Cleanth Brooks

"The formalist critic"

K. M. Newton

pp. 26-30

in: K. M. Newton (ed), Twentieth-century literary theory, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 1997

Abstract

That literary criticism is a description and an evaluation of its object. That the primary concern of criticism is with the problem of unity — the kind of whole which the literary work forms or fails to form, and the relation of the various parts to each other in building up this whole. That the formal relations in a work of literature may include, but certainly exceed, those of logic.

Cited authors

Brooks Cleanth