Abstract
Cleanth Brooks' critical study on fiction, especially on William Faulkner's, is a remarkable achievement. Brooks claimed that there is no essential difference between fiction criticism, poetry criticism and drama criticism. In fiction criticism, Brooks' emphases remain on textual skills such as irony, paradox and symbol, taking fiction as an organism that should be independent of the social life and political propaganda, and opposing Romantic sentimentalism. Nevertheless, Brooks also lay great weight to the historical context and geographical environment of an author, emphasizing the influence of an author's life experience and entire body of works on a particular fiction, and attaching importance to the role of readers. This shows Brooks' revision on the text centrism of the New Criticism. The paper reflects Brooks' fiction criticism from three aspects: the logical difficulty in close reading of a fiction, the entanglement between the critical pattern and philosophy, and his potential slipping into cultural criticism as his effort to fend the accusation of monism.
First Page
43
Last Page
54
Recommended Citation
Fu, Feiliang, and Shunqing Cao. 2013. "Cleanth Brooks's Theory of Fiction and His Critical Practice." Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art 33, (5): pp.43-54. https://tsla.researchcommons.org/journal/vol33/iss5/3
