Introduction: the textualization of judgment

Without analogizing too neatly, the motivating premise of this book is that early literary critics stood at a crossroads similar to the one that confronts literary scholars today. Then, as now, the material basis for critical judgment was shifting. Where we face the rise of digital media and online publishing, early critics wrote against the background of a rapidly changing landscape of books. The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries witnessed a massive spread of cheap print, as newspapers and other ephemeral publications proliferated throughout an increasingly diverse literary marketplace. New publishing practices brought with them new modes of authorship and new ways of reading: among these was criticism. By the eighteenth century, the critic was recognized as a species of author whose publications enveloped poetry in a web of contention. What were the protocols of reading in this increasingly contentious field? What did it mean to be a critic or a judge of books and how did that meaning change? Within what genres of writing did criticism appear and how were those genres valued? And, at the most abstract: what relation does the textual discourse of criticism have to the experience of reading, talking, and knowing about literature? This book is about the competing answers that English writers gave to these questions. It is about how criticism first came to be understood as a mode of publication and a form of knowledge. I ought to begin by acknowledging that early criticism was met with a great deal of skepticism. The more that writers valued the approval of “true judges,” the less stock they claimed to place in “criticks.” Differentiating between these two groups of readers and declaring alliance with the first was, for many authors, the whole point of writing a preface in the first place, and it is in such supplementary genres – prologues, prefaces, dedications – that much early critical writing appears. Thus, for most of its early history, criticism is marked by a strongly negative, often sneering attitude toward critics. As Phillip Smallwood has remarked, “The birth of