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M(eyer) H(oward) Abrams |
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Among modern American critics, M. H. Abrams ranks as one of the foremost defenders of humanistic and historical literary study. His two major works, The Mirror and the Lamp (1953) and Natural Supernaturalism (1971), base their historical arguments on an analysis of certain conceptual metaphors in Romantic poetics and literature. For his skill in employing this approach and for the learning and scope of his scholarship, Abrams has been often compared with such distinguished literary and intellectual historians as A. O. Lovejoy, Ernst Robert Curtius, and Erich Auerbach. Abrams is best known as a historian and critic of Romanticism and as one of its most congenial and compelling defenders. The prestige of Romantic poetry and the vitality of Romantic studies in America after the New Critical period were due in part to the impact made by The Mirror and the Lamp. Perhaps more significantly, The Mirror and the Lamp, and later Natural Supernaturalism, decisively showed the importance of literary theory in general and the rewards of a theoretically self-conscious approach to Romanticism in particular.
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