F. R. Leavis: The university and the sage
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 […]
Month: December 2012
I. A. Richards: Meaning and value
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, […]
Personal authority and the retreat from scholarship
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 […]
Eliot and scholarship: Method and judgemen
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 […]
Eliot and his influence
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; […]
Methods and Institutions: Eliot, Richards and Leavis
My discussion of the work of Woolf, Murry and Orage in the previous chapter indicates that the personal authority of the Victorian men of letters continued to be used well […]
Murry and Orage: Editors and sages
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 […]
The importance of difficulty
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 […]
Woolf and Murry: Impressionism and authority
Woolf’s opposition to scholarship and the canon, and her upholding of a method of reading that was emphatically non-institutional, make her search for an authorial persona and an appropriate critical […]
The common reader: Leisure and idealism
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’ […]