ENGLISH LITERATURE (CBSE/UGC NET)

Detailed explanation-1: -Longinus as the first Romantic critic: Scott James calls Longinus ‘the first Romantic critic’ because of his insistence on passion, ecstasy, transport, imagination, intensity and exaltation. There are the romantic traits breathed by Longinus in the aesthetic criticism of the classical age.

Detailed explanation-2: -Longinus is termed differently by different critics; he is called as the first romantic critic by Saintsbury, while Atkins finds “a balance between romantic temper, classical and technical excellence of art", in Longinus.

Detailed explanation-3: -Longinus, also called Dionysius Longinus or Pseudo-Longinus, (flourished 1st century ad), name sometimes assigned to the author of On the Sublime (Greek Peri Hypsous), one of the great seminal works of literary criticism.

Detailed explanation-4: -Scott James hails him as the first romantic critic whereas prof. Atkins admires him as a great classical critic. In fact, Longinus is a classicist in taste, romantic in temper and an idealist at heart. He anticipated much that is modern in critical world.

Detailed explanation-5: -Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Hazlitt, Lamb, Leigh Hunt, and De Quincey all contributed to critical literature. But the main critics who gave a direction to the current of literary criticism were Coleridge, Lamb, Hazlitt and De Quincey. All of them have often been categorized as “Romantic Critics.”