Critical Genealogies: Historical Situations for Postmodern Literary Studies

Reassessing the ancestry of contemporary criticism, Jonathan Arac opens current debates over English studies to a larger understanding of cultural and political history, from romanticism through postmodernism. This work of creative scholarship enlarges our knowledge of the history of criticism while also exemplifying a new practice of writing literary history. Arac draws new lines from Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, and Arnold to their modern successors and to recent developments in Marxism and poststructuralism.