In 1983, I took a course in American literature under Dr Richard Godden at the University of Keele. The course was entitled ‘The Southern Renaissance’, and alongside writers such as William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, and Erskine Caldwell, we read and studied works by John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, and Robert Penn Warren, who were influential both as Southern writers and as leading figures in the American New Criticism. At this time I was also interested in structuralist and post-structuralist theory, and I had done a great deal of work on theorists such as Saussure, Barthes, Althusser, Lacan and Derrida. For most of their English and American followers, these theories were seen as a reaction against the existing dominant positions in philosophy and literary theory. In literary theory, these dominant positions were associated with F. R. Leavis in England and the New Criticism in America. What struck me at this time was that the positions which I had identified in the works which Ransom, Tate, and Warren had produced during the Southern Renaissance seemed to contradict the positions attributed to them as New Critics. In fact I was impressed by the similarities between the positions of the New Critics and those of the post-structuralists themselves, and I decided that a major reappraisal of the origins, practices, and impacts of the New Criticism was necessary. This book is a contribution to that reappraisal.