M. H. Abrams | |
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| Born | Meyer Howard Abrams (1912-07-23)July 23, 1912 Long Branch,New Jersey, U.S. |
| Died | April 21, 2015(2015-04-21) (aged 102) Ithaca, New York, U.S. |
| Other names | Mike Abrams |
| Education | Harvard University (AB,MA,PhD) Magdalene College, Cambridge |
| Alma mater | Harvard University |
| Occupation | Literary critic |
| Known for | The Norton Anthology of English Literature (general editor);The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition (1953);Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature (1971) |
Meyer Howard Abrams (July 23, 1912 – April 21, 2015), usually cited asM. H. Abrams, was an Americanliterary critic, known for works onromanticism, in particular his bookThe Mirror and the Lamp. Under Abrams's editorship,The Norton Anthology of English Literature became the standard text for undergraduate survey courses across the U.S. and a major trendsetter in literary canon formation.
Born inLong Branch, New Jersey, Abrams was the son of Eastern European Jewish immigrants.[1] The son of a house painter and the first in his family to go to college, he enteredHarvard University as an undergraduate in 1930. He went intoEnglish because, he says, "there weren't jobs in any other profession..., so I thought I might as well enjoy starving, instead of starving while doing something I didn't enjoy."[2] After earning his bachelor's degree in 1934, Abrams won a Henry Fellowship toMagdalene College,Cambridge, where his tutor wasI. A. Richards. He returned to Harvard for graduate school in 1935 and received a master's degree in 1937 and a Ph.D. in 1940.[3]
DuringWorld War II, he served at the Psycho-Acoustics Laboratory at Harvard. He describes his work as solving the problem of voice communications in a noisy military environment by establishing military codes that are highly audible and inventing selection tests for personnel who had a superior ability to recognize sound in a noisy background.[4]
In 1945, Abrams became a professor atCornell University. The literary criticsHarold Bloom,Gayatri Spivak andE. D. Hirsch, and the novelistsWilliam H. Gass andThomas Pynchon were among his students.[1][5] He was elected a Fellow of theAmerican Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1963[6] and a member of theAmerican Philosophical Society in 1973.[7] In 1981, Northwestern University awarded him an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters.[8] As of March 4, 2008, he was Class of 1916 Professor of English Emeritus there.[9]
His wife of 71 years, Ruth, predeceased him in 2008.[10] He turned 100 in July 2012.[11] Abrams died on April 21, 2015, in Ithaca, New York, at the age of 102.[12][13]
Abrams offers evidence that until the Romantics, literature was typically understood as a mirror reflecting the real world in some kind of mimesis; whereas for the Romantics, writing was more like a lamp: the light of the writer's inner soul spilled out to illuminate the world.[14] In 1998,Modern Library rankedThe Mirror and the Lamp one of the 100 greatest English-language nonfiction books of the 20th century.[15]
Abrams was the general editor ofThe Norton Anthology of English Literature, as well as the editor of that anthology entitledThe Romantic Period (1798–1832)[16] where he evaluated writers and their reputations. For example, in his introduction toLord Byron, he emphasizes howByronism relates toNietzsche's idea of the superman,[17] and in the introduction toPercy Bysshe Shelley, Abrams says, "The tragedy of Shelley's short life was that intending always the best, he brought disaster and suffering upon himself and those he loved."[18]
Literary theories, Abrams argues, can be divided into four main groups:[19]
