Terry Eagleton looks back across sixty years to an extraordinary
critical milieu that transformed the study of literature
Before the First World War, traditional literary scholarship was
isolated from society at large. In the years following, a younger
generation of critics came to the fore. Their work represented a
reaction to the impoverishment of language in a commercial, utilitarian
society increasingly under the sway of film, advertising, and the
popular press. For them, literary criticism was a way of diagnosing
social ills and had a vital moral function to perform.
Terry Eagleton reflects on the lives and work of T. S. Eliot, I. A.
Richards, William Empson, F. R. Leavis, and Raymond Williams, and
explores a vital tradition of literary criticism that today is in danger
of being neglected. These five critics rank among the most original and
influential of modern times and represent one of the most remarkable
intellectual formations in twentieth-century Britain. This was the
heyday of literary modernism, a period of change and
experimentation--the bravura of which spurred on developments in
critical theory.
