Morris Croll and the Structure of Literary Revolutions

A century ago, Morris Croll developed a combinatory theory of novelty that challenged both the Romantic and evolutionary models of artistic innovation by accentuating the interdisciplinary network of writers who ushered in “a self-conscious modernism” during the early modern period. Instead of an isolated genius or blind social forces, Croll identified a diffuse group of lawyers, logicians, schoolteachers, scientists, playwrights, priests, poets, and politicians who all challenged the Ciceronian period, preparing the way for a new baroque style that enabled avant-gardists to not only express their ideas but capture the embodied mind in motion. In this essay, I read Croll’s history of seventeenth-century modernism within the context of the interwar years in which it was developed, examining how Croll’s thesis regarding the general structure of literary revolutions might be applied to the literary revolution that was taking place as he was writing his major essays.