the same year F.J. Broomfield consolidated Lawson's reputation with his Henry Lawson and His Critics, which was followed in 1931 by a work in similar vein, the set of essays edited by Brereton and Bertha Lawson under the title of Henry Lawson by His Mates. Ninteen thirty also saw the appearance of H.M. Green's An Outline of Australian Literature, the first comprehensive critical survey to 1928, and H.A. Kellow's Queensland Poets. A shrewd critic, and headmaster of Rockhampton Grammar School, Kellow made a substantial addition to the regional study of Australian writing. Since Kellow's book, it is possible to discern something like a tradition of such studies, including Cecil Hadgraft's Queensland and Its Writers (1959), Paul Depasquale's A Critical History of South Australian Literature 1836-1930 (1978) and Bruce Bennett's The Literature of Western Australia (1979). If, on the one hand, 1930 witnessed the consolidation of a tradition of critical interpretation and assessment going back something like half a century, it also saw the rise of some new elements in Australian critical thought. John Anderson, professor of philosophy at the University of Sydney, had strong interests in literature and criticism as well as in philosophy. He expressed some of the former in a series of talks given to the Sydney University English Society. His topics in 1930 included 'Realism and Some of Its Critics' and 'Ulysses'. Anderson's concern for modernism in literature was certainly not unique, but it is worth noting that his defence of James Joyce in particular relates him to several distinguished Joycean commentators who came to prominence much later; S.L. Goldberg in The Classical Temper (1961), Clement Semmler in For the Uncanny Man (1963) and Clive Hart with his Concordance to Finnegans Wake (1963).

Even in the 1930s, however, native-born Australian critics as well as the Scot, John Anderson, were keenly aware of literary movements overseas. Although a committed nationalist, Vance Palmer was nevertheless widely acquainted with contemporary English, European and American writing. Randolph Hughes's 1935 monograph Christopher Brennan: An Essay in Values makes an analysis of the Australian poet the occasion for an attack on Australian provincialism. P.R. Stephensen was an enthusiast, at first hand, for D.H. Lawrence, his books and ideas. After returning home from Europe in 1932, Stephensen made a contribution of a somewhat different kind to Australian critical attitudes. The Foundations of Culture in Australia (q.v., 1936) argues the necessity of building a local culture out of local experience rather than materials derived at second hand from England and Europe. Two years later Rex Ingamells and Ian Tilbrook extended Stephensen's thesis in Conditional Culture (1938) which provided, in turn, the basic doctrines of the Jindyworobak movement. The Jindyworobaks never commanded the allegiance of more than a section of the literary community. Yet they crystallised much of the critical feeling of the 1930s, especially the steady advance in the belief that a national literature could and should be created out of indigenous experience expressed in that form of the English language which had grown up through 150 years of antipodean usage. Out of that ambience came several important surveys, among them 'M. Barnard Eldershaw's' Essays in Australian Fiction (q.v., 1938), which included among its subjects Frank Dalby Davison, Leonard Mann, Christina Stead and Eleanor Dark. Another overview of fiction was J.O. Anchen's The Australian Novel: A Critical Survey (1940). Anchen's study opens with a brief history of Australian criticism, selecting for particular praise Barton, Byrne, Turner and Sutherland and Tucker from the nineteenth century; Zora Cross, Nettie Palmer, H.M. Green, P.R. Stephensen and 'M. Barnard Eldershaw' in the twentieth. A book of rather greater importance than Anchen's also appeared in 1940: E. Morris Miller's Australian Literature. A bibliographic compilation, it was revised and extended by F.T. Macartney in 1956 and remains a fundamental reference work.

The wartime years of the 1940s produced in criticism, as in so much of Australian life, a heightened and vigorous activity. Some of it represented an implicit acknowledgement of the message of Miller's bibliography: that there was a need to consolidate the factual bases of interpretation and judgement. The need was in part met by a series of literary biographies: Vance Palmer's A.G. Stephens: His Life and Work (1941) and Frank Wilmot (1942), Miles Franklin and Kate Baker's Joseph Furphy (1944), James Devaney's Shaw Neilson (1944) and Nettie Palmer's Henry Handel Richardson (1950). At the same time other commentators continued the process of assessment. Tom Inglis Moore's Six Australian Poets (1942) offered accounts of Hugh McCrae, Shaw Neilson, Bernard O'Dowd, 'William Baylebridge', Christopher Brennan and R.D. FitzGerald. Brian Elliott collected a number of his essays in Singing to the Cattle (1947). Douglas Stewart, literary editor of the Bulletin 1939-61, published The Flesh and the Spirit (1948), the lead essay clearly announcing Stewart's affinity with Norman Lindsay. In 1944 H.M. Green's Fourteen Minutes put into print a series of radio talks on Australian poets, recognising the possibilities of a further medium for critical discourse which was most fully exploited by Vance Palmer in his regular book reviews for the ABC. C.B. Christesen's anthology Australian Heritage (1949) indicated through its title its emphases and principles of selection. Christesen's contribution to and influence on Australian literary criticism began in Brisbane in 1940 when he founded Meanjin Papers. Later to shift to Melbourne and to change its name to Meanjin Quarterly, Meanjin soon became a major force in the literary life of the country. With a democratic temper and a bias distinctly Australian, the journal not only maintained its own point of view; it offered a forum for some of the most sophisticated and professional criticism to have been written in Australia. By his unfailing commitment to the development of Australian literature and culture, together with his flair for discovering writers of major talent, Christesen proved himself to be the most gifted literary editor in Australia since A.G. Stephens. In 1967 he published some of the most distinguished contributions to Meanjin under his editorship in On Native Grounds. Southerly, the other leading journal of the 1940s, was born a little earlier than Meanjin - in 1939 as the organ of the Sydney branch of the English Association. Not so exclusively concerned with indigenous writing as Meanjin, Southerly nevertheless regularly found space for local creative and critical work. First edited by R.G. Howarth and later by Kenneth Slessor, Walter Stone, G.A. Wilkes and Elizabeth Webby, it remains an important arena for literary discussion. One other well-known magazine came into existence in the early years of the Second World War: Max Harris's Angry Penguins, first issued in Adelaide in 1941, was rendered notorious in 1944 as host to the Ern Malley hoax poems. Where Southerly was eclectic and Meanjin vigorously Australian, Angry Penguins was modernistic and cosmopolitan. Between them, the three magazines exemplify the range, spirit and variety of Australian literary culture in the 1940s. During the 1940s Colin Roderick began his long career as critic, historian and editor. In Mortal Bondage (1948) is a biography of Rosa Praed, but Roderick's most substantial contribution to Australian literary scholarship has been as an editor of Henry Lawson.

The kind of historical research demonstrated in these volumes runs through the 1950s, sometimes intersecting with critical evaluation, sometimes remaining parallel and separate. The concern for research, furthermore, was intensified by the noticeable growth in academic attention to Australian literary studies. Before the 1950s isolated individuals in university English departments, Hadgraft in Brisbane, Elliott in Adelaide, Inglis Moore in Canberra, had taken a serious professional interest in Australian writing. It was not until the middle of the century, however, that a major institutional commitment became apparent in the universities. An early manifestation of this phenomenon was G.A. Wilkes's New Perspectives on Brennan's Poetry (1952). The product of postgraduate research, New Perspectives was a very thorough exegesis of a body of verse whose symbolic difficulties had hitherto largely defied penetration. Wilkes's unravelling of Poems (1913) pointed the way to a wide-ranging academic enquiry into the sources, materials, affinities and techniques of Australian literature. The universities provided only one part of the critical effort of the 1950s. Major metropolitan dailies like the Sydney Morning Herald and the Melbourne Age, joined later by the national daily the Australian, continued through their literary pages to disseminate information and opinion. Hugh Anderson added to the growing store of bibliographical information with his Guide to Australian Poets (1953) and Frank Wilmot (1955). The bibliophile Walter Stone maintained publication of his Biblionews. Many established writers expressed their views in books of criticism, among them James Devaney's Poetry in Our Time (1952), Miles Franklin's Laughter, Not for a Cage (1956) and Frederick T. Macartney's Australian Literary Essays (1957). Leslie Rees, for many years a leading producer of radio drama with the ABC, wrote Towards an Australian Drama (1953), one of the first books on the subject. Later revised and expanded as A History of Australian Drama (1973, 1978, and 1987) it remains an important reference work. The 1950s were further marked by the entry into the field of some new literary journals which soon made their mark. Australian Letters, edited by Max Harris, Geoffrey Dutton and Bryn Davies, was devoted more to creative than critical work. A selection of some of its best material was brought out in 1968 under the title The Vital Decade. Overland, first issued in 1954 under the editorship of Stephen Murray-Smith, was radical on social and political issues, more catholic in the range of fiction, verse and criticism it accepted. A sampling from its first ten years of publication appeared in 1965 as An Overland Muster. Quadrant, founded in 1956 by James McAuley, adopted a political attitude almost the exact opposite of Overland's, although it was similarly willing to print a wide range of literary material. Nineteen fifty-eight was an especially important year for Australian criticism, bringing with it at least three books of major consequence. Russel Ward's The Australian Legend, although essentially a work of history, illustrated, through its heavy dependence on bush songs and ballads, the close nexus between historical and literary studies in Australia. The Penguin Book of Australian Verse, edited by John Thompson, Kenneth Slessor and R.G. Howarth, was one of the several collections of poetry which have helped to form Australian taste. This Penguin anthology was replaced in 1972 by a new selection made by Harry Heseltine. Finally in 1958 A.A. Phillips published The Australian Tradition. The essays brought together in this volume were drawn from the best Phillips had written in the previous ten years or so, many of them for Meanjin. They included close analyses like 'The Craft of Lawson' and 'The Craft of Furphy', along with more general commentaries such as 'The Democratic Theme' and a piece which has given Australian criticism some of its permanent currency, 'The Cultural Cringe'. Printed within the covers of a single book, work of this calibre established Phillips as one of the major critics of the mid-century. In the year following The Australian Tradition Vincent Buckley brought out his Essays in Poetry, Mainly Australian (1959), which views its material from a quite different standpoint from Phillips. Suspicious of both the democratic account of Australian writing and what he termed the 'vitalism' of the Lindsay school, Buckley, in pieces like 'The Image of Man in Australian Poetry', looked for a spiritual dimension to his culture. Cecil Hadgraft's Australian Literature: A Critical Account to 1958 (1960), on the other hand, falls more readily into the ambience of Phillips and Ward. For many years a member of the English department of the University of Queensland, Hadgraft carried out much pioneering work in Australian literary history. His own historical overview is commonsensical, engaging and free of distorting dogma. His large contribution to Australian literary scholarship was recognised on the occasion of his retirement when a collection of essays, Bards, Bohemians, and Bookmen (1976), was edited by Leon Cantrell.

The permanent commitment of the universities to Australian literary studies was marked by the appointment in 1962 of G.A. Wilkes to the Chair of Australian Literature at Sydney University, the first in the country. He was succeeded in 1968 by Leonie Kramer, editor of The Oxford History of Australian Literature (1981) and the author of several studies on 'Henry Handel Richardson'. A further indication of the increasing professionalisation of Australian criticism was the establishment in 1963 of Australian Literary Studies, a journal devoted, under the editorship of L.T. Hergenhan, exclusively to the scholarly and critical study of Australian writing. Its annual bibliographies and reports on research in progress, along with its wide-ranging articles and reviews, offer a useful index to the state of the discipline. In the 1960s and 1970s the growth of a body of professional criticism was further assisted by the activities of a number of publishing houses: the Australian Writers and their Work series, for instance, initiated by Lansdowne Press and taken over by OUP; UQP's Portable Australian Authors series, the Australian Literary Reprints, facsimile texts of nineteenth-century works from Sydney University Press; or the many play texts from Currency Press. The increased availability of previously inaccessible titles was matched by the provision of fuller and more reliable texts of major authors, e.g. T.T. Reed's edition of Kendall (1966) or the editions of Brennan's Verse (1960) and Prose (1962) by A.R. Chisholm and J.J. Quinn. Comprehensive interpretations of various aspects of literary history were offered by Brian Elliott in The Landscape of Australian Poetry (1967) and Tom Inglis Moore in Social Patterns in Australian Literature (1971). Other important reference works came from Grahame Johnston and John Barnes. Johnston's Annals of Australian Literature (1970) followed his earlier selection, Australian Literary Criticism (1962); Barnes collated some major literary documents in The Writer in Australia, ranging from Sinnett's The Fiction Fields of Australia to Judith Wright's 'The Upside-down Hut'. The flow of literary biographies was maintained by Clement Semmler's The Banjo of the Bush (1966), James Normington-Rawling's Charles Harpur: An Australian (1962), Hugh Anderson's Poet Militant: Bernard O'Dowd (1968) and Jack Beasley's account of Katharine Susannah Prichard, The Rage for Life (1964). Two general histories were especially characteristic of the critical achievement of the 1960s. In 1964 Geoffrey Dutton edited The Literature of Australia, recruiting a panel of writers to provide broad surveys of the chief literary genres, together with specialist studies of leading individual figures. Three years earlier (1961) a quite different kind of conspectus had appeared in H.M. Green's two-volume History of Australian Literature. Unlike Dutton's co-operative venture, this was the culmination of a lifetime's effort of an individual who had been intimately involved in many of the episodes he chronicled. Green's two volumes encompass an extraordinarily comprehensive survey of every department and level of literary activity, including criticism. His thoroughness, sympathetic common sense and unique relation to his material make Green's History a major work unlikely ever to be duplicated. R.F. Brissenden's 1966 study, Patrick White, was characteristic of its time in a different way, in its response to a writer who had imposed himself as the giant of contemporary Australian writing. From the early 1960s on, Australian criticism responded with markedly increased understanding and frequency to the body of White's creative literature, especially his fiction. Brissenden was a poet as well as an academic critic, and the 1960s saw the production of several important critical works by leading creative writers. The tradition of the artist-critic goes back in Australia through figures like Stewart, Slessor and FitzGerald to Lindsay and Brennan, even to Kendall and Harpur. In the 1960s it was notably represented by Judith Wright's Preoccupations in Australian Poetry (1965) and A.D. Hope's Australian Literature 1950-62 (1963). Hope had taken part in some of the livelier polemical debates of the 1940s, conducting skirmishes with Arthur Phillips and Max Harris among others. It was not, however, until comparatively late in his career that he brought together his critical writings into a number of substantial volumes: The Cave and the Spring (1965), Native Companions (1974), The Pack of Autolycus (1978) and The New Cratylus (1979). Especially in The New Cratylus he embarks on a kind of consideration quite rare in Australian critical prose, speculation by a creative artist about the sources and processes of his own imagination. The uniquely stimulating and personal brand of criticism sometimes commanded by the practising writer is further exemplified in Les A. Murray's The Peasant Mandarin (1974) and in many of the judgements of Chris Wallace-Crabbe, whose Melbourne or the Bush (1974) is a representative work. D.R. Burns, a novelist and university teacher, combined the strengths of both callings in his lively The Directions of Australian Fiction 1920-1974 (1975), while Nancy Keesing brought together the work of several hands in Australian Postwar Novelists (1975). Her title reflects the widely held view that the most challenging Australian literature is increasingly to be found towards the more recent end of its time span, leaving the work of the colonial writers as the domain of research scholars and cultural historians.

One mark of the increasing professionalism of criticism through the 1980s and early 1990s was its further concentration in the universities. As the intellectual perspectives on Australian writing became more varied and complex throughout the period, so the proportion of practising critics located in university literature and humanities departments became larger. The literary supplements of the metropolitan dailies like the Melbourne Age, the Sydney Morning Herald, and the Australian nevertheless maintained a healthy tradition of non-academic commentary, as well as offering space to some of the livelier academic writers. Don Anderson, for instance, of Sydney University, wrote a regular weekly column for the Sydney Morning Herald, a good deal of his literary journalism being collected in Hot Copy (1986). A number of literary journals were produced independently of the universities. The most substantial new periodicals to appear in this period, however, were by and large produced within or supported by university English departments - Melbourne University's Scripsi, for example, which first appeared in 1981, or Meridian, which commenced publication in 1982 under the sponsorship of the La Trobe University English department.

There was often a perceived connection between the more conservative assessments of Australian writing and some of the well-established academic scholars. At the beginning of the 1980s the Oxford History of Australian Literature (1981), edited by Leonie Kramer, attracted the particular disapproval of the younger critics for what was seen to be its authoritarian, élitist stance. What, indeed, might be described as a critical 'generation gap' was vigorously delineated in John Docker's account of Australian literary culture at the time - In a Critical Condition, published in 1984. John McLaren's Australian Literature: An Historical Introduction (published toward the end of the decade in 1989) although far less controversial than the Oxford History, was still the product of another academically trained and employed critic. The first edition of this Companion, which appeared in 1985, was also the product of three tenured academics. Representing that more inclusive sense of literature which underpinned a great deal of the criticism of the period, the Companion gained immediate acceptance as an indispensable reference tool for anyone with an interest in Australian writing, whether professional or amateur.

The comprehensive survey, however, was by no means the pre-eminent form of Australian criticism during the 1980s. Just as characteristic was the extension of the range of theoretical discourses which had begun to emerge in the 1970s. Not surprisingly, post-colonial theory rose to a position of prominence in an increasingly multicultural and self-reliant Australia. An important text in this regard was The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literature (1989) by Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin. The three authors were less concerned to interpret Australian writing according to their own theoretical predilections than to acclimatise those predilections within the Australian intellectual environment. A more direct application of the theory to Australian literary history is to be found in The Dark Side of the Dream (1991) by Bob Hodge and Vijay Mishra.

Developing multiculturalism produced a variety of critical voices speaking to or for a range of ethnic communities - European and, as the decade wore on, Asian. Sneja Gunew, among others, sought to provide an integrated account of the significant non-Anglo-Celtic elements in contemporary Australian writing, through bibliographical listings or in collaboration with other commentators such as Ian Reid (Not the Whole Story, 1984) or Kateryna Longley (Striking Chords, 1992). In some of her work Gunew linked her multicultural interests with her feminist concerns. Her Feminist Knowledge: Critique and Construct (1990) relates her to other feminist theorists and critics active during the 1980s. At the beginning of the period Beatrice Faust published Women, Sex, and Pornography (1980), a study followed in 1983 by Dale Spender's Feminist Theorists (1983), and in 1985 by Carole Ferrier's Gender, Politics and Fiction: Twentieth Century Australian Women's Novels. Elizabeth Grosz, in such works as Jacques Lacan: A Feminist Introduction (1990) made further significant contributions to feminist writing. In Stories of Herself when Young (1990) Joy Hooton moved both feminist theory and the autobiographical genre into a new dimension of understanding.

Post-colonial and feminist theorising, together with the analysis of European and Asian elements in contemporary Australian writing, certainly helped to define the contours of literary criticism in the 1980s. Just as important was the increasing attention being paid to Aboriginal writing. Thus Jack Davis and Bob Hodge edited Aboriginal Writing Today in 1985; Stephen Muecke's Textual Spaces: Aboriginality and Cultural Studies of 1992 demonstrated not only the sharper focus on Australia's indigenous people but equally the increasing convergence of literary criticism and cultural studies. Two other important books were Adam Shoemaker's Black Words White Page: Aboriginal Literature from 1929 to 1988 (1989) and Mudrooroo's Writing from the Fringe: A Study of Modern Aboriginal Literature (1990).

At the same time as Australian writers and critics were becoming more aware of and responsive to the nation's cultural and ethnic diversity, they were also becoming more attuned to its regional variety. It was no longer felt to be good enough to represent Australian literature as a single undifferentiated geographical phenomenon. Thus Bruce Bennett insisted on the importance of local coloration in Australian writing in works such as Wide Domain: Western Australian Themes and Images (1979, with William Grono), Place, Region and Community (1985), and An Australian Compass (1991). Other regions of the continent also attracted the kind of localising interest which was summed up in the Oxford Literary Guide to Australia, first published in 1987 under the editorship of Peter Pierce.

While new critical emphases were developing in Australia (often mirroring or responsive to European or American developments) some of the older forms of commentary and interpretation continued to flourish. In 1984 John Colmer, for instance, published a critical account of the fiction of Patrick White, Australia's only Nobel Laureate in literature; this was followed in 1991 by David Marr's highly acclaimed biography of White. Tony Hassall's Strange Country (1986) offered a clear-headed guided to the work of Randolph Stow. In 1981 Rosemary Dobson spoke with a practitioner's voice of The Continuance of Poetry, while another practitioner, Andrew Taylor, offered his Reading Australian Poetry in 1987.

No single year of the decade was better calculated to focus Australians' growing awareness of the many-faceted nature of their contemporary culture than the bicentennial year, 1988. The range and complexity of the popular response to the celebration of 200 years of European occupation of the Australian continent were mirrored in the diversity of critical writing which appeared in 1988. Kevin Gilbert's anthology Inside Black Australia provided compelling evidence of the quantity and quality of contemporary Aboriginal writing. Debra Adelaide's A Bright and Fiery Troop not only reinstated some of Australia's nineteenth-century women writers, but also exemplified the wider scholarly effort to recapture ever more facets of the country's literary past. At the same time Jack Beasley's Journal of an Era demonstrated that more immediate history was not without its interest and unresolved conflicts. Ann Curthoys's For and Against Feminism was a clear reminder of the significant impact of feminist theory on contemporary Australian criticism. Meaghan Morris's The Pirate's Fiancée proved that some of the liveliest and sharpest criticism was still being written outside university departments.

Perhaps, however, no single book more completely captured the critical temper of the decade than one whose publication was clearly designed to coincide with the bicentennial year - the Penguin New Literary History of Australia, produced by a team of writers under the general editorship of Laurie Hergenhan and Bruce Bennett. The sweep of its concerns, its practical perspectives, its theoretical framework - all demonstrated as plainly as possible the enormous changes Australian criticism had undergone since the original Penguin Literature of Australia was published in 1964 under the editorship of Geoffrey Dutton. In the intervening years it had been thoroughly theorised, had learned to take full advantage of an ever more supportive scholarly infrastructure, had grown immeasurably in the professionalism of its practices and procedures. If it had forsaken anything, it was perhaps the exercise of evaluative judgement. Nevertheless, as the critics of the 1980s and 1990s scanned the horizons of their broadened domain, they did so, by and large, with a discerning gaze.

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noun

1. A comment expressing fault: blame, censure, condemnation, denunciation, reprehension, reprobation. Informal pan. Slang knock. See praise/blame.
2. Evaluative and critical discourse: critique, notice, review. See opinion, words.

n

Definition: interpretation, analysis
Antonyms: estimation, guess, supposition

n

Definition: verbal disapproval
Antonyms: approval, compliment, praise

The expression in words of judgments on aspects of the art of music. It embraces many kinds of writing about music, from historical and analytical discussion in books and periodicals to reviews in daily newspapers. The place of criticism (in the evaluative, as opposed to the style-analytical or historical, sense) in musicology is a vexed issue. Many scholars argue that an awareness of music as a vehicle of human expression is fundamental to the study of music and that evaluative criticism should accordingly have a place. Others prefer to limit their role to textual criticism, the preparation of faithful and accurate editions in which alternatives are considered and assessed and choices are made. At its best, scholarly criticism may communicate a view of a work or a repertory in a wide historical and social context, to show why it came into existence, how it relates to earlier and contemporary works, what techniques it uses and how effectively it uses them, and how it functions as a coherent work of art (this may involve some use of analysis) etc.

Criticism of the written text, the scholar's chief task, is different in many respects from criticism of the heard performance, the task of the journalist-critic, who may write for a magazine, a newspaper or a radio station. He is subject to certain editorial disciplines of space and time, imposed by his editors and arising from economic factors. He has to be aware of the public he is writing for and its degree of cultural sophistication. Nevertheless his first duty remains to the art of music itself, to encouraging the good and discouraging the bad (as he sees it) by bringing to it sympathy, receptiveness and a proper basis of knowledge. His second duty is to his readers, to attracting and holding their interest, to informing them, perhaps to entertaining them. Only after that does the critic have a duty to the performers he is reviewing: he should treat their work responsibly and take it seriously, but he is not their instructor. Any critical judgment is likely to include a subjective element and it is part of the critic's job to convey which elements are personal and which are not, so giving the reader some scope for forming his own opinions or at least for establishing limits within which his taste and judgment might lie. The critic should see his role as embodying some element of description and evaluation, when he is considering new music (for which he may wish to prepare himself by prior study of the score or attendance at rehearsals), or when he is not, as describing the style, the technical adequacy and the musical insights of a performer (whose performance he may instinctively measure against some ideal of his own, possibly based on experience of previous performances). Extremes of approach in music criticism are represented, on the one hand, by what has been called the ‘sensitized palate’ approach, whereby the critic responds on an intensely personal plane by reporting his own reactions, which may say much more about the critic than about the music and whose value must depend upon his response to any particular musical experience and the degree of interest attached to his subjective impressions; and on the other, by the critic who diligently describes, in terms as objective as possible, any work or performance while minimizing his personal response, which is apt to produce dull, objective writing. Unless the critic possesses a musical mind of exceptional interest and the capacity to express it felicitously, he will normally do best to steer a course between the Scylla of extreme subjectivity and the Charybdis of objective description. He may do best to regard himself as a professional, well-informed listener, drawing on his training, experience and love of music to arouse the enthusiasms and widen the experiential horizons of his readers.

The earliest criticism of Western art music is found in the work of late medieval theorists who criticized the innovations of their time; but it was only with the Renaissance that the discussion of music moved on to the question of the effect that music might have on the listener - a topic of concern to the humanist thinkers and religious reformers and counter-reformers of the time. The Baroque theory of expression, with its preoccupation over music as the provider of affective experience, also gave rise to a music-critical literature.

In the late 17th century, with the rise of periodicals and newspapers, the criticism of musical works and events could move into a wider arena. Some discussions in pamphlet form, however (always beloved of the French), may be ranked as music criticism, for example the early 18th-century disputes between the supporters of Italian opera and those of French. The writings of Addison in The Spectator in the second decade of the century inaugurated music criticism in England and greatly influenced that in Germany, when Mattheson imitated the style of Addison and Steele and then founded the first periodical wholly devoted to writings about music, Critica musica (1722-5). Others followed, including Scheibe's Der critische Musikus (1737-40) and the Berlin papers edited by Marpurg. It was no coincidence that music criticism appeared and flourished just at the time when concert life was starting, and in the same places: a middle-class public, eager to hear music, was also ready to read about it. French pamphlet wars continued during the 18th century, characteristically linked to operatic disputes, like the Querelle des Bouffons and the Gluck-Piccinni controversy, in the 1750s and 1770s. By this time specific criticism of new music publications, and discussions of other musical matters, were beginning to appear in general cultural journals, in London, Paris, Vienna and elsewhere. J.A. Hiller's weekly publication, issued in the late 1760s in Leipzig - rapidly becoming an important centre of musical commerce - was an early music periodical designed to appeal to a wide readership.

It was also in Leipzig that the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung was founded, in 1798; in the ensuing years this was to be the leading periodical for the coverage of the Viennese Classical composers. Literary figures such as E.T.A. Hoffmann, as well as its founder J.F. Rochlitz, wrote in this journal, inspired by idealistic notions linking the arts with social and political issues. Heine, too, wrote for a music periodical. Up to around this time, the daily press had carried reports on concerts and other musical events, though not reviews; but before the end of the 18 century critical comment had begun to appear. The first regular music critic on a daily paper is thought to have been appointed (to The Times, London) in 1845. Yet for the sheer quantity of published music criticism Paris prevailed, with such periodicals as Fétis's Revue musicale (1827), the publisher Heugel's Le ménestrel (1833) and the publisher Schlesinger's Gazette musicale de Paris (1834), which provided a platform for composers.

In its first issue, Liszt attacked critics as shallow and ignorant, and pressed the claims of composers to serve as critics. Many of the most interesting critics of the 19th century were in fact composers, which is not surprising since the holding of strong opinions about new music and the lack of need for judicious balance are bound to lead to interesting writing. Weber was a forceful and controversial critic, Berlioz a fine literary one with a command of the striking phrase, with keen insights on subjects that appealed to him even if purblind on others, and Schumann, who founded the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik in 1834 and edited it for ten years, showed himself a keenly discriminating writer, interested in aesthetic questions, acutely perceptive on promising young composers (he was the first to hail the genius of Chopin and Brahms, though also that of several now forgotten composers) and both equipped and ready to write long, detailed analysis-criticisms when necessary (for example on Schubert's Symphony no.9).

One leading and influential critic who was not a composer was Eduard Hanslick, the dominating figure in Viennese criticism for much of the latter part of the 19th century. A cultivated man, graceful writer and penetrating critic, he has been widely vilified for his resistance to Wagner (who was himself a prolific critic, though chiefly as a propagandist for his own thinking). London criticism in the mid-19th century was mostly conservative, ready to accept Rossini and Mendelssohn but not Verdi or Wagner, who were found vulgar and noisy. It was left to an Irishman, George Bernard Shaw, to counterbalance them with his eager advocacy of Wagner and his deprecation of Brahms, expressed trenchantly and wittily. Hugo Wolf, in Vienna, attacked Brahms and supported Wagner, in strongly polemical tones. In Prague, Smetana espoused the cause of Slavonic nationalism, as in St Petersburg did Cui and Stasov (in which he was opposed by the influential Serov). Tchaikovsky, a critic during the 1870s, found neither Brahms nor Wagner to his taste. In France the most important composer-critic was Debussy who was impatient of trivia (he called Grieg's piano miniatures ‘pink bonbons stuffed with snow’), saw the danger of Wagner as a model (preferring Musorgsky) and stressed the need for French composers to be true to native tradition.

Debussy's criticism was written in the early years of the 20th century, but composer-critics have, in this century, generally been less prominent, partly no doubt owing to the changing nature of music criticism in an age of specialization and intense activity. The need (or perhaps simply the custom), in the English-speaking countries particularly, for newspaper criticism to be published the morning after a performance, which has prevailed for most of the 20th century, led to the development of a new form of journalism, which at its worst could be vacuous and inaccurate but at its best could convey the essence of an event judiciously, with immediacy and conveying a kind of enthusiasm that would he appropriate only to an instant) product designed for instant consumption.

Distinguished practitioners of this medium in the USA have been W.J. Henderson, who wrote in New York between the 1880s and the 1930s and brought a fine knowledge of music and history to his reviews on the New York Times and later the New York Sun; he saw Wagner in a true perspective (though was disturbed by the morality of some of his operas), was conservative in taste yet had a ready sympathy for the best in new music, for example admiring Stravinsky's Rite of Spring. Among his successors was Olin Downes, a critic first in Boston and then for the New York Times, who despite a lack of traditional academic training formed a writing style of his own that conveyed his vigorous and unorthodox enthusiams for then-unpopular contemporary causes, such as Sibelius, Prokofiev, Stravinsky and Shostakovich, as well as jazz. With Virgil Thomson, who wrote for the New York Herald Tribune, the tradition of the composer-critic was revived; though a believer in critical objectivity, and possessor of a cool, elegant and witty style, he could not always conceal his particular likes and dislikes. The most influential New York critic later in the 20th century has been Harold C. Schonberg, whose professional pianist's training and broad culture informed his writing for two decades. Criticism of a more scholarly kind is represented by the work of Joseph Kerman, in monthlies, quarterlies and books, who has endeavoured to use musicological method to serve critical ends and has brought a keen analytical and historically informed equipment to the task.

In England, the leading figure in criticism in the early 20th century was Ernest Newman, who was also a great Wagner scholar; his objective as a critic was complete scientific precision in the act of evaluation, involving closely reasoned argument based on a well-stocked mind and a readiness to respond to new stimulus. He wrote for daily newspapers in Manchester and Birmingham and for the London Sunday Times. Although not a newspaper critic, Donald Tovey has a place in any discussion of criticism for his brilliant series of analytical notes, with their numerous insights (those of a moderately successful composer) into the compositional process. Later noteworthy critics have included Frank Howes, critic for The Times, strongly in the tradition of English conservatism in his reactions to (for example) Stravinsky and Schoenberg but a keen champion of English music. The criticism of the Handel, Bizet and opera scholar Winton Dean, usually written for monthly journals, has led to an increased awareness of the interplay between literary and dramatic factors with musical ones. An outstanding practitioner of daily criticism in England was Andrew Porter, who through his work in the Financial Times was largely responsible for a change in the character of English criticism during the 1960s, whereby critics were assigned more space and thus encouraged to adopt a more literary manner; from the 1970s he was music critic of the New Yorker, where his elegant style, underpinned by sound scholarship and keen perception, exercised a substantial influence on American critical standards. English-language criticism has, broadly speaking, avoided the element of politicization that is found in much musical criticism in the European continent.

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criticism, the reasoned discussion of literary works, an activity which may include some or all of the following procedures, in varying proportions: the defence of literature against moralists and censors, classification of a work according to its genre, interpretation of its meaning, analysis of its structure and style, judgement of its worth by comparison with other works, estimation of its likely effect on readers, and the establishment of general principles by which literary works (individually, in categories, or as a whole) can be evaluated and understood. Contrary to the everyday sense of criticism as ‘fault‐finding’, much modern criticism (particularly of the academic kind) assumes that the works it discusses are valuable; the functions of judgement and analysis having to some extent become divided between the market (where reviewers ask ‘Is this worth buying?’) and the educational world (where academics ask ‘Why is this so good?’). The various kinds of criticism fall into several overlapping categories: theoretical, practical, impressionistic, affective, prescriptive, or descriptive. Criticism concerned with revealing the author's true motive or intention (sometimes called ‘expressive’ criticism) emerged from Romanticism to dominate much 19th‐ and 20th‐century critical writing, but has tended to give way to ‘objective’ criticism, focusing on the work itself (as in New Criticism and structuralism), and to a shift of attention to the reader in reader‐response criticism. Particular schools of criticism also seek to understand literature in terms of its relations to history, politics, gender, social class, mythology, linguistic theory, or psychology. See also exegesis, hermeneutics, metacriticism, poetics.

The term can mean, and has meant in France, many different ways of writing or talking about literature. It is not so much a literary genre as a set of practices, often at odds with each other. French literary history shows striking changes in the dominant functions assumed by criticism, the institutions where it is produced, and the value placed upon it, from the Romantic scorn for the critic as uncreative parasite to the extraordinary respect shown to certain maîtres à penser of the late 20th c.

1. Medieval and Renaissance

The words ‘la critique’ (criticism) and ‘le critique’ (critic) did not have their modern meaning until the late 16th and 17th c. Medieval France, however, was familiar with several kinds of criticism, practised mainly in the universities in relation to Latin texts, both biblical and classical. There were biographies of writers, some in the vernacular [see Vida], but above all there was a highly developed art of commentary. This paid attention to the intention and genre of works, their moral value, their usefulness as a source of expressions and rhetorical devices, and to their often hidden meaning, interpreted according to sophisticated allegorical schemes. The latter continued into the Renaissance period and beyond; they are mocked in the prologue to Rabelais's Gargantua.

The Renaissance saw a great flourishing of philology, as practised by such humanist scholars as Dolet or Dorat. This was applied first and foremost to ancient texts [see Classical Influences], but also to difficult writings in French, as in Muret's commentary on Ronsard. At the same time, there was criticism of a more polemic nature in various prefaces, and particularly in the arguments about the value of the new programme of the Pléiade, which was carried on in Sébillet's Art poétique français and Du Bellay's Défense et illustration. This overlapped with the development of formal criticism or poetics. Late medieval rhetoricians (e.g. Jean Bouchet) had produced manuals of poetic devices, but the 16th c. saw the recovery of Aristotle's Poetics and Horace's Ars poetica and the publication of commentaries and treatises on poetics in Latin (Castelvetro, Scaliger) and increasingly in French (Ronsard, Peletier du Mans).

2. 17th and 18th Centuries

Such theoretical works, sometimes polemic in nature, are a major feature of 17th-c. literary history [see Classicism]. They include the works of Chapelain, La Ménardière, Colletet, Rapin, Le Bossu, and Boileau. Boileau, however, is much less the dogmatic lawgiver of legend than the committed and often prejudiced critic, passionately concerned with evaluating and promoting the literature of the present. A related mode of criticism in this period is the fault-finding commentary, concentrating on questions of language and decorum. Malherbe's commentary on Desportes is the classic example, together with Chapelain's Sentiments de l'Académie sur le Cid.

More entertaining than pedantic discussions of this kind were the relatively informal discussions of French and foreign literature in fashionable society and the writings read there. Montaigne may be seen as a precursor; his Essais abound in agreeably personal discussions of his reading. In the 17th c. the salons provided a new venue for literary conversations (the Académie Française itself was originally a kind of salon). The honnêtes gens of the salons were the public for the numerous essays, letters, dialogues, reflections, and the like which contain the best of 17th-c. criticism—one may cite the writings of Balzac, Sarasin, Méré, Bouhours, La Bruyère, and Saint-Évremond, together with the novels of Madeleine de Scudéry and the prefaces of writers such as Corneille, Racine, and Boileau. This ‘amateur’ critical tradition, whose aim is to create, consolidate, or revise the literary norms of polite society, continues throughout the 18th c. in innumerable writings, including those of La Motte, Bayle, Fénelon, Marivaux, Diderot, Voltaire (who also practised the more pedantic mode in his commentaries on Corneille), and Chamfort. Of the more theoretical works produced in the 18th c., the most important are probably those of Dubos and Marmontel.

In the ancien régime, as in more recent times, literature was often a place of controversy. In the 17th c. there were violent onslaughts by Bossuet, Nicole, and others on the immoral tendencies of imaginative writing, and the use of religious subjects in profane literature was defended by Desmarets in the face of Boileau's attacks. The turn of the century saw the Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes, in which first Boileau and Perrault, and then Madame Dacier and La Motte took leading parts. In the 18th c. literary quarrels came to have an increasingly political nature (for or against the Enlightenment). An important new development was the appearance of book-reviewing periodicals such as the Journal des Savants, the Mémoires de Trévoux, Fréron's Année littéraire, Linguet's journals, and Grimm's less public Correspondance littéraire. This was the birth of the professional journalist-critic, who was to flourish in the following century.

3. 19th and 20th Centuries

During the 18th c. French literature had begun to be systematically studied in the rhetoric classes of secondary schools. This normative teaching is enshrined in Batteux's Cours de belles-lettres; from now on the criticism of modern literature and pedagogy were to become ever more closely entwined. La Harpe continued in the same vein for the adult audiences of the Lycée. His Cours de littérature is a culmination of the old tradition of dogmatic evaluation, but at the same time it is a history of European literature. Literary history in its modern sense, however, makes its appearance in the works of de Staël and Chateaubriand. And it was the historical approach which was to dominate the criticism and eventually the teaching of literature in the following century or more with the voluminous writings of Villemain, Sainte-Beuve, Taine, Brunetière, Lanson, and many others. [For this development, and the subsequent conflict between literary history and ‘la nouvelle critique’, see Literary History].

Meanwhile, evaluative, essayistic criticism remained vigorous and often combative, as in the work of Stendhal, Nodier, Nisard, or Saint-Marc Girardin or the prefaces of most of the major writers of the 19th c. Sainte-Beuve, for all his ‘scientific’ biographical ambitions, was above all an opinion forming journalist, and periodicals such as the Revue de Paris and the Revue des deux mondes provided a forum for critical debate. In the later 19th c., in reaction to positivistic literary history, there was a flourishing of ‘impressionistic’ criticism, exemplified by the work of Jules Lemaitre. After 1909 the Nouvelle Revue Française in particular provided a home for creative criticism by writers such as Du Bos, Thibaudet, Rivière, and Paulhan. In modern times, moreover, some of the best personal criticism has been written by those who are better known as poets or novelists: for instance, Baudelaire, Proust, Gide, Valéry, Blanchot, Butor, and Bonnefoy. Sartre is a special case, pursuing the same type of investigation into human motives and actions in his fiction and drama and in his writings about literature.

4. ‘La Nouvelle Critique’

The second half of the 20th c. is marked by the emergence of a varied set of tendencies sometimes grouped together as ‘la nouvelle critique’. These are united principally by their opposition to traditional university criticism (‘l'homme et l'œuvre’) on the one hand, and to essayistic impressionism on the other. Most refer explicitly to some theoretical foundation and subvert ‘common-sense’ readings of texts based on philological and historical information or authorial intention. The first group to be given this label were the critics sometimes known (rather inaccurately) as the Geneva School (Raymond, Poulet, Richard, etc.), who used a thematic analysis largely inspired by Bachelard to illuminate the ‘moi profond’ of the writer. A second group were the revisionist Marxist critics such as Goldmann, who attempted to go beyond the simple reflection model of classic Marxism. A later development of Marxist criticism is that of the Althusser school, notably Macherey, who made use of some of the ideas of Structuralism to stress the contradictory positions that go into the ‘production’ of literary works. Around 1968 the group associated with Sollers, Kristeva, and Tel Quel also attempted to bring together Marxism and late Structuralism.

It is no doubt Structuralism that has had the greatest impact on the study of literature. This is described in a separate entry, but it should be stressed here that Structuralist theory and criticism were intimately bound up with new movements in creative writing such as the Nouveau Roman. Such a commitment to the new is seen at its best in the work of Barthes, probably the most constantly rewarding critic of recent decades. He, like many of his colleagues, made the move from Structuralism to Post-Structuralism around 1968, abandoning hopes for a ‘science of literature’ in favour of approaches stressing the openness and contradictions of the text, which thus becomes the ground for the creative activity of the reader. Two dominant features of criticism between 1970 and 1990 were the impact of feminism, particularly in the 1970s, and the massive influence on literary interpretation of psychoanalysis. This was a period in which the intellectual leaders of French modernity (Barthes, Lacan, Derrida, Foucault, Kristeva, Irigaray, Lyotard) exerted a powerful influence well beyond the frontiers of France.

It should not be thought that these developments have meant the end of more traditional modes of criticism in France. Much journalistic criticism is relatively unaffected by such ideas, although journals such as Critique, Littérature, and Tel Quel have been among the centres of new critical activity. And the universities, while their attitude to various types of ‘nouvelle critique’ is warmer than in the 1960s, have continued to produce much-needed philological and historical work. Indeed, one of the most hopeful signs of the early 1990s is the development outlined at the end of the entry Literary history.

[Peter France]

Bibliography

• R. Fayolle, La Critique littéraire (1964)
• G. Poulet (ed.), Les Chemins actuels de la critique (1968)
• J. Sturrock (ed.), Structuralism and Since (1979)
• A. J. Minnis and A. B. Scott, Medieval Literary Theory and Criticism (1988)

The analysis of a performance. The term is often used in the pejorative sense of making an unfavourable or severe comment, but criticism of athletes can be a useful motivational strategy if used sensitively, for example, when combined with praise and followed with suggestions as to how to improve. It is generally agreed that criticisms consisting only of unspecific exhortations to try harder are not very effective.

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IN BRIEF: The forming of judgments. Also: disapproval.

Criticism is more effective when it sounds like praise. — Arnold H. Glasow.

LearnThatWord.com is a free vocabulary and spelling program where you only pay for results!

For a list of words related to criticism, see:

• Schools, Styles, and Forms - criticism: analysis and evaluation of literary works
• Judgments and Critiques - criticism: act of passing judgment as to the merits of anything; faultfinding; analysis and evaluation of a literary or artistic work or performance; critique
• Disapproval, Disrespect, and Denial - criticism: unfavorable observations or comments

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Common misspelling(s) of criticism

• critisism

Dansk (Danish)
n. - kritik

Nederlands (Dutch)
kritiek

Français (French)
n. - critique, blâme, étude critique sur, analyse critique, critique littéraire

Deutsch (German)
n. - Kritik

Ελληνική (Greek)
n. - κριτική, αξιολόγηση, επίκριση, κατάκριση

Italiano (Italian)
critica

Português (Portuguese)
n. - crítica (f), censura (f)

Русский (Russian)
критика

Español (Spanish)
n. - crítica, observaciones y reparos, censura, comentario crítico

Svenska (Swedish)
n. - kritik, klander

中文（简体）(Chinese (Simplified))
批评, 非难, 评论

中文（繁體）(Chinese (Traditional))
n. - 批評, 非難, 評論

한국어 (Korean)
n. - 비평 , 비판 능력, 원전연구

日本語 (Japanese)
n. - 批評, 批判

العربيه (Arabic)
‏(الاسم) نقد, انتقاد‏

עברית (Hebrew)
n. - ‮ביקורת, ביקורתיות‬

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