In this book, Catherine LeGouis examines the work of three nineteenth-century positivist critics, each of whom struggled to overcome the contradictions of attempting to separate esthetic, psychological, and sociological concerns from individual subjectivity.

These positivists - staunch believers in the authority of scientific reason inspired by Auguste Comte, J. S. Mill, and Hippolyte Taine - attempted to turn literary criticism into an exact science that would observe and explain not only the social context of literature, but also its esthetics, without recourse to subjectivity based on individual reactions.

The writings of Emile Hennequin, a French journalist, editor, and literary critic of the 1880s, exemplify the tensions between the positivists' drive to systematic literary criticism and the unfettered imagination inherent in literature.

Dmitrii Pisarev, a firebrand Russian literary critic of the 1860s and a younger colleague of the great Russian radicals Nikolai Chernyshevsky and Nikolai Dobroliubov, combines rigid positivism and a rejection of esthetics with great critical sensitivity and spectacular displays of imaginative literary skill. From the mid-1860s to the mid-1880s, German philologist and critic Wilhelm Scherer, more doctrinaire than Hennequin or Pisarev, links linguistic development and national character.

The positivists proposed theoretical frameworks so rigid that they were impossibly impractical, which guaranteed that only with infusions of imagination could their systems attain any credibility. Their fascination with the impossibility of impersonal, absolute literary judgements paradoxically became their first surrender to subjective taste, for choosing a system, even one based on objectivity, is an exercise in subjectivity.

Entranced by their self-defeating objective, the positivists failed to appreciate that subjectivity and imagination are not illusions to be expunged, but a valuable - and fundamental - part of reality.