The twentieth-century humanist critics

"The Twentieth-Century Humanist Critics revisits the work and place of eight scholars roughly contemporary with Anglo-American New Criticism: Leo Spitzer, Ernst Robert Curtius, Erich Auerbach, Albert Beguin, Jean Rousset, C.S. Lewis, F.O. Matthiessen, and Northrop Frye. First, William Calin considers the achievements of each critic, examining their methodologies and basic presuppositions as well as the critiques marshalled against them. Calin then explores their relation to history, to canon-formation, and to current theoretical debates. He goes on to show how these eight scholars form a current in the history of criticism, a current that is related to both humanism and modernism." "Underscoring the international, cosmopolitan aspects of literary scholarship in the last century, The Twentieth-Century Humanist Critics discusses humanist critical traditions from Europe, the United Kingdom, and North America, and reveals the surprising extent to which, across various languages and academic systems, critics posed similar questions and arrived at a wealth of complementary responses."--Jacket.