Abstract
The purpose of this thesis is to analyze the critical position of a group of literary critics centered at the University of Chicago. A selection of their essays, edited by Ronald Salmon Crane, was published by the University of Chicago Press in 1952 under the title Critics and Criticism, Ancient and Modern. These essays contain formal statements of the Chicago school’s critical methodology and of their philosophical substrate, particularly in the works of Crane, Richard McKeon, and Elder Olson. |There are four chapters in this thesis. The first contains an outline of the Chicago school’s critical position. The second contains some observations about their methodology. The third chapter compares the Chicago criticism with two comprehensive critical theories, those of Wayne Schumaker and of Rene Wellek and Austin Warren. The fourth, and last, chapter concludes with some suggestions for extending the Chicago form-and-structure criticism into a comprehensive critical system.