MODERN AMERICAN CRITICISM

There is very little that need be said here except to salute Dr. Sutton's survey as the best over-all introduction we know of to the complexities and confusions, the splendors and miseries of modern American literary criticism. It is sharply drawn, smoothly, suggestively written; its scope is startling, especially for so relatively short a study, covering in cogent commentary everything from Richard's Principles and Babbitt and More to Eliot and the New Critics, the Chicago group and the neo-Aristotelians, and the Myth and Marxist schools. Dr. Sutton fully honors the aesthetic revolution preached and practised by Ransom, Brooks and Blackmur, but he feels that the modern movement has now been won- pure textual analysis, anti-Romantic theory and technique and, in some cases, the use of multiple disciplines, mostly from philosophy or Jung and Freud. It should integrate and interact within the world as a whole; isolation is impossible and the humanities can only grow in so far as literature and society cease to be alienated.... A bang-up job.