Critical revolutionaries Five critics who changed the way we read

Literary theorist, critic, and expositor Eagleton here focuses on five critics who had an early and lasting influence on the practice and field of literary criticism. Through close readings of his subjects' works, Eagleton provides a balanced evaluation, noting the sources as well as the prejudices, parochial beliefs, and progressive positions alike. T. S. Eliot is deemed a "master craftsman" in his quest for a "qualitative history of experience." I. A. Richards, recognized as an early theorist who believed literary studies should be a branch of psychology, was an egalitarian rather than an elitist. William Empson was perhaps "the cleverest critic," while F. R. Leavis espoused rigorous judgment and deplored popular culture as "uniformly barren." Raymond Williams, "the greatest socialist thinker of post-war Britain," popularized and advanced the field of cultural studies. Eagleton measures the influence of politics and religion, Marx and Freud, modernism and capitalism, and their respective intersection with the arts. These five critics asked how literature reflects society and subsequently serves as a measure of the life that produced it. Their answers varied, but their arguments were powerful and they each proved highly impactful.

Literary critic Eagleton (Tragedy) explores in this erudite survey the work of five literary critics who developed and popularized a form of analysis built on a belief that "the close reading of literary texts was a profoundly moral activity which cut to the heart of modern civilisation." He starts with T.S. Eliot, the only American-born of the group, who advocated for a criticism that involved "severing the work from its producer," in which "a reader's interpretation may be quite as valid as the author's own."I.A. Richards developed ideas of literary theory and the practice of "practical criticism," sharing Eliot's belief that the reader's emotional response was just as important, if not more so, than their intellectual experience. Richards's student William Empson, "perhaps the cleverest critic England has ever produced," argued for judging poetry by the same "rational standards of argument," and F.R. Leavis built an international reputation through his magazine Scrutiny. The book closes on Raymond Williams, who evolved the ideas of his predecessors from literary criticism into a new discipline, cultural studies. Along with shrewd analysis, Eagleton exhibits great wit, describing Eliot, for example, as an "unstable compound of bourgeois stuffiness and literary saboteur." This will delight scholars and students alike. (May)