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- raries at Cambridge, although relations between them were strained (Leavis felt that Richards should have … Read the rest
Author: bookworm
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 into the twentieth century, to underwrite judgements about literature that were set in opposition to the values of scholarship. All three of these critics drew on a rhetoric that helped to surround their status with a certain mystique, allowing little … Read the rest
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 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 age from the social and spiritual prob- lems it faced. Indeed, Orage chose an … Read the rest
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 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 at literary criticism when its entry into university syllabuses was first mooted: that it … Read the rest
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 method- ology seem less the product of gender alone than the result of a complex set of intellectual and institutional factors, in which gender neverthe- less played an important part. It is certainly significant that there are parallels between Woolf’s … Read the rest
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’ 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 ‘the critic and the scholar’ in that he is
worse educated, and nature has not … Read the rest
Virginia Woolf: Criticism as private experience
It is difficult to approach Virginia Woolf without being conscious not only of her Modernism, but also of her relationship to the concept of a feminine sensibility. Because many of Woolf’s subjects are women, and because the method of reading she advocates is linked closely to her attempts to explore the ‘unknown and uncircumscribed spirit’13 of woman, it is easy
to see how her criticism has been read as wholly … Read the rest
Criticism and the Modernists: Woolf, Murry, Orage
The resistance to literary scholarship, in the form of a set of critical philos- ophies that emphasised the relationship between text and reader over the codes and practices of academic study, was to become a recurring theme in the arguments about academic English that took place over the next few decades. Significantly, this debate about different forms of literary knowledge took place not just within the universities, but also in … Read the rest
The analysis of Shakespeare
The literary histories of Courthope, Gosse and Saintsbury, written in the closing years of the nineteenth century, exemplify two markedly different approaches to the genre that draw on the opposing techniques of schol- arship and criticism. Such differences are also apparent in early twentieth- century studies of Shakespeare, which can be used to illustrate the ambivalent attitudes of certain early professors of English towards recent developments in academic methodology. This … Read the rest
Literary history: Scholarship and narrative
The personal forms of authority to which these professors clung stand at an ironic distance from the courses outlined in Chapter 2, in which the factual bodies of knowledge associated with the text’s language, sources and historical background offered themselves as a ready solution to the problem of how literary knowledge could be taught and examined. As we have seen, such knowledge soon became central to the emerging discipline of … Read the rest