Surveying the state of criticism in 1891, Henry James wrote: ‘If literary criticism may be said to flourish among us at all, it certainly flourishes immensely, for it flows through the periodical press like a river that has burst its dikes. The quantity of it is prodigious … Periodical literature is a huge, open mouth which has to be fed – a vessel of immense capacity which has to be filled.’ Filling this maw, James found, was a great deal of uninspired chatter of a generalised, mechanical kind, a deluge of ‘reviewing’ that ‘in general has nothing in common with the art of criticism’: ‘What strikes the observer above all, in such an affluence, is the unexpected proportion the discourse uttered bears to the objects discoursed of – the paucity of examples, of illustrations and productions, and the deluge of doctrine suspended in the void.’

Besides this periodical literature there was also academic scholarship that was either genteel-Arnoldian, concerned with upholding certain moral and social values, or historical-philological, oriented toward establishing literary facts, mainly biographical, and exact texts, some of which – the poems of Donne and other metaphysical poets, for example – would prove essential to the critical revolution that followed. But especially in America, there was little that we today – with our ingrained emphasis on close reading, with our view of literary commentary as professional discourse yet also as a political and social argument – would describe as criticism. Two longtime antagonists, the humanist Paul Elmer More and his iconoclastic opponent, H. L. Mencken, could agree on one thing: the sheer paucity of genuine aesthetic criticism in the first decade of the twentieth century, when each began writing. ‘When I did most of my work’, wrote More, ‘there was almost a critical vacuum in this country and in England … It was something of an achievement – I say it unblushingly – just to keep going in such a desert.’ Mencken said much the same thing. ‘When I began to practice as a critic, in 1908, … it was a time of almost inconceivable complacency and conformity.’

One of the profound ironies of contemporary academic criticism is that, though its practitioners describe themselves as producers and distributors of cultural values, they have been patently unable to acquaint the culture at large with the content of the work they do. There are, of course, many reasons for this, some of them beyond the control of academics. The ‘public sphere’, after all, despite some pockets of freedom and rigour, bears little resemblance to the classical public sphere of eighteenth-century Britain as described, for example, by Jürgen Habermas and Terry Eagleton. Given the prevalence of advertising, publicity, mass media, and manufactured public opinion and consent, little opportunity exists for academics or others to transform the public sphere in to a site of ‘communicative action’, Habermas's term for open and invigorating discourse that brings scientific, moral, and aesthetic evaluation to bear in order to democratise and transform the polity. Nevertheless, despite these difficulties, academics have been increasinglyinterested in exploring their relationship to the public sphere, perhaps more so than at any time since the 1960s. This is due in no small measure to the attacks that have been made on the academy by conservatives, who have alleged that contemporary criticism is responsible for an assault on the canon, on taste, on values, on shared beliefs and practices, and on common sense. In part, too, the renewed interest in the public sphere is the result of frustration following more than two decades during which the dramatic politicisation of literature and criticism has been largely confined to the politics of theory alone, as if such activity could be separated from the politics of the critic as citizen – as voter, as a community member with political beliefs and commitments, as activist.

In 1983 Donald E. Stanford, the justly esteemed editor of Edward Taylor's poems, published Revolution and Convention in Modern Poetry. Subtitled ‘Studies in Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, Edwin Arlington Robinson, and Yvor Winters’, Stanford's book rates the five poets in this sequence on a rising scale of merit from first to last. The book went largely unnoticed, as was customary with critics of Stanford's persuasion: the judgements that he arrived at were so far from those commonly accepted, that the majority seemingly could not find any common ground that would make dispute profitable. Yet Stanford reached those judgements out of a coherent understanding of the poetic tradition in English over the centuries. As he declared in the Southern Review in 1987:

Winters would have named Ben Jonson along with Herbert, and would have reversed the rankings of Pound and Eliot in Stanford's hierarchy. Yet we hear in these comments Yvor Winters still speaking twenty years after his death. Before dismissing such views as merely crotchety, it must be noticed that they come to terms with certain figures that the current consensus is uncertain about. One such is Edwin Arlington Robinson. Another is J. V. Cunningham. And a third is Paul Valéry. More generally the consensus is uneasy with the assumption that poetry is an instrument for evaluating experience; and it is reluctant to legislate for the future, as Stanford does with his concern for ‘better role models’.

‘Form is a way of thinking’, R. P. Blackmur wrote, and form was one of his cherished, recurring words. Yet he cannot plausibly be called a formalist, and it is entirely characteristic of his criticism that he should use an apparently smaller concept – technique – to get him into even larger territories. His approach, he said in 1935, in an essay called ‘A Critic's Job of Work’, was

It may help to suggest that Blackmur's early work concentrated on technique in the first sense, with plenty of glances at the others, while his later work examined technique chiefly in the last sense; and that the middle sense never left him, early or late. This grouping corresponds very roughly to a focus on poetry and poets in the first books – e.g., The Double Agent (1935), The Expense of Greatness (1940) (much of this work reappearing in Language as Gesture (1952) and again in Form and Value in Modern Poetry (1957)) – and on prose and society in the later ones – e.g., The Lion and the Honeycomb(1955), Eleven Essays in the European Novel (1964), A Primer of Ignorance (1967).

More than a quarter-century after his death, Ezra Pound remains the most controversial poet of the twentieth century. For some, his poetry lacks intellectual depth and emotional resonance. Its notoriety is the result of unconventional posing rather than a genuine contribution to the poetic tradition, and the many poets who have been beguiled by his example, chiefly Americans, have been misled into a sterile bypath. For others, his poetry retains a freshness, concreteness, and rhythmic power unmatched by any poet of the twentieth century. His irreverent posturing offers a salutary fillip toward reconsidering the task of poetry in advancing modernity, and his many imitators are a testimony to the enduring power of his achievement. Such conflicting evaluations are further complicated by the ongoing debate about Pound's politics – his interest in Mussolini, which began in 1923 and 1924 (not long after Mussolini's arrival in power in late October 1922), and his later anti-semitism, which swells into a consuming passion during the later 1930s.Pound's position within the canon will always be precarious, if only because his art and his life were equally reckless; and while some deplore the ongoing debate about Pound, viewing it as a slight to his achievement, many welcome it as a sign of the urgency that attaches to the questions posed by his career, questions so central to the intersection of ethics and aesthetics in late modernity that it would be unwise to muffle them with the reverential silence that can attend canonical status. ‘He was one of us only, pure prose’, Robert Lowell once wrote of Mussolini, and much the same might be said of Pound.

The early modern period is an age of poet-critics. At the turn of the twentieth century, as new schools and movements of poetry sprang up throughout Europe, the poets who created them also spread the word of a critical revolution. ‘Ladies and Gentlemen’, Stéphane Mallarmé told his Oxford and Cambridge audiences in 1894, ‘I am truly bringing news. Astonishing news. And never seen before. – We have been meddling with verse.’ Many later poets brought similar news. A flood of essays and lectures and position papers and manifestos accompanied each innovation in style. Indeed, in some cases, such as Marinetti's ‘Manifesto of Futurism’ (1909) or Breton's first Manifesto of Surrealism (1924), the manifesto may have been more influential than the verse it recommended. Nor were these documents merely the public relations or by-products of changes in poetry. Often they served as ‘gunsights’(Ezra Pound's word), forerunners of new composition. Thus Mikhail Kuzmin's Russian manifesto ‘On Beautiful Clarity’(1910) is important less for what it explains or defends than for pointing out critical directions to poets of the future: Gumilev, Akh-matova, Mandelstam. At such times the critic unites with the artist. This interpenetration of criticism and poetry, their mutual influence and vitality, helps to define the early modern period. The leading figures tend not to be poets only, or critics only, but genuine poet-critics.

What accounts for this alliance? Part of the answer may be that it was already long overdue. Poets had been among the best critics since ancient times, so ready to discuss their art that a history of criticism might be composed entirely from their statements. As practical critics, Horace and Dante and Keats have more to say about poems than do Plato, Aquinas, and Hegel.

For reasons soon to be enumerated, Virginia Woolf did not presume, nor openly aspire to take her place among the select company of writer-critics she admired. She would praise, but never mimic ‘the down right vigour of a Dryden, or Keats with his fine and natural bearing, his profound insight and sanity, or Flaubert and the tremendous power of his fanaticism, or Coleridge, above all, brewing in his head the whole of poetry and letting issue now and then one of those profound general statements which are caught up by the mind when hot with the friction of reading as if they were of the soul of the book itself’. Coleridge, indeed, was for her perhaps the greatest, certainly the purest of critics in his exemplary ‘in difference to, in his hatred of, “mere personality”’. Affections may be, as Coleridge affirmed, the ‘best part of humanity’, but the pure critic mounts ‘into an atmosphere where the substance of [human] desires has been shredded by infinite refinements and discriminations of all its grossness’ and the light of criticism ‘is concentrated and confined in one ray – in the art itself’.

By such standards, Woolf does not rate highly as a pure critic of literature. Her criticism, as she openly confessed, was of the grosser sort, adulterated by personal likings or aversions, alloyed by doubts and perplexities. It was, in short, so intent on tracking ‘the flight of the mind’ in all its unpredictable coursings that to capture the soul of the book was an outcome devoutly to be wished, but never confidently expected: ‘The critic may be able to abstract the essence and feast upon it undisturbed, but for the rest of us in every book there is something – sex, character, temperament – which, as in life, rouses affection or repulsion; and, as in life, sways and prejudices; and again, as in life, is hardly to be analysed by the reason.’

It would be tempting to cast a chapter on the ‘Criticism of Fiction’ in the form of its own continuous narrative, and as will shortly appear, the history between 1900 and 1960 does have a plausible beginning and a recognisable middle. But it has no coherent end. In the early years of this century serious reflection on the novel was largely the province of novelist-critics who developed a working theory of fiction based on the exigencies of creative activity, and the first phase of the exposition to follow will trace the unsteady development of critical principles as they emerged not only out of literary practice but also out of heated polemical exchange. Indeed a notable feature of the modern consideration of narrative art is that when it passed from the hands of the novelists into the hands of the professors, it continued to bear the imprint of the local controversies that originally set the terms of discussion. The struggle to free a conception of the novel from narrow partisanship makes a large part of the later history of the problem, but instead of providing a denouement for the conceptual drama, it prepares for the radical transformations of the last decades of the century.

The extraordinary range and wearying quantity of criticism of the novel means that several regions of fruitful thought must be neglected or tautly paraphrased. My hope is that a focus on a particular web of figures and concepts will let us see the inner design of the Anglo-American critical bearing during a period when it remained strikingly impervious to outside influences.

In 1929, in Paleface: The Philosophy of the ‘Melting Pot’, Wyndham Lewis sets out to examine the operations of ‘race-consciousness’ in contemporary fiction and poetry. His subject entails methods and aims far more ambitious than those of ‘literary criticism’, a term he lifts away from his own prose on the tweezers of these inverted commas: ‘these essays do not come under the head of “literary criticism”. They are written purely as investigations into contemporary states of mind, as these are displayed for us by imaginative writers.’ Expanding the centre of attention from literary text to cultural context, Lewis augurs a change in critical ethic and practice that has continued, through the twentieth century, into the flourishing industry of ‘culture studies’. As cultural critic more than cultural student, however, Lewis stands at the root of the contemporary discipline as a most provocative radical, a disturbing witness to the basic tendencies of socially and historically informed readings of literature. For Lewis's emphasis on the cultural grounding of art leads to a thoroughly determinist account, one which he promises, as that last passage continues, as the end and purpose of his inquiry. His essays are ‘intended to set in relief the automatic processes by which the artist or the writer (a novelist or poet) obtains his formularies: to show how the formularies for his progress are issued to him, how he gets them by post, and then applies them’.

Though all literary criticism may be read as implicit commentary on the writer's own practice, Gertrude Stein's is especially self-regarding, always explicitly about her compositional practices. Even the pleasure she takes in viewing paintings, the subject of the least ostensibly literary of her Lectures in America (1935), proves inseparable from her writing. Paradoxically, this is because the two complementary forms of experience do not over lap; every one, Stein declares at once grandly and tentatively, ‘is almost sure to really like something outside of their real occupation’, and in her case ‘looking at pictures’ is ‘the only thing’, apart from her ‘real’ occupation, writing, which she ‘never get[s] tired of doing’. Such self-reflexivity, typical of modernist poetry and fiction yet fairly exceptional in twentieth-century criticism, should not be dismissed as a sign of self-indulgence. Instead, Stein's multiple accounts of herself writing, and of herwriting self, form a trenchant critique of the idealist assumptions which continued to operate in the critical writing of her modernist contemporaries, despite being called into question by their creative work.

Hence, when her concerns become expressly literary near the end of ‘Pictures’, the contrast she makes between the ‘literary ideas’ of painters and those of writers directly leads to a dismissal of that staple of literary criticism, ‘the writer's idea’: ‘Of course the best writers that is the writers who feel writing the most as well as the best painters that is the painters who feel painting the most do not have literary ideas.’ Accordingly, such writing can not properly be understood in terms of the writer's – or in deed any – organising idea, any ‘central thing which has to move’ even if ‘everything else can be quiet’.

Nothing human is alien to Kenneth Burke. He is the least confined of modern critics. It is not simply that he writes about everything: he tries to encompass everything within a system or systems of explanation that have the effect of conservation. In the narrow political sense, Burke is by no means a conservative, and yet one might say, that he is the most ‘conservational’ of critics. The trajectory of Burke's career from the first collection of essays Counter-Statement to The Rhetoric of Religion is a movement of increasing encompassment of all branches of knowledge: literature, sociology, philosophy, linguistics, theology etc. ‘Branches of knowledge’ is misleading, because of the peculiarly idiosyncratic appropriation of them.

How to encompass this most encompassing, yet most personal of critics? The question has been raised, particularly by writers hostile to his enterprise, about whether indeed Burke qualifies as a literary critic. Thus Marius Bewley, one of his severest critics, has noted, ‘how easily, without an exacting critical conscience, Burke's theory moves through art to propaganda, how easily the literary merges into the revolutionary critic’. The occasion for the charge is an extended passage in Attitudes Toward History of which the following sentences should serve:‘Our own program, as literary critic, is to integrate technical criticism with social criticism (propaganda and didactic) by taking the allegiance to the symbol of authority as our subject … And since the whole purpose of a “revolutionary” critic is to contribute to a change in allegiance to the symbols of authority, we maintain our role as “propagandist” by keeping this subject forever uppermost in our concerns.’ Burke's role as revolutionary critic may be only a phase or aspect of his total performance, but it is taken to be expressive of a characteristic disposition in the performance.

For readers over the age of fifty, modernism and the New Criticism are not just terms that refer to a remote and distant past, not just names that stretch across a map of venerable but vanished empires in the history of literary criticism. They evoke places where we have conversed with colleagues, or hours spent with books that still rest upon the shelves, only slightly discoloured with age. New Criticism has perhaps slipped more irretrievably into the past of professional literary studies than modernism, which continues to play a pivotal role in contemporary cultural debate as the governing term in discussions about the notion of ‘the postmodern’. But for a history of literary criticism that is devoted to modernism and the New Criticism, the personal associations of both terms can easily undermine a dispassionate account. The subject extends into the present and lacks the corrective of a tranquil and healing hindsight. Moreover, situated at that troublesome crossroad where professional literary studies (New Criticism) meet with the broader cultural and social transformations of the twentieth century (modernism), it is a subject that engages some of our most passionate views about art and society, intellectuals and public culture.

The ongoing contemporaneity of these subjects inevitably affects the kinds of narration that one might offer, for several reasons. One has to do with the logic of historical insight, its foundations in differing temporal indices. Descriptions of the past are grounded in temporal perspectives derived from the future, or as Jürgen Habermas has expressed it: ‘The historian does not observe from the perspective of the actor but describes events and actions out of the experimential horizon of a history that goes beyond the actor's horizons of expectations.’ Yet insofar as we ourselves are still actors whose horizons of expectations include much that was encompassed in the New Criticism and modernism, it is not immediately self-evident which interpretive framework, which new set of horizons, might best furnish a meaningful historical account of those subjects.

When the twenty-three year old W. B. Yeats praised Ruskin's Unto This Last, his father took offence, and ‘we began to quarrel, for he was John Stuart Mill's disciple. Once he threw me against a picture with such violence that I broke the glass with the back of my head’ (Explorations, 417). Some such encounter happens over and over in Yeats's criticism, whose rhetoric is animated by the language of conflict and combat:

Not only in the Yeats family but in Ireland at large, literary opinions become fighting matters. Padraic Colum's father stood trial (in 1907) for ‘shouting, hissing and booing and stamping his feet’ and ‘using obscene language to the annoyance of the audience’ during one of the notorious first performances of Playboy of the Western World (The Abbey Theatre, p. 132). More recently, the publication of the Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing (1991) inspired public debate and private animosity, with its designation of some Irish writers as ‘English’, its lack of women editors, and its alleged ‘Northern agenda’.

T. S. Eliot became a figure in the tradition he made himself famous by attacking. He was a critic of modern society and modern culture who ended up an icon with in the institution that is one of modernity's moments, the twentieth-century university. This is a fate that may have disappointed him, but it would probably not have surprised him. His sense of historical perversity was pretty complete.

Eliot was a modern partly by temperament. He made a show, in his criticism, of depreciating writers to whom he owed a good deal of his voice as a poet and his principles as a critic. But he was a modern by circumstance, as well. For he could hardly have hoped to make himself the exception to the conditions he analysed with such mordant disapproval. When he criticised modern culture for its lack of a coherent moral ground, and for the idiosyncratic and makeshift value systems it produced to compensate for that lack, he did so in the name of doctrines – ‘royalism’, to take a notorious example – whose idiosyncracy is, to say the least, fairly pronounced. Eliot built his castle out of the stones he found lying around the yard of modernity, just as Wordsworth, Emerson, Arnold, and Pater had built theirs.

Most people are accustomed to drawing a distinction between modern art and literature on the one hand and modern life – the political, social, and economic conditions of modernity – on the other. They think of the first as the antagonist of the second: modern life runs along its track of disenchantment and demystification, and modern art and literature assess the damage.

long before the orthodox onset of the Industrial Revolution, and well before Europe was facing a similar shake up, the traditional urban order in Britain was experiencing the forces of change that were to reshape its character. An important feature of the transformation underway was the emergence of the so-called ‘new towns’, and among these one of the most novel and distinctive categories was watering-places – inland and coastal resorts devoted to the provision of health and leisure. This chapter will examine the evolution of the resort from about 1700 until the arrival of the railways, an event whose influence can be exaggerated but which none the less represented a watershed. Four sets of issues will be explored. First, the chronology and pattern of development. Second, the broad factors responsible for this. Third, the urban status of watering-places, their relationship to other towns providing similar services, and their typology. Fourth, the particular economic, social, political and cultural characteristics of resorts. Because of their newness and distinctive profile, spa and seaside centres provide a litmus test of the urban transformation unfolding in the long eighteenth century. Though apparently very different from the classic ‘new newtowns’ of the Industrial Revolution, they were to form a vital element in the urban network which emerged.

CHRONOLOGY AND PATTERN OF DEVELOPMENT

In Britain the earliest commercial development of spas as a health cure for the social elite dates from the late Tudor and early Stuart era. This parallels the beginnings of a period of discovery and rediscovery of springs in France, though in Italy there seems to have been a network of widely used watering-places since at least the later medieval period, whose clientele included the aristocracy. In the case of Britain, Phyllis Hembry has located the foundation of sixteen spas in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, and there are clear signs of exploitation of the springs at Buxton, Harrogate, Tunbridge Wells and most notably Bath (see Plate 3), which saw substantial investment in the health and visitor facilities.