'Common-sense, ' the Romantic critics told us, was all that was needed to understand and interpret literary texts. Today, we know this is not generally true. Modern criticism has joined with pre-Romantic criticism to expose common-sense as appropriate (because simple-minded), inadequate to comprehend and interpret verbal structures which are frequently 'non- common]sensical, ' anti-commonsensical, or even nonsensical.
The difference between readers today and their earlier counterparts is that we have lost the full vocabulary of criticism and the consciousness of the literary and...
'Common-sense, ' the Romantic critics told us, was all that was needed to understand and interpret literary texts. Today, we know this is not gener...
