The secular wood : literary criticism in the public sphere

The thesis considers the work of six prominent literary critics, all of whom have written for large non-specialist audiences: Samuel Johnson, William Hazlitt, Matthew Arnold, T.S. Eliot, Lionel Trilling and James Wood. The subjects have been chosen because each occupies a distinct historical moment and addresses himself to a distinct critical milieu. Collectively, however, their lives span 300 years of cultural history. "The thesis addresses the various ways in which the six critics construct their public personae, the kinds of arguments they use, and their core principles and philosophies. It considers how they have positioned themselves in relation to the modern tradition of descriptive criticism and the prevailing tendencies of their particular historical period. The thesis proposes that, by virtue of being public critics, they must deal with the problem of presenting themselves as individual voices within the public sphere and must address, through literary criticism and the essay form more generally, the issues of individualism and the social implications of the democratising, secularising, liberalising forces of modernity. This follows from the fact that, as critics, they are necessarily concerned with the status of individual judgement and individual responsiveness. "The thesis is composed of six essay-chapters, one on each critic. Each essay is an attempt to ground these large, somewhat abstract questions in specific instances that give them tangibility. They are also written in such a way that they might be profitably be read by a non-specialist. The style of the thesis is an extension of my own practice as a public critic and is intended to reflect the familiar style in which its subjects wrote