From the Personal Heresy to Ecocriticism: Moving Canons, Creating Reading Communities

Abstract

This essay surveys some of the forms that Anglophone literary studies have taken across the last two centuries, placing a particular emphasis on reading communities. It opens with an account of “The Personal heresy” controversy of the 1930s, before moving back to a summary of the origins of the institutionalized study of English, in London in the nineteenth century. Subsequently it discusses New Criticism and the various approaches referred to as ‘theory’ that dominated the academic study of literature in the last decades of the twentieth century. It contrasts formalism with ethically committed approaches, such as postcolonialism and ecocriticism, concluding that in their most altruistic iterations, these two approaches speak for, and to, an inclusive planetary community of readers, and hold out the possibility of an eco-sustainable future.

DOI: 10.17456/SIMPLE-55

Bibliography

Achebe, Chinua. 1988. An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. Hopes and Impediments. Selected Essays, 1965-1987. Oxford: Heinemann, 1-13.

Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths & Helen Tiffin. 1989. The Empire Writes Back, Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures. London-New York: Routledge.

Bakhtin, Mikhail. 1981. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Austin: University of Texas Press.

Brooks, Cleanth. 1968 [1947]. The Well Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry. London: Methuen.

Campbell, Joseph. 1949. The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Princeton (NJ): Pantheon Books.

Conrad, Joseph. 1994 [1899]. Heart of Darkness. Harmondsworth: Penguin.

DeLoughrey, Elizabeth & George B. Handley eds. 2011. Postcolonial Ecologies: Literatures of the Environment. Oxford-New York: Oxford University Press.

Eagleton, Terry. 1983. Literary Theory: An Introduction. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.

Fish, Stanley. 1980. Is There a Text in This Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities. Cambridge (MA): Harvard University Press.

Foucault, Michel. 1980. Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972-1977. New York: Pantheon.

Foucault, Michel. 1986. Of Other Places. Diacritics, 16, 1: 22-27.

Ghosh, Amitav. 1986. The Circle of Reason. London: Hamish Hamilton.

Ghosh, Amitav. 1996. The Calcutta Chromosome. London: Picador.

Ghosh, Amitav. 2004. The Hungry Tide. London: Harper Collins.

Ghosh, Amitav. 2016. The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable. Chicago-London: The University of Chicago Press.

Gilbert, Helen. 2001. Postcolonial Plays: An Anthology. London-New York: Routledge.

Gowdy, Barbara. 2000 [1998]. The White Bone. London: Picador.

Huggan, Graham & Helen Tiffin. 2010. Postcolonial Ecocriticism: Literature, Animals, Environment. Oxford-New York:Routledge.

James, C. L. R. 1969 [1963]. Beyond a Boundary. London: Hutchinson.

Massey Doreen. 1994. Space, Place and Gender. Cambridge: Polity Press. Massey, Doreen. 2005. For Space. London: Sage.

Milton, John. 1957. Complete Poems and Major Prose. New York: The Odyssey Press.

Palmer, David. 1965. The Rise of English Studies: An Account of the Study of English Language and Literature from Its Origins to the Making of the Oxford English School. London: University of Hull/Oxford University Press.

Pope, Alexander. 1978. Poetic Works. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Rangarajan, Swarnalatha. 2014. Engaging with Prakriti: A Survey of Ecocritical Praxis in India. Greg Garrard ed. The Oxford Handbook of Ecocriticism. Oxford-New York: Oxford University Press, 527-536.

Soja, Edward. 2011 [1989]. Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory [2nd ed.]. London:Verso.

Tennyson, Alfred Lord. 1992. Selected Poems. New York: Dover.

Thieme, John. 2016. Postcolonial Literary Geographies: Out of Place. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

Tillyard, E. M. W. 1930. Milton. New York: Dial Press.

Tillyard, E. M. W. & C. S. Lewis. 1939. The Personal Heresy: A Controversy, London: Oxford University Press.

Wimsatt, W. K. & Monroe C. Beardsley. 1946. The Intentional Fallacy. Sewanee Review, 54, 3: 468-488.

Wimsatt, W. K. & Monroe C. Beardsley. 1949. The Affective Fallacy. Sewanee Review, 57, 1: 31-55.