Name: Juliana Angel S.

Dacurro Course/Sec: BSED English 3

Module 14
HISTORICAL CRITICISM

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SELF-ASSESSMENT EXERCISE 1
What is the relationship of history to a literary text according to historical critics? Who are the
philosophers that influenced this critical canon?
Historical theory requires that you apply to a literary text specific historical
information about the time during which an author wrote. History, in this case, refers
to the social, political, economic, cultural, and/or intellectual climate of the time.
Griffith states that historical critics believe they could illuminate works of literature
by studying what gave birth to them: the intellectual and cultural environment from
which they came, their sources and antecedents, authors' lives, authors' intentions,
and authors' language. They believed that their approach was "scientific" because
they were dealing with objective reality— historically verifiable facts—and were
using a scientific method for collecting such facts.

As for the philosophers who influenced this critical canon, two French philosophers
who influenced historical criticism are Auguste Comte and Hippolyte Taine. Taine,
in his History of English Literature (1863), holds that all art is an expression of the
environment and time in which the artist lived.

Hippolyte Taine was a French critic and historian. He was the chief theoretical
influence of French naturalism, a major proponent of sociological positivism and one
of the first practitioners of historicist criticism. Literary historicism as a critical
movement has been said to originate with him. Taine is also remembered for his
attempts to provide a scientific account of literature.

While Auguste Comte is the founder of positivism, a philosophical and political

movement which enjoyed a very wide diffusion in the second half of the nineteenth
century. Comte took the notion of a hypothetical framework for social organization
that would imitate the hierarchy and discipline found in the Roman Catholic church.
From various Enlightenment philosophers he adopted the notion of historical
progress.

ASSIGNMENT
i. Distinguish between biographical criticism and historical criticism.
Historical criticism emphasizes the social and cultural environment that surrounds a
work of art. Historical criticism has several goals including the study of a particular
culture and the evolution of literary tradition. Historical criticism attempts to
understand literary references in the context of the environment in which they were
written since both language and cultures change over time.

Meanwhile, Biological Criticism is the practice of analyzing a piece of literary work

through the lens of the author’s experience. It considers the ways age, race, gender,
family, education, and economic status inform a writer’s work. In biographical
 criticism, a critic might also examine how a literary work reflects personality
characteristics, life experiences, and psychological dynamics of the author.

ii. What are the fundamental tenets of historical criticism?

Historical Criticism seeks to recognize the influence of the environment on
literature. Among the steps to take when considering the historical context in literary
criticism are:
 Determine the historical period of the work.
 Consider major events, values, beliefs, etc. of the epoch.
 Consider how the work fits with, or stands apart from, mainstream values or
beliefs of the time.
 Consider other texts of the time that might give the reader insight into the
time period.

Summing up the fundamental principles of historical criticism, Douglass Bush

(1965) surmises that since the great mass of great literature belongs to the past,
adequate criticism must grow out of historical knowledge, cultural and linguistic, as
well as out of intuitive insight. Every work must be understood on its own terms as
the product of a particular mind in a particular setting, and that mind and setting must
be re-created through all the resources that learning and the historical imagination
can muster—not excluding the author's intention, if that is known. The very pastness
of a work…. is part of its meaning for us and must be realized to the best of our
power. If we do not pay attention to authors and their historical context, Bush says,
we run the risk of anachronistic misreading and misunderstandings.

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[English 20]: [Literary Criticism]