M. H. Abrams
Meyer Howard Abrams is
one of the most respected scholar-theorists of the twentieth century. His
special field is Romantic poetry and poetics, but he has done scholarly work
that draws on encyclopedic historical knowledge of literary theory from all
periods, and he has engaged in paradigm-level debates in contemporary literary
theory. He has also played a major role as an anthologist, serving, among other
things, as founding editor of The Norton
Anthology of English Literature (1962). With respect to prominence and
influence, his peers include Northrop Frye and Harold Bloom. Like Abrams, Frye
and Bloom have scholarly specializations in Romanticism, and both have also
done major work as literary theorists. Unlike Frye and Bloom, Abrams is not himself
intellectually and imaginatively a Romantic, neither of the Blakean
mystical cast, like Frye, nor of the Byronic egoistic cast, like Bloom. Abrams’
chief intellectual affinities are with the Enlightenment and with neo-classical
theorists rather than with the Romantics—with Hume, Johnson, and Burke, rather
than with Schlegel, Coleridge, and Shelley.
In contemporary
critical theory, Abrams has been most active and influential as an urbane but
incisive critic of poststructuralism. In contrast to both Frye and Bloom, Abrams
produced no distinctively original or idiosyncratic theory of his own. Instead,
he occupies a commanding position as one of the most articulate spokesmen for traditional
humanism and for “pluralism,” a stance he associates with Wittgenstein. He
believes that multiple alternative theories can give access to different
aspects of a literary text but that no theory should be given precedence over
the body of informed common understanding that constitutes the “humanist
literary paradigm” (1997). In Abrams’ conception, the humanist literary paradigm
consists of a set of common-sense notions about literary meaning and a critical
ethos corresponding to those notions. The common-sense notions are that authors
have definite intentions in creating structures of meaning and that those meanings
have reference to objectively recognizable phenomena within an actual world
shared by the author and his or her readers. The ethos corresponding to these
notions is that scholars and critics should conscientiously seek to identify determinate
literary meanings grounded in authorial intentions, locate those meanings within
a historical and theoretical context, and generously appreciate the imaginative
qualities manifested in the works they study.
Jonathan Culler (1997)
characterizes poststructuralism as a sustained philosophic critique of common
sense. Abrams, in contrast, characterizes it as a programmatic but arbitrary
departure from common sense. In formulating an alternative to poststructuralist
conceptions of literature, Abrams elevates common sense into a defensible
philosophical position. The crucial poststructuralist strategy, he argues, is
to invest language or discourse with quasi-autonomous status. By thus detaching
language from its natural function as an intermediary in human communication, poststructuralism
falsely attenuates the originative power of authors, the individuality of both
authors and readers, the reality of the world shared by authors and readers,
and the distinct character of specific literary works as intentional
communicative artifacts (1995, 1997). (All but two of Abrams’
most important theoretical essays [1995, 1997] are collected in Doing Things with Texts [1989].)
Abrams produced two
massive tomes of historical scholarship: The
Mirror and the Lamp (1953) and Natural
Supernaturalism (1971). These two books are supplemented by several major
essays collected in The Correspondent
Breeze (1984), and in particular by “Structure and Style in the Greater
Romantic Lyric.”
In the introduction to The Mirror and the Lamp, Abrams
constructs a taxonomic model encompassing, he suggests, all possible forms of
literary theory. He identifies four elements that constitute the natural
environment in which literature is produced and read: an author, a reader, a shared
world, and a text. Abrams argues that all literary theories can be classified
by the relative emphasis they place on one of these four elements. Expressive
theories emphasize the author; rhetorical or “pragmatic” theories emphasize
effects on readers; mimetic theories emphasize representations of the world and
“objective” theories emphasize the formal organization of the literary work. As
simple as this model is, Abrams makes a convincing case, documented in detail,
that these four elements can effectively distinguish literary theories from the
time of Plato and Aristotle up through the mid-twentieth century. Applying this
model to his particular subject in The
Mirror and the Lamp, Abrams argues
that the transformations of aesthetic theory between the neo-classical and
Romantic periods can best be described as a shift from mimetic to expressive
theories.
In Natural Supernaturalism, Abrams interprets the Romantic poets, and especially Wordsworth, in such a way that they
become congenial to a reader, like himself, who does not resonate to mystical
themes. He mutes the transcendental aspects of Romantic poetry and concentrates
on its social, political, and artistic aspects. He thus aims at making
Romanticism more relevant to the needs and concerns of modern readers. In “Structure
and Style in the Greater Romantic Lyric,” adopting a more simply historical,
scholarly stance, Abrams astutely analyzes the transcendental philosophy that
undergirds the Romantic world view.
REFERENCES AND
SUGGESTED
Abrams, M. H. (1953). The mirror and the lamp: Romantic theory and
the critical tradition.
Abrams, M. H. (1971). Natural supernaturalism: Tradition and revolution
in romantic literature.
Abrams, M. H. (1984). The correspondent breeze: Essays on English Romanticism.
Abrams, M. H. (1989). Doing things with texts:
Essays in criticism and critical theory (ed. Michael Fischer).
Abrams, M. H. (1995).
“What is a humanistic criticism?” In D. Eddins (ed.),
The emperor redressed: Critiquing critical
theory.
Abrams, M. H. (1997) “The transformation of English studies: 1930-1995.”
Daedalus 126(1),
105-32.
Abrams, M. H., & Harpham, G. (2008). A glossary of literary terms, 9th
edn.
Abrams, M. H., et al.
(1962). The Norton Anthology of English
Literature, 2 vols.
Culler, Jonathan. (1997).
Literary theory: A very short introduction.