Bibliographical footnotes. The play and place of criticism.--The play of criticism: The innocent insinuations of wit: the strategy of language in Shakespeare's sonnets. The dark generations of Richard III. The frail china jar and the rude hand of chaos. Dover beach and the tragic sense of eternal recurrence. The Marble faun and the international theme. From Youth to Lord Jim: the formal-thematic use of Marlow. The ekphrastic principle and the still movement of poetry.--The place of criticism: The disciplines of literary criticism. Joseph Warren Beach's modest appraisal. Contextualism was ambitious. Contextualism and the relegation of rhetoric. Critical dogma and the new critical historians. Platonism, Manichaeism, and the resolution of tension. Northrop Frye and contemporary criticism: Ariel and the spirit of gravity. The existential basis of contextual criticism.

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