Literary Criticism

The place of criticism: A wider view

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… Continue reading The place of criticism: A wider view

Literary Criticism

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 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… Continue reading F. R. Leavis: The university and the sage

Literary Criticism

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… Continue reading Virginia Woolf: Criticism as private experience

Literary Criticism

The importance of Classics: The literary tradition

These suspicions about the academic validity of the study of English literature were also apparent at Cambridge, where once again they crystal- lised around the inauguration of a professorship, the King Edward VII Professorship of English Literature. This Professorship was established in 1910 as the result of a donation from the newspaper magnate Sir Harold… Continue reading The importance of Classics: The literary tradition