Assessing major critics from Vernon Parrington to Murray Krieger, Wesley Morris points the way to a "new historicism." He outlines traditional historicist interests in American literary theory and draws from them the foundation for a vital new study of literature. As Mr. Morris shows, however, the new historicism moves beyond-necessarily using the most recent developments in linguistics, anthropology, psychoanalysis, the psychology of perception and literary response-to see the aesthetic relationship between the work and its context.
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