Focusing on dramatic criticism, this book explores the self authorizing strategies of writers such as Jonson, Dryden, Aphra Behn, Thomas Rymer, Jeremy Collier and Joseph Addison. Cannan focuses on how they established themselves as critics, and paved the way for the birth of dramatic criticism in seventeenth and early eighteenth-century England.Introduction The Author as Critic The 'Laughing Critick' The Parson Turn'd Critick 'Criticks by Profession' The Journalistic Critic from The Gentleman's Journal to The SpectatorPAUL D. CANNAN is Assistant Professor, University of Minnesota, USA.