the tradition handed down to the present by the 'progressive' epochs of the past was a set of compelling norms, a mortmain that literary legatees must honour on pain of disinheritance
[...] The idea that there are 'non-political' forms of criticism is simply a myth which furthers certain political uses of literature all the more effectively. [...] It is a distinction between different forms of politics--between those who subscribe to the doctrine that history, society and human …
Another reason why literary criticism cannot justify its self-limiting to certain works by an appeal to their 'value' is that criticism is part of a literary institution which constitutes these works as valuable in the first place. [...] Shakespeare was not great literature lying conveniently to ha…
[...] Some traditional critics would appear to hold that other people subscribe to theories while they prefer to read literature 'straightforwardly'. No theoretical or ideological predilections, in other words, mediate between themselves and the text: to describe George Eliot's later world as one o…
