Critical Essay | Critical Essay by John L. Mahoney

Critical Essay by John L. Mahoney

SOURCE: "William Hazlitt: The Essay as Vehicle for the Romantic Critic," in The Charles Lamb Bulletin, n.s. No. 75, July, 1991, pp. 92-98.

In the following essay, Mahoney contends that Hazlitt's essay represents a move away from the formal treatise—and toward a more familiar style of writing about aesthetics that would become popular in the nineteenth century.

Genre is, of course, an old critical issue. As M. H. Abrams and others remind us, it is apparent in the ancient classical tendency to divide literature into epic-narrative, poetic-lyric, and dramatic, and it persists with varying degrees of emphasis throughout the history of literary theory.¹ From the Renaissance to the neoclassic period, genres were strictly defined and were not to be mixed lightly lest their basic purity be defiled. There was also an order of rank with epic and tragedy regarded as major forms and lyric as minor. The more striking appearances...
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