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Contexts for Criticism, 4/e
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Mimetic Criticism: Reality as Context
Essay Questions
1
Many of the earliest novels employed realistic techniques modelled after journalism and letter writing (cf. Ian Watt's
The Rise of the Novel
on the advent of the bourgeouis reading public in 18
th
-century England). Epistolary novels continue to be popular nearly three centuries later ("The Yellow Wallpaper" is one example of the genre). Critique the virtues and shortcomings of the epistolary technique from a mimetic critical perspective.
2
It is often said that the British Romantic poets rejected the Johnsonian mimetic esthetic of the 18
th
-century -- that Wordsworth and Coleridge conceived of poetry as a "lamp" whose purpose was to shed new light on reality, rather than a "mirror" that merely reflected it (cf. M.H. Abrams's classic
The Mirror and the Lamp
). In the Preface to the
Lyrical Ballads
, however, Wordsworth argues for the realism of "plain diction" as an alternative to the allegedly artificial language of neoclassical 18
th
-century poetry. What does this (apparent) contradiction say about the underlying paradox of mimetic criticism?
2003 McGraw-Hill Higher Education
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