Anne H . Stevens ’ s Literary Theory and Criticism : An Introduction . Toronto : Broadview Press , 2015 . By Heather Lusty
Anne Stevens ’ Literary Theory and Criticism : An Introduction offers a fresh take on a towering subject . Intended for a broad audience , the book provides succinct overviews to the major historical eras and their respective great theoretical treatises . A thorough introduction addresses the typical misgivings about the weighty field – often dismissed as heavily theoretical and largely subjective . As Stevens points out , every day “ we perform countless acts of reading , writing , interpretation , and evaluation […]; literary theory provides a vocabulary and tools for thinking about reading , writing , and criticism , both everyday acts of evaluation and more academic studies of literature and culture .”
A chapter on the ancient world sets the foundation for the development of Western tradition . Plato ’ s seminal works on speech and writing provide an introduction into literary theory and the first dialogues , or discussions , on a wide variety of subjects important to the Greeks . Aristotle ’ s contributions to narrative form come next ; our understanding of the elements of poetry : comedy , tragedy , and epic , are defined by his Poetics . Horace , Quintilian , and Longinus round out the approaches to exploring and analyzing the art , speech , and aesthetics that define Western civilization .
The Middle Ages and the Renaissance are next ; Stevens outlines how the development of religion and Biblical interpretation influenced the establishment of a literary canon . Medieval scholasticism , a Christian intellectual movement , applied Aristotelian studies to
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