Criticism > Nineteenth-Century Literary Criticism > American Literary Criticism in the Nineteenth Century - John Stafford (essay date 1952)


American Literary Criticism in the Nineteenth Century - John Stafford (essay date 1952)

John Stafford (essay date 1952)

SOURCE: Stafford, John. “Young America's Theory of Criticism.” In The Literary Criticism of “Young America”: A Study in the Relationship of Politics and Literature 1837-1850, pp. 39-53. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1952.

[In the following excerpt, Stafford examines the critical theory associated with the group of reviewers known as “Young America”—a group that included Cornelius Mathews, Evert A. Duyckinck, William A. Jones, John L. O'Sullivan, and Parke Godwin—and their dedication to a democratic national literature.]

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To understand Young America's criticism, we must consider the group's theories and assumptions about the function and method of literary criticism, as well as Young America's social milieu. The adoption of a critical or aesthetic theory or of a particular method of criticism may have only an indirect influence on the practice of criticism. As R. P....

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