Theory of Literature [antikvár]

PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION * The naming of this book has been more than ordinarily difficult. Even a proper 'short title', 'Theory of Literature and Methodology of Literary Study', would be too cumbersome. Before the nineteenth century one might have managed, for then a full, analytic title could have covered the title-page while the spine bore the inscription 'Literature'. We have written a book which, so far as we know, lacks any close parallel. It is not a textbook introducing the young to the elements of literary appreciation nor (like Morize's Aims and Methods) a survey of the techniques employed in scholarly research. Some continuity it may claim with Poetics and Rhetoric (from Aristotle down through Blair, Campbell, and Kames), systematic treatments of the genres of belles-lettres and stylistics, or with books called Principles of Literary Criticism. But we have sought to unite 'poetics' (or literary theory) and 'criticism' (evaluation of literature) with 'scholarship' ('research') and 'literary history' (the ' dynamics ' of literature, in contrast to the ' statics ' of theory and criticism). It comes nearer to certain German and Russian works, Walzel's Gehalt und Gestalt, or Julius Petersen's Die Wissenschaft von der Dichtung, or Tomashevsky's Literary Theory. In contrast to the Germans, however, we have avoided mere reproductions of the views of others and, though we take into account other perspectives and methods, have written from a consistent point of view; in contrast to Tomashevsky, we do not undertake to give elementary instruction on such topics as prosody. We are not eclectic like the Germans or doctrinaire like the Russian. By the standards of older American scholarship, there is something grandiose and even 'unscholarly' about the very attempt to formulate the assumptions on which literary study is conducted (to do which one must go beyond 'facts') and something presumptuous in our effort to survey and evaluate highly specialized investigations. Every specialist will unavoidably be dissatisfied with our account of his speciality. But we have not aimed at minute completeness: the literary examples cited are always examples, not 'proof'; the bibliographies are 'selective'. 7