The Humanist Critic: Lionel Trilling and Edward Said

The Humanist Critic examines the careers of Lionel Trilling and Edward Said in two contexts: on one hand, it focuses on the changing shape of literary criticism as it occurred alongside the advent of critical theory and, on the other hand, it addresses each critic’s understanding of the gradual emergence of modernism in the nineteenth-century. Nutters argues that Trilling and Said each drew upon their favorite modern writers to reimagine the role of the humanist tradition at a time when the...