Wilson's Literary And Cultural Criticism

As a famous American literary and social critic in the 20^th century, Edmund Wilson today still enjoys a high reputation for his aesthetically responsive, reality-embracing and intellectually conscious criticisms which not only enriched the artistic criticism of American literature, but also developed inseparable relations with the wider American culture. His literary criticism is characterized by his overwhelming concern with the society combined with a poetic approach. Wilson's criticism covers a wide array of perspectives: the aesthetic value of literary works, the critic's professional development and improvement, and the public orientation and humanistic concern an intellectual is supposed to have. With these features, Wilson's literary criticism is not confined to literature, which is only the starting point, butpursues a much higher goal--interpretation of American civilization as a whole.With the awareness of this distinctive facet of Wilson's critical career, this paper aims to probe the origin, the trail, and the radiation of Wilson's criticism, referring to the sources of Wilson's thought, its evolution and influence upon the general public respectively.The first chapter is primarily a retrospective study of influences that shaped Wilson's critical outlook: the European and American humanistic tradition in literary criticism, the New England tradition embodied by his father and others. The second chapter summarizes the characteristics of Wilson's literary criticism. And the third chapter mainly deals with the transition in Wilson's critical career from literature to the public life and civilization. All three chapters form a progression, which corresponds to the whole path that Wilson traveled, from a point to a plane, from partial to holistic, from literature to civilization.