Literary Criticism, Volume 5

This final volume of Leslie Stephen's essays on literary criticism include trenchant pieces on many of the leading writers of Victorian England: the novelists Charlotte Brontë, Charles Kingsley, and Edward Bulwer-Lytton; the historians Thomas Babington Macaulay and Thomas Carlyle; the cultural critic John Ruskin; and the poet Robert Browning. This volume also includes Stephen's three essays on American literature-on the novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne, the poet James Russell Lowell, and American dialect humor of the mid-19th century. In addition, Stephen wrote a comprehensive essay on the novels of Honoré de Balzac as well as a searing review of the deficiencies of Hippolyte Taine's History of English Literature. As in all his essays, Stephen here displays a sensitivity to the philosophical and aesthetic thought behind literary works as well as a deep humanity that is not afraid to pass moral judgments on authors and their works. His criticism was pioneering in his day and remains a vital contribution to the literature of its era.