1.3 Literary theorising from Aristotle to Leavis – some key moments

The earliest work of theory was Aristotle’s Poetics (4th century BC), which, in spite of its title, is about the nature of literature itself: Aristotle offers famous definitions of tragedy, insists that literature is about character, and that character is revealed through action, and he tries to identify the required stages in the progress of a plot. Aristotle was also the first critic to develop a ‘reader-centred’ approach to literature, since his consideration of drama tried to describe how it affected the audience. Tragedy, he said, should stimulate the emotions of pity and fear, these being, roughly, sympathy for and empathy with the plight of the protagonist. By the combination of these emotions came about the effect Aristotle called ‘catharsis’, whereby these emotions are exercised, rather than exorcised, as the audience identifies with the plight of the central character.
The first prestigious name in English writing about literature is that of Sir Philip Sidney, who wrote his ‘Apology for Poetry’ in about 1580. Sidney was intent on expanding the implications of the ancient definition of literature first formulated by the Latin poet Ovid (43 BC–AD 17), who had said that its mission is ‘docere delictendo’ – to teach by delighting (meaning, approximately, by entertaining). Sidney also quotes Horace (65–8 BC), to the effect that a poem is ‘a speaking picture, with this end, to teach and delight’. Thus, the giving of pleasure is here allowed a central position in the reading of literature, unlike, say, philosophy, which is implicitly stigmatised as worthy and uplifting, but not much fun. The notion of literature giving pleasure will now seem an unremarkable sentiment, but Sidney’s aim was the revolutionary one of distinguishing literature from other forms of writing, on the grounds that, uniquely, literature has as its primary aim the giving of pleasure to the reader, and any moral or didactic element is necessarily either subordinate to that, or at least, unlikely to succeed without it. In a religious age, deeply suspicious of all forms of fiction, poetry, and representation, and always likely to denounce them as the work of the devil, this was a very great step to take.
Literary theory after Sidney was significantly advanced by Samuel Johnson in the eighteenth century. Johnson’s Lives of the Poets and Prefaces to Shakespeare can be seen both as another major step forward in critical theory, and as the start of the English tradition of practical criticism, since he is the first to offer detailed commentary on the work of a single author. 
After Johnson came a major burgeoning of critical theory in the work of the Romantic poets: Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, and Shelley. One of the main texts is Wordsworth’s Preface to Lyrical Ballads. The book blends high literature and popular literature, since it contains literary ballads constructed on the model of the popular oral ballads of ordinary country people. The original readers of Lyrical Ballads also disliked the abandonment of the conventions of verbal decorum. Suddenly, two ambitious young poets were trying to make their poetic language as much like prose as possible, avoiding the conventions of diction and verbal structure which had held sway for so long. Thus, this book is one of a number of significant critical works in literary theory whose immediate aim is to provide a rationale for the critic’s own poetic work, and to educate the audience for it. It also anticipates issues of great interest to contemporary critical theory, such as the relationship between poetic language and ‘ordinary’ language, and that between ‘literature’ and other kinds of writing.