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George Saintsbury was one of the most influential literary critics, along with Leslie Stephen and Edmund Gosse, of the late Victorian era and early twentieth century. In terms of sheer quantity of writing, he surpassed most of his prolific contemporaries; during a sixty-year career as a journalist and academic critic, he produced hundreds of essays, reviews, and prefaces in addition to literary histories, anthologies, critical editions, and other books. No period of English literature was foreign to him, and his knowledge of French literature was nearly as thorough. Such prodigality and scope have made Saintsbury's work as a whole difficult to digest, accounting in part for the lack of attention paid to him. He also defies easy categorization as a critic because of his unwillingness to associate himself with particular schools of criticism or theories of literature. Yet Saintsbury's writings are fundamentally "all of a piece," to use a phrase he applied to Thackeray.
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