| Works: Works by W. C. Brownell |
| 1909 | American Prose Masters. Brownell's companion to his Victorian Prose Masters (1901) is a critical study of Cooper, Hawthorne, Emerson, Lowell, Poe, and Henry James. It is noteworthy for its serious consideration of American literary expression compared with that of English masters and its high standard, which avoids the chauvinism of other American literary critics of the period. Poe receives Brownell's harshest criticism; Hawthorne is granted only one perfect work (The Scarlet Letter), and James is faulted for desiring "to be precise, not to be clear." |
| 1914 | Criticism. The literary critic fights an increasingly losing battle to maintain the traditional Victorian literary values of moral earnestness in this essay and his subsequent, aptly named volume, Standards (1917). |
