Critical Inquiry Critical Inquiry
Christopher Rovee. New Critical Nostalgia: Romantic Lyric and the Crisis of Academic Life. New York: Fordham University Press, 2024. 272 pp.
Review by Yohei Igarashi
16 January 2025
What’s new with the New Critics these days? The number of English graduate programs in the US that have recently offered a seminar focusing exclusively or largely on the New Criticism is, I suspect, zero. Graduate students at most institutions would find it no hindrance in their studies to do without the New Critics, however much we might wish it were otherwise. Perhaps this will change. But the transmission outlook is not very good.
For all that, the New Criticism lives on. It retains its special status as the foundational paradigm of literary criticism and as an infrastructural practice that has shaped and persisted through later disciplinary developments.[1] It was and remains deeply personal. Louis Menand and Lawrence Rainey observed that “[f]or readers over the age of fifty, modernism and the New Criticism are not just . . . names that stretch across the venerable but vanished empires in the history of literary criticism.” Rather “they evoke places where we have conversed with colleagues, or hours spent with books that still rest upon the shelves.”[2] Indeed, as Alan Liu has suggested, no paradigm in literary studies since has managed to elicit the kind of collectively personal response that the New Criticism did, as encapsulated by what Liu heard people say to Cleanth Brooks in 1989 a few years before Brooks’s death: not “‘you changed my approach,’ ‘you changed my theory or method,’ or even ‘you changed how I read literature,’” but “you changed my life.”[3] And then there are the generations of professors who have had New Critical theory taught and mediated to them, not to mention the fact that the New Criticism’s inaccurate but irredeemable reputation as retrograde is, at least for the moment, attended by an aura of midcentury-modern hip, boosted by recent interest in disciplinary history.
This nostalgic phenomenon frames Christopher Rovee’s New Critical Nostalgia: Romantic Lyric and the Crisis of Academic Life: “I don’t mean a nostalgia for the New Criticism (though in some cases it manifests that way) but rather a nostalgia for something indeterminate which the New Criticism is regularly identified with, namely the fleeting cohesiveness and relevance that our histories tend to associate with the postwar era of the 1940s and ’50s” (p. 1)—in other words, the era before our disciplinary “age of fracture,”[4] to borrow from historian Daniel T. Rodgers. Revaluations of the New Criticism have appeared over the years; the business of the sympathetic literature is complexification, to insist that New Criticism was not a monolithic movement and on its ongoing relevance.[5] What makes New Critical Nostalgia unique is that it offers, from a Romanticist’s perspective, a revisionist account of critics and scholars working in the middle third of the twentieth century by taking as its lens the reception of the kind of poetry the New Critics supposedly disliked the most, or found most inconvenient for their purposes: Romantic poetry. This delimitation—the midcentury reading and teaching of Romantic lyric poems specifically—opens into more general reflections about literary studies, reflections that are grouped under the idea of a collective disciplinary nostalgia, where nostalgia is also understood in terms of Kevis Goodman’s recent work on that subject.[6] The book toggles effectively between its smaller and bigger scopes through Rovee’s positing of the metonymic, “cathected,” and “overdetermined” significance of Romantic lyric poems for the aforementioned professors and the discipline (pp. 4, 53).[7]
The book’s engine is intellectual biography. New Critical Nostalgia is based on the careful and passionate study of the archival materials of exemplary English professors of the period, New Critically disposed and not. The papers of John Crowe Ransom, Frederick Pottle, Brooks, W. K. Wimsatt, Josephine Miles, and M. H. Abrams get the most substantial treatments, but the book also incorporates findings from the papers of Allen Tate, Robert Penn Warren, and others. The disciplinary-historical documents receive a kind of recursive close reading: “I ... channel my own predilection for reading poetry closely into closely reading others’ close readings” and other documents relating to close reading; I would have been interested in further comment on this identity of object and method (p. 68). The chapters are enlightening, as Rovee closely reads “Ransom-reading-Wordsworth,” Brooks and Warren reading Percy Shelley, Brooks reading Keats, Wimsatt reading Byron (and Abrams not reading him), and—in an especially impactful chapter, also the longest—Miles reading Wordsworth (p. 41). Original, informative, and deliberative, New Critical Nostalgia shows how the formative decades of literary criticism were marked not by a rejection of the Romantics, but by statistics-backed appreciation, anxious devaluation in the service of critics’ and criticism’s developmental narratives, and—most intriguingly—a profound identification with them over historical and geographical distances.
New Critical Nostalgia is thus a major contribution and corrective to the reception history of Romantic poetry while it deepens our understanding of the New Critics. Free of polemic and prediction, Rovee’s measured book invokes, but does not finally make large claims about, “the future of literary study” and more broadly “twenty-first-century academia” (p. 9). Is literary study to keep doing what it has always done since the New Critics—the circular case for tradition—or does a closer look at this archive hint at other kinds of criticism with the potential to elicit a reaction like “You changed my life”? What alternative practices might the contingent New Criticism have not-so-benevolently extinguished prematurely? What is to become of New Criticism’s legacy? Now, a quarter century since Menand and Rainey wrote, the age range of those wistful professors with formative exposure to New Critical thought is seventy-five and up. Rovee’s recovery of the Romanticism immanent in the New Criticism will be a valuable resource as we ponder such questions and work toward what comes next.
[1] See John Guillory, Professing Criticism: Essays on the Organization of Literary Study (Chicago, 2022), pp. 44–78; on the New Criticism within the New Historicism, for example, see Alan Liu, “The Power of Formalism: The New Historicism” in Local Transcendence: Essays on Postmodern Historicism and the Database (Chicago, 2008), pp. 29–68.
[2] Louis Menand and Lawrence Rainey, “Introduction,” in The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, Vol. 7: Modernism and the New Criticism, ed. A. Walton Litz, Menand, and Rainey (New York, 2000), p. 1.
[3] Alan Liu, “Understanding Knowledge Work,” Criticism 47 (Spring 2005), pp. 256, 255.
[4] See Daniel T. Rodgers, The Age of Fracture (Cambridge, Mass., 2012).
[5] For example, Rereading the New Criticism, ed. Miranda B. Hickman and John D. McIntyre (Columbus, Ohio, 2012).
[6] See Kevis Goodman, Pathologies of Motion: Historical Thinking in Medicine, Aesthetics, and Poetics (New Haven, Conn., 2023).
[7] This aspect of the argument, along with the idea that Romantic developmental narratives shaped modern literary study, are reminiscent of Clifford Siskin’s The Historicity of Romantic Discourse (New York, 1988).
