The Rise and Fall of New Criticism: Its Brief Dialectic History from I. A. Richards to Northrop Frye

I. A. Richards’ emphasis upon the individual judgment of poetry based on one’s whole experience, implicit in the criticism of Eliot, Pound, and Hulme, was first attenuated by Winters’ ethical approach, then by the cognitive approach of Ransom, the formalist strategies of Brooks, Wimsatt and Wellek, and finally the archetypal theory of modes and genres proposed by Northrop Frye. With this the affective theory of response was brought to its dialectic negation in a contextualist reification which both culminated and terminated the viable ideas at the root of Anglo-American New Criticism. At present the task of criticism is to return to the affective principles first elucidated by Richards, but now within a synthetic context open to a variety of disciplines inclusive of the Marxist and Freudian theories which had been offensive to almost all the New Critics including Richards himself.