George Saintsbury - Literary Criticism

Literary Criticism

His first book, A Primer of French Literature (1880), and his Short History of French Literature (1882), were followed by a series of editions of French classics and of books and articles on the history of French literature, which made him the most prominent English authority on the subject. His studies in English literature were no less comprehensive, and included the valuable revision of Sir Walter Scott's edition of John Dryden's Works (Edinburgh, 18 vols., 1882–1893), Dryden (1881) in the "English Men of Letters" series, History of Elizabethan Literature (1887), History of Nineteenth Century Literature (1896), A Short History of English Literature (1898, 3rd ed. 1903), an edition of the Minor Poets of the Caroline Period (2 vols., 1905–1906), a collection of rare poems of great value, and editions of English classics. He coined the term "Janeite" for a fan of Jane Austen in his introduction to a 1894 edition of Pride and Prejudice.

At the turn of the century, Saintsbury edited and introduced an English edition of Honoré de Balzac's novel series La Comédie humaine, translated by Ellen Marriage and published in 1895-8 by J. M. Dent. He went on to edit the series of "Periods of European Literature," contributing the volumes on The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory (1897), and The Earlier Renaissance (1901). He subsequently produced some of his most important works, A History of Criticism (3 vols., 1900–1904), with the companion volume Loci Critici, Passages Illustrative of Critical Theory and Practice (Boston, U.S.A., and London, 1903), and A History of English Prosody from the 12th Century to the Present Day (i., 1906; ii., 1908; iii., 1910); also The Later Nineteenth Century (1909).