Soliciting Interpretation: Literary Theory and Seventeenth-Century English Poetry (review)

In the Introduction to Soliciting Interpretation, Elizabeth D. Harvey and Katharine Eisaman Maus justify the subtitle of the book by ascribing theoretical affinities to the critics included, thus providing a rationale for their assembly of a dozen essays, which are, with the exception of Maureen Quilligan's essay on the poems from Mary Wroth's Urania (1621), on "major authors" (Shakespeare, Jonson, Donne, Herbert, and Milton). What, then, is the principle of inclusion in an anthology which purports to react against the "high formalism" of predecessors (T.S. Eliot, for instance), to think of "the relationship between literature and history in a new way" (p. x), and to challenge the "New Critical canon" (p. xiv) — that historical consequence of settled opinion on "intrinsic excellences" (p. xiv). As for the book's organization, the editors concede that, although they have grouped the essays which "might fruitfully be considered together," other arrangements — or even a random mix of the twelve parts — might serve as well. So one section is "political," even though the assumption seems to be that all criticism— even criticism which purports to escape the "real world" of economic and political strife by resorting to an aesthetics of "art for art's sake" — is of necessity political. The editors praise the "new historicists" for having overcome the limits of criticism unmindful of "structures of political authority," past and present, implying that they have accomplished this critical wonder by a mere shift in reading interest: