Critical Revolutionaries: Five Critics Who Changed the Way We Read

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 crit...