Conrad and the new Literary Institution of Modernism

Refocusing of style and aims of literature by Modernist writers - lays the basis for English Studies in 1920s in England and, eventually, the New Criticism. Here's a little of that history:

From Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction (1983). From his chapter "The Rise of English."

The literary map was in fact already being drawn elsewhere, by a body of criticism which influenced Leavis greatly. In 1915 T. S. Eliot had come to London, son of an 'aristocratic' St Louis family whose traditional role of cultural leadership was being eroded by the industrial middle class of their own nation. Repelled like Scrutiny by the spiritual barrenness of industrial capitalism, Eliot had glimpsed an alternative in the life of the old American South -- yet another candidate for the elusive organic society, where blood and breeding still counted for something. Culturally displaced and spiritually disinherited, Eliot arrived in England, and in what has rightly been described as 'the most ambitious feat of cultural imperialism the century seems likely to produce', began to carry out a wholesale salvage and demolition job on its literary traditions. The Metaphysical poets and Jacobean dramatists were suddenly upgraded; Milton and the Romantics were rudely toppled; selected European products, including the French Symbolists, were imported. (38)

Eliot's view that language had become stale and unprofitable in industrial society, unsuitable for poetry, had affinities with Russian Formalism; but it was also shared by Ezra Pound, T. E. Hulme and the Imagist movement. Poetry had fallen foul of the Romantics, become a mawkish, womanly affair full of gush and fine feeling. Language had gone soft and lost its virility: it needed to be stiffened up again, made hard and stone-like, reconnected with the physical world. The ideal Imagist poem would be a laconic three-line affair of gritty images, like an army officer's rapped-out command. Emotions were messy and suspect, part of a clapped-out epoch of high-flown liberal-individualist sentiment which must now yield to the dehumanized mechanical world of modern society. (41)

The American New Criticism, which flourished from the late 1930s to the 1950s, was deeply marked by these doctrines. New Criticism is generally taken to encompass the work of Eliot, Richards and perhaps also Leavis and William Empson, as well as a number of leading American literary critics, among them John Crowe Ransom, W. K. Wimsatt, Cleanth Brooks, Allen Tate, Monroe Beardsley and R. P. Blackmur. Significantly, the American movement had its roots in the economically backward South -- in the region of traditional blood and breeding where the young T. S. Eliot had gained an early glimpse of the organic society. (46)

Document prepared March 2nd 2005