Encyclopedia of Literature and Criticism

Tolstoy’s War and Peace (1863-9), which many claim to be the realist masterpiece par excellence, has the largest possible theme: what are war and peace if not the twin poles between which nations have swung from time immemorial? But, apart from the campaigns, victories and defeats for which the historical record vouches, the events that affect Tolstoy’s characters have nothing out of the ordinary: old people die, young people fall in and out of love, get married and have children, the thoughtful meditate on the meaning of life, the thoughtless give themselves up to enjoyment; they all grow older, more sedate, more serious, as the years march on. In the plot of War and Peace there is nothing in any way exceptional; Tolstoy made of it an exceptional novel by the art with which he wove his epic story round dozens of lives, all distinct, all fascinating, because they were all, in their different ways, utterly human, truer than any biographer could make his subject.

Deconstruction of orthodox views of what is of prime importance in the English literary Renaissance may be connected with the revisionism of recent work in Tudor history (see, for instance, The Reign of Elizabeth I, ed. Haigh, 1984) and with the revival of historicism in literary studies, with its emphasis on particularity at the expense of essentialism. At the same time, concepts of the singularity of the text come into question when we notice, for instance, pressures from modern feminism. So far as ‘the Renaissance’ is concerned, this is of particular interest since the English High Renaissance is headed by a woman—Elizabeth I. The cult of Elizabeth is essentially a male construct (with whatever willing compliance by the queen herself). It is an elaborate definition of what women should be, as seen by men. There is, so far as I know, as yet no full-scale analysis of the myth by a feminist historian, but there are signs that the male-dominated view of Renaissance women which the myth enshrines is beginning to be called into question. This is partly through interest in writings of the period actually by women and partly through re-examination of how women are represented by male authors. Stella is looking unsteady on her pedestal, and the witches in Macbeth are being rethought and revalued.

One of the things which Spenser’s The Faerie Queene (1590, 1596) signifies is the quintessence of the English Renaissance epic. As such, it stands as a monument to its author’s awareness of the classics, his understanding of the importance of the idea of the gentleman and his sense of the potential of both the individual and the nation. Aesthetically, although incomplete, it can (with some effort) be considered High Renaissance art in its organization of parts into a harmonious, unified whole and in its decorative elaboration and refinement.

But Kermode clearly differs with Bloom in believing that there do exist powerful constraints upon any such revisionist programme, among them those forms of ‘institutional control’ that provide at least a background of consensual understanding against which to judge these novel departures. On this point he agrees with Stanley Fish: that criticism is a communal sense-making enterprise, one that requires some measure of continuity (or deference to established norms), even in periods like the present when it appears that just about every such convention is subject to doubt and disagreement.

Aesthetics are at least as old as Plato, but ‘Aestheticism’ originates from the early nineteenth century. This is because Aestheticism is neither a theory, nor a philosophy, nor even a field of enquiry, but a set of priorities, born of historical circumstance: the demise of religious certainty and the growth of scientific method. Later in the century it was joined to a lifestyle—‘The Aesthetic Movement’—which involved a taste for Liberty furnishings, Whistlerian painting, japonaiserie, and a certain flexibility in sexual conduct. It was entirely possible to pursue the intellectual interests of Aestheticism along with the transient tastes of the ‘Movement’ (both Oscar Wilde and William Morris did so, in their different ways), but Aestheticism proper is a critical attitude that has survived, with modifications, from the nineteenth to the twentieth century.