M. H. Abrams

Meyer Howard Abrams is one of the most respected scholar-theorists of the twentieth century. His special field is Romantic poetry and poetics, but he has done scholarly work that draws on encyclopedic historical knowledge of literary theory from all periods, and he has engaged in paradigm-level debates in contemporary literary theory. He has also played a major role as an anthologist, serving, among other things, as founding editor of The Norton Anthology of English Literature (1962). With respect to prominence and influence, his peers include Northrop Frye and Harold Bloom. Like Abrams, Frye and Bloom have scholarly specializations in Romanticism, and both have also done major work as literary theorists. Unlike Frye and Bloom, Abrams is not himself intellectually and imaginatively a Romantic, neither of the Blakean mystical cast, like Frye, nor of the Byronic egoistic cast, like Bloom. Abrams’ chief intellectual affinities are with the Enlightenment and with neo-classical theorists rather than with the Romantics—with Hume, Johnson, and Burke, rather than with Schlegel, Coleridge, and Shelley.

In contemporary critical theory, Abrams has been most active and influential as an urbane but incisive critic of poststructuralism. In contrast to both Frye and Bloom, Abrams produced no distinctively original or idiosyncratic theory of his own. Instead, he occupies a commanding position as one of the most articulate spokesmen for traditional humanism and for “pluralism,” a stance he associates with Wittgenstein. He believes that multiple alternative theories can give access to different aspects of a literary text but that no theory should be given precedence over the body of informed common understanding that constitutes the “humanist literary paradigm” (1997). In Abrams’ conception, the humanist literary paradigm consists of a set of common-sense notions about literary meaning and a critical ethos corresponding to those notions. The common-sense notions are that authors have definite intentions in creating structures of meaning and that those meanings have reference to objectively recognizable phenomena within an actual world shared by the author and his or her readers. The ethos corresponding to these notions is that scholars and critics should conscientiously seek to identify determinate literary meanings grounded in authorial intentions, locate those meanings within a historical and theoretical context, and generously appreciate the imaginative qualities manifested in the works they study.

Jonathan Culler (1997) characterizes poststructuralism as a sustained philosophic critique of common sense. Abrams, in contrast, characterizes it as a programmatic but arbitrary departure from common sense. In formulating an alternative to poststructuralist conceptions of literature, Abrams elevates common sense into a defensible philosophical position. The crucial poststructuralist strategy, he argues, is to invest language or discourse with quasi-autonomous status. By thus detaching language from its natural function as an intermediary in human communication, poststructuralism falsely attenuates the originative power of authors, the individuality of both authors and readers, the reality of the world shared by authors and readers, and the distinct character of specific literary works as intentional communicative artifacts (1995, 1997). (All but two of Abrams’ most important theoretical essays [1995, 1997] are collected in Doing Things with Texts [1989].)

Abrams produced two massive tomes of historical scholarship: The Mirror and the Lamp (1953) and Natural Supernaturalism (1971). These two books are supplemented by several major essays collected in The Correspondent Breeze (1984), and in particular by “Structure and Style in the Greater Romantic Lyric.”

In the introduction to The Mirror and the Lamp, Abrams constructs a taxonomic model encompassing, he suggests, all possible forms of literary theory. He identifies four elements that constitute the natural environment in which literature is produced and read: an author, a reader, a shared world, and a text. Abrams argues that all literary theories can be classified by the relative emphasis they place on one of these four elements. Expressive theories emphasize the author; rhetorical or “pragmatic” theories emphasize effects on readers; mimetic theories emphasize representations of the world and “objective” theories emphasize the formal organization of the literary work. As simple as this model is, Abrams makes a convincing case, documented in detail, that these four elements can effectively distinguish literary theories from the time of Plato and Aristotle up through the mid-twentieth century. Applying this model to his particular subject in The Mirror and the Lamp, Abrams argues that the transformations of aesthetic theory between the neo-classical and Romantic periods can best be described as a shift from mimetic to expressive theories.

In Natural Supernaturalism, Abrams interprets the Romantic poets, and especially Wordsworth, in such a way that they become congenial to a reader, like himself, who does not resonate to mystical themes. He mutes the transcendental aspects of Romantic poetry and concentrates on its social, political, and artistic aspects. He thus aims at making Romanticism more relevant to the needs and concerns of modern readers. In “Structure and Style in the Greater Romantic Lyric,” adopting a more simply historical, scholarly stance, Abrams astutely analyzes the transcendental philosophy that undergirds the Romantic world view.

REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS

Abrams, M. H. (1953). The mirror and the lamp: Romantic theory and the critical tradition. New York: Oxford University Press.

Abrams, M. H. (1971). Natural supernaturalism: Tradition and revolution in romantic literature. New York: Norton.

Abrams, M. H. (1984). The correspondent breeze: Essays on English Romanticism. New York: Norton.

Abrams, M. H. (1989). Doing things with texts: Essays in criticism and critical theory (ed. Michael Fischer). New York: Norton.

Abrams, M. H. (1995). “What is a humanistic criticism?” In D. Eddins (ed.), The emperor redressed: Critiquing critical theory. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press.

Abrams, M. H. (1997) “The transformation of English studies: 1930-1995.” Daedalus 126(1), 105-32.

Abrams, M. H., & Harpham, G. (2008). A glossary of literary terms, 9^th edn. New York: Wadsworth.

Abrams, M. H., et al. (1962). The Norton Anthology of English Literature, 2 vols. New York: Norton.

Culler, Jonathan. (1997). Literary theory: A very short introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press.