Word.ws English Dictionary

New Humanism

New Humanism proper noun: a theory of literary criticism developed in the United States around 1900 by Irving Babbitt and Paul Elmer More, opposing Romanticism and emphasizing the moral and spiritual content of literary masterpieces.

Proper noun

New Humanism

  1. A theory of literary criticism developed in the United States around 1900 by Irving Babbitt and Paul Elmer More, opposing Romanticism and emphasizing the moral and spiritual content of literary masterpieces.
    • Similarly, early twentieth-century US-American New Humanism—led by Irving Babbitt and Paul Elmer More—berates American culture and education. New Humanism's basis are the literary and social theories of English poet and critic Matthew Arnold, who seeks to evoke the moral quality of past...2021, Anthony B. Pinn, editor, The Oxford Handbook of Humanism, Oxford University Press, →ISBN, page 303

Questions about New Humanism

What does New Humanism mean?
New Humanism means a theory of literary criticism developed in the United States around 1900 by Irving Babbitt and Paul Elmer More, opposing Romanticism and emphasizing the moral and spiritual content of literary masterpieces.
What part of speech is New Humanism?
New Humanism is a proper noun.

Words near New Humanism in the dictionary

  1. New Hollywood
  2. New Holstein
  3. New Hope
  4. new hotness
  5. New Hudson
  6. New Humanism
  7. New Hyde Park
  8. New Iberia
  9. new immigrant
  10. new immigrants
  11. New Imperialism

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: New Humanism (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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