Director of the Liaison Program
Research & Engagement
Literary Commentary throughout History
Listed below are resources that can help you learn about how some of these great works have been written about throughout history. Throughout history it has been called many different things: exegesis, scholia, glosses, aesthetics, poetics, commentary, critique, criticism.
The resources below are from the Oxford Bibliographies, which are scholarly research recommendations from academic experts. Many of these bibliographies will provide examples of the literature of literary criticism, as well as examples of compiled primary sources of historical literary criticism.
Medieval Thought
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Medieval studies - Oxford bibliographies online This link opens in a new window
Offers peer-reviewed annotated bibliographies on European and Mediterranean civilization from the 4th to the 15th centuries. Very useful for introductions to the scholarship of a field and key critical works.
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Classics in the Middle AgesThis article deals primarily with the transmission and reception in western Europe of classical Greek and Latin texts written before 525 CE and focuses on the Latin tradition.
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Early Italian HumanistsDecades before the traditional “father of humanism” Francesco Petrarca (Petrarch), writers such as Lovato dei Lovati and Albertino Mussato were fascinated by the study, emulation, and critical assessment of the classical world.
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Medieval Latin Commentaries on Classical MythAs the abundance of extant medieval commentaries attests, classical mythology presented several conundrums for medieval audiences. The historical distance between the writers of classical myths and their medieval readers prompted numerous scholars to reframe and even rewrite their sources to ameliorate challenges ranging from complicated classical Latin syntax to theological conflicts between pagan polytheism and Christian monotheism. Despite its polytheism, classical mythology became a source for manifold medieval erudition, beginning with the grammatical studies that introduced students to Latin literacy.
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Ovid in the Middle AgesThis article focuses on the academic study of, and literary engagement with, Ovid’s works in the medieval period, from the 12th to the 15th centuries.
Renaissance Thought
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Renaissance and Reformation - Oxford bibliographies. This link opens in a new window
Offers peer-reviewed annotated bibliographies on the period of the Renaissance and Reformation, which spans roughly from the 14th through 17th centuries. Very useful for introductions to the scholarship of a field and key critical works.
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Art of PoetryThe art of poetry has deep roots within the western tradition, but since poetry was one of the five disciplines that the humanist educational reform privileged, the analysis of poetry on the theoretical level and practical instructions on how to write a good poem flourished in the Renaissance. Since Renaissance humanism predicated a search for ancient models, Horace’s Art of Poetry, Aristotle’s Poetics, and (to a lesser extent) Plato’s observations on poetry provide a foundation for inquiry.
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Augustinianism in Renaissance ThoughtIt is hard to overestimate the enduring impact that St. Augustine of Hippo (b. 354–d. 430) has exerted on the development of Western thought, from its most personal expressions to its broadly cultural reflections. Theology, philosophy, literature, visual arts, even politics—all were pervasively influenced by the Church Father’s thought and its reverberations through the ages.
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The BibleThe primary texts for the Renaissance were the works of Greek and Roman writers. For the Reformation, however, only one text mattered: the Bible.
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The Church Fathers in Renaissance and Reformation ThoughtIt is now accepted that some—or even most—humanist scholars of the Renaissance were interested in Christian antiquity as well as its pagan counterpart, and that patristic writings mattered for Protestant as well as Catholic authors of the Reformation. This bibliography gathers the works that have proven to be essential points of reference for this historiographical shift, or that point to topics that merit further exploration in this still relatively new field of inquiry.
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The Classical TraditionEven the word “Renaissance” (“rebirth” in French) points to the effort to revive the learning of antiquity that motivated the intellectual elite of that era—for what sprang forth was an urgent awareness of the ancient past, prompting innovations in both ideas and the arts. The classical tradition, accordingly, has long played a central role in Renaissance studies.
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HistoriographyHistory was one of the main disciplines identified with the humanist movement; Renaissance humanists wrote many works of history and edited, translated, and published the historical works of ancient predecessors.
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Literary CriticismA product of the revival of classical Greek and Roman culture known as humanism, Renaissance literary criticism took root in defenses of poetry and dialogues on language and literary imitation in Italy in the 14th and 15th centuries.
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Lucretius in Renaissance ThoughtEven before its celebrated rediscovery by Poggio Bracciolini in 1417, Lucretius’s didactic Epicurean epic De rerum natura was famous as a Roman masterpiece celebrated by Virgil and Ovid, and infamous as a capsule of dangerous, irreligious paganism ferociously denounced by Arnobius and other Christian apologists.
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Ovid in Renaissance ThoughtThe influence of Ovid, one of the key canonical authors in Latin literature, on post-classical literature, art, and culture is perhaps even more extensive than that of Virgil. Central to the importance of his reception is his long hexameter poem the Metamorphoses, an encyclopedia of mythological narratives, and which has been described as “the painters’ bible” for the Renaissance. The wide variety of Ovid’s other works fed other streams of Renaissance literature.
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Platonism, Neoplatonism, and the Hermetic TraditionThe trends of Platonism which proved to be the most influential throughout the Renaissance were born roughly around the same period as the Greek corpus attributed to the Egyptian sage Hermes Trismegistus.
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RhetoricThe humanists of the Italian Renaissance proposed to restore classical Latin, and along with it, the full classical art of rhetoric.
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TranslationIn the early years of the 15th century, Renaissance humanists insisted that the capacity to translate texts from Greek and Hebrew into Latin, and later into and between vernacular tongues, was a critical aspect of grammar and rhetoric.
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Virgil in Renaissance ThoughtAs one of the key canonical authors in Latin literature, Virgil came to occupy an important place in the culture of the period as humanism positioned the classics at the center of Renaissance education. The spread of printing made his poetry accessible in the far corners of Europe and the Americas, with translations extending Virgil’s reach to those who could not read Latin. From this base, Virgilian material reappears throughout the art, literature, and music of the period.
Early Modern Thought
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Victorian literature - Oxford bibliographies This link opens in a new window
Offers peer-reviewed annotated bibliographies on the literature of the Victorian period, which encompasses the reign of Queen Victoria from 1837 to 1901. Very useful for introductions to the scholarship of a field and key critical works.
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American Literature - Oxford Bibliographies This link opens in a new window
Offers peer-reviewed annotated bibliographies on American Literature. Very useful for introductions to the scholarship of a field and key critical works.
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British and Irish literature - Oxford bibliographies This link opens in a new window
Offers peer-reviewed annotated bibliographies on British and Irish Literature. Very useful for introductions to the scholarship of a field and key critical works.
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The Christian ChurchThe changes and challenges to religion are one of the defining features of the Victorian period and its literature, and these continue to be one of the key literary-critical loci in scholarly discussion. From the very public debates that arose out of advances in biblical criticism and the biological and geological sciences, to the various radical movements that either came to prominence in the Victorian era (the High Church revivalism of the Tractarians, for example) or moved into controversial new phases (Evangelicalism, among both Anglicans and nonconformists), the Christian Church remained one of the focal points for writers throughout the 19th century.
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Classical AntiquityReferences to ancient Greece and Rome abound in Victorian literature and culture. Although classical studies are often associated with the elite, there is evidence in sources from textbooks to periodicals to the popular stage that Greek epic and tragedy, Roman history, and artifacts and accounts of archaeological discoveries reached a wide audience. Fascination with Greek culture developed in the Romantic period as a reaction against Augustanism and remained strong throughout the century, with cultural critics such as Matthew Arnold insisting on the relevance of Hellenism to the concerns of the present day. Victorian authors also found new significance in the Roman inheritance.
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The Epic TraditionEpic occupied a prominent position as the highest test of poetic genius, yet any poet imprudent enough to attempt an epic would be faced with a daunting challenge. For a Victorian poet the attempt to rival Homer or Virgil involved complex considerations of form, theme, and history. The genre was traditionally associated with heroism and masculine strength, mythology, and the shaping of national identity, religion, and war, and with the poet’s own desire to compete with and surpass his predecessors much as epic heroes seek to prove their own supremacy. The reception of ancient epic was an ongoing concern in the period, since Homer in particular was cited as a model in literature, politics, and morality.
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Myth and Victorian LiteratureMyth is a prominent part of the Victorian engagement with the past and the present, and myths were essential to the Victorians’ conception of themselves. Before the eighteenth century, myth usually refers to the inherited stories of the Greeks and Romans, but, with expanded exploration through travel and scholarship, this gradually widened to include mythologies belonging to other cultures.
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The Bible and American LiteratureIt is a critical commonplace that the King James Bible served as the moral and cultural foundation for the Reformed Protestant community—a People of the Book—that developed in Puritan and colonial America and then continued in this role in the newly established United States well into the twentieth century.
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The English Bible and LiteratureThe centrality of the Bible to Anglophone culture and to its literature is evident and everywhere. No work has sunk so far into the marrow of the culture and had such diverse meanings for different ages.
Modern Literacy Criticism
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Literary and critical theory - Oxford bibliographies This link opens in a new window
Offers peer-reviewed annotated bibliographies on literary and critical theory. Very useful for introductions to the scholarship of a field and key critical works.
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Johns Hopkins guide to literary theory & criticism This link opens in a new window
Presents a comprehensive historical survey of the field's most important figures, schools, and movements.
