Literary Articles

The place of criticism: A wider view

Jan

2013

What has emerged from this discussion of the reform of English Literature at A-level is that the tension between the specialist discipline of English and the private act of reading is still ongoing. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, this tension took two easily distinguishable forms: the intellectual authority that was used to ...

The new A-level: The treatment of contexts

Jan

2013

Reactions to the revised specifications were mixed. One English teacher, Pamela Bickley, described QCA’s new version of English Literature as ‘positively encouraging’. Its emphasis on contextuality made it a welcome alternative to ‘the A-Level tendency to study a work of literature as a discrete entity that springs to life fully formed’ and offered ‘far less ...

A-level reform: A brief introduction

Jan

2013

The introduction of Curriculum 2000 was the result of a long period of debate about post-compulsory education in England and Wales. The changes it implemented were intended to broaden the post-16 curriculum and increase the number of students choosing to stay on after GCSE. The main focus of its attention was the A-level, a qualification ...

Revising English: Theory and Practice

Jan

2013

The difficulty of resolving the ‘Arnoldian paradox’ – of closing the gap between culture and society so that the former could be brought to bear on the problems of the latter – remained an important theme in the literary criticism of the 1960s and 1970s. During these decades, the need for a stable, humane culture ...

F. R. Leavis: The university and the sage

Dec

2012

Richards’s sense of the narrowness of literary scholarship is apparent in the direction taken by his career. After the publication of Practical Criticism in 1929, he spent relatively little time in Cambridge: in 1934, he was commissioned by the General Education Board in New York to recom- mend a set of improvements in the teaching ...

I. A. Richards: Meaning and value

Dec

2012

Eliot’s rejection of the ‘lemon-squeezer school of criticism’ also adds an ironic twist to Tillyard’s claim that Eliot was himself a central figure in the development of such a school, promoting critical rigour and the need for the ‘minute exegesis’ of difficult texts. By 1956, Eliot had become con- vinced that criticism should be directed ...

Personal authority and the retreat from scholarship

Dec

2012

Such a focus on language gives many of Eliot’s writings a characteristic structure that is at once an echo of Walter Bagehot’s notion of the ‘review-like essay’,33 and a potential blueprint for an academic essay that could demonstrate the capacity for judgement as well as know- ledge that he praised in the work of W. ...

Eliot and scholarship: Method and judgemen

Dec

2012

Eliot had his own doubts about the desirability of an academic form of literary criticism. His misgivings stemmed, in part, from his belief that the qualities needed to be a critic included a kind of taste that developed in a gradual, organic manner, rather than being a skill to be taught. In the Introduction to ...

Eliot and his influence

Dec

2012

The relationships between the work of all three critics are complex. Only seven years separated them in age. Eliot and Richards were close friends whose correspondence spanned some forty years; Leavis was deeply influenced by both Eliot’s poetry and his analysis of the develop- ment of the literary tradition; and Leavis and Richards were contempo- ...

Murry and Orage: Editors and sages

Dec

2012

If Woolf’s criticism was Paterian in its vision of the relationship between reader and text, then that of Murry, and his fellow editor A. R. Orage, was firmly Arnoldian. Both saw literature as essential to the upholding of a certain set of values, generally characterised in terms of an appeal to ‘truths’ that could rescue ...

The importance of difficulty

Dec

2012

On one level, it is easy to see both Murry’s humanism and Woolf’s visions as a means of self-promotion, resting as they do on a personal engagement with the text rather than the detached, analytical methods of the newly professionalised humanities. This, of course, leaves both Woolf and Murry open to many of the charges levelled ...

The common reader: Leisure and idealism

Dec

2012

Woolf’s attempt to validate a non-academic approach to literature is best exemplified by her championing of Samuel Johnson’s figure of the ‘Common Reader’. For Woolf, this figure ‘dignifies [the] aims’ of the ‘private people’ who read in rooms ‘too humble to be called libraries’, the mass of ordinary, non-academic readers.45 The common reader differs from ...

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