An interpretive approach to current literary criticism grounded in critical histories combined with an openness to the unpredictability of reading

Rethinking the relationship of current literary criticism to the discipline’s past, Reading the Literary Past presents an interpretive approach to literary criticism grounded in critical histories rather than methods, attentive to the idiosyncrasy of reading and the contingencies influencing it.

Andrew Mattison combines an openness to the unpredictability of reading—the potential autonomy that individual interpretive acts have from the background or ideology of the critic—with a pragmatic approach that acknowledges the interpretive effects of happenstance or unsought contingencies, particularly the resources (including books) available to a critic. Examining a series of individual encounters between readers and old texts, Mattison explores the questions that have animated literary interpretation in the past and present as it has grappled with canonical authors such as Milton, Shakespeare, and Donne—from critics as diverse as Mark Pattison, Rosalie Colie, and Edward Said, to less well-known figures such as Abraham Cowley and Dorothy Osborn.

Mattison demonstrates how literary critics, despite their theoretical sophistication, are never fully able to get away from the interpretive concerns that sustained earlier scholarship, despite the political and institutional pressures on the act of literary interpretation. Reading the Literary Past shows how the recurring problems, revelations, and failures of criticism suggest ways of sustaining the critical vocation in the face of ongoing threats to the humanities.