From Critic to Literary Critic: the Case of The Academy, 1869

Abstract

In the last decade, after intensive policing, the boundaries of English literature, like those of Germany and the Soviet Union, have fallen, and exiled elements such as language, history, philosophy, gender and anthropology have moved in to transform the nature and definition of the subject.¹ Interdisciplinarity, intertextuality and plurality now occupy the place of what was formerly understood as a more unified subject. Moreover, the cumulative critique of modernism, by structuralism rooted in anthropology; by post-structuralism rooted in philosophy, rhetoric, and linguistics; and by postmodernism, has not only embraced catholicity and diversity, but has excluded judgement and, in the case of postmodernism, has yoked low and high culture in a discursive continuum. At a stroke, over the last two decades, critical space has been created for the study and inclusion of periodicals within the categories of ‘literature’ and ‘Eng. Lit.’. To students of Victorian periodicals, the twentieth-century preoccupation with definitions of literature and non-literature by modernists such as René Wellek, Austin Warren and F.R. Leavis, and the related obsession with standards and hierarchies of individual works and authors, have called attention dramatically to the institutionalisation and specialisation that the field of literature has undergone since 1900.