![]() ![]() ![]() Yet his writing on English literature is of recognized merit, he has been highly praised by men like Victor Giraud and George Saintsbury, and his complete Shakespeare is one of the major French translations of the poet. A modest and retiring person, who saw only grounds for pessimism in the political trends of the nineteenth century, who felt a nostalgic longing for a supposedly more stable and well-ordered past, who feared the progress and consequences of industrialism, Montégut might seem the least likely of critics to judge American literature rightly and with sympathetic understanding. It is an interesting fact that American literature received its first extensive treatment in France not from an admirer of American democracy, but from a political conservative, an opponent of the French Revolution. Although Emile Montégut's work on American writers has been given some attention, there has been little attempt to assess the validity and significance of his criticism. ![]()
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