Toward the end of the nineteenth century a number of trends were visible in British criticism, including the humanism of Matthew Arnold, the aestheticism of Walter Pater and Oscar Wilde, the socialist criticism of Bernard Shaw, and the mainstreams of realist and naturalist criticism. The first notable group of British critics in the twentieth century were affiliated with the universities. During the nineteenth century relatively few critics were professors and wrote primarily for journals and magazines (among the few notable exceptions to this was Matthew Arnold who was elected Professor of Poetry at Oxford in 1857). In the last decade of the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth century, with the establishment of English literature as a separate discipline, this situation changed rapidly. In 1895 the influential literary historian and critic George Saintsbury was appointed Professor of Rhetoric at Edinburgh, and the renowned Shakespeare scholar A.C. Bradley assumed an acedmic post in 1882. Walter Raleigh and Arthur Quiller-Couch took over important professorships of English Literature at Oxford and Cambridge respectively. Raleigh and Quiller-Couch did not consider themselves critics as such and in fact showed considerable scorn for academic criticism. Their own approaches to texts and authors were empirical, unsystematic, impressionistic and sometimes idealistic. By far the most influential of this early generation of academic critics was A.C. In Shakespearean Tragedy (1904), Bradley's central thesis, influenced by Hegel, the Hegelians T.H. Greene and F.H. Bradley (his brother), saw tragedy as a dialectic whereby the moral order and harmony of the world were threatened (by the tragic hero) and then re-established. Shakespearean tragedy, according to Bradley, embodied this dialectic. For all the controversy it spawned, Bradley's text remains a classic of literary criticism.
 

Another group of critics, who might loosely be called neo-Romantic, included D.H. Lawrence, G. Wilson Knight, John Middleton Murry and Herbert Read. Lawrence (1885-1930) was an avowed irrationalist, reacting against both the mainstream rationalist tradition in Western thinking, as well as against the modern industrial world which he saw as sexually repressive and as having stunted human potential. Lawrence's literary criticism was expressed in several reviews and in his Studies in Classic American Literature (1923), as well as in essays on sexuality and the unconscious. In both these works and his fiction, Lawrence advocated a vitalism and individualism which often had parallels in the views of Nietzsche and Freud. He attempted to revaluate various writers in the light of his libidinal and primitivist ideology, urging that their art achieved something contrary to their conscious and morally repressive intentions. His disposition is anti-democratice and even fascistic, reacting, like Nietzsche, against mass mediocrity and moral conventionalism, and urging hope for a new man. In his own highly idiosyncratic way, Lawrence anticipates the stress on the unconscious, the body and irrational motives in various areas of contemporary criticism.
 

Of the other neo-Romantic critics mentioned above, Middleton Murry (1889-1957) attempted to reinstate a Romantic belief in pantheism and the organic unity of the world. He saw a central criterion of genuine poetry that it was not amenable to paraphrase and that it expressed truths inaccessible to reason or concepts. Herbert Read (1893-1968) began as an advocate of imagism and classicism and eventually expressed an allegiance to Romanticism and articulating an organicist aesthetic, viewing poetry as transcending reason. G. Wilson Knight (1897-1985), a Shakespeare scholar, is best known for his The Wheel of Fire (1930). Drawing on the findings of anthropologists such as Sir James Frazer concerning myths, rituals and symbols, Wilson Knight interprets Shakespeare's plays in terms of certain recurring symbols and motifs. As a critic, he distinguished interpretation, which aims empathetically to reconstruct an author's vision, from criticism which he sees as evaluative. Somewhat like the New Critics, Wilson Knight wished to subordinate considerations drawn from intention or biography or morality to artistic concerns. Another significant critic in this broad Romantic-religious tradition was C.S. Lewis (1898-1963) whose major critical work was The Allegory of Love (1936) which, along with his other works, contributed to his mission of promoting understanding of the formality and didacticism of the literature of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Finally, mention should be made of the scholar of Milton and Shakespeare, E. M. Tillyard (1889-1962), who engaged in a debate with C.S. Lewis in The Personal Heresy (1939) and whose most influential work was The Elizabethan World Picture (1943).
 

A further generation of professional critics helped both to rejuvenate the study of English literature and to pave the way for the New Criticism. The most prominent of these, associated with the new English curriculum at Cambridge University, were I.A. Richards and his student William Empson. In his Principles of Literary Criticism (1924) and his Science and Poetry (1926), Richards attempted to establish a systematic basis for the study of literature. He distinguished, most fundamentally, the emotive language of poetry from the referential language of non-literary disciplines. In 1929 he published a book, Practical Criticism, whose profound and pervasive influence still endures. Using samples of students' often erratic attempts to analyse poetry, he aimed to foster the skills and techniques necessary for the close reading of literature. The practice of close reading as established by Richards, at both Cambridge and Harvard (to which he later transferred) later had a profound impact on the New Critics who facilitated its academic institutionalisation. While William Empson himself was not a New Critic, he produced a book Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930) which had an impact on the New Criticism in virtue of the close attention it paid to literary texts and its stress on ambiguity as an essential characteristic of poetry.
 

A convenient starting point for tracing the growth of modernistic trends in twentieth century British criticism is the development of symbolism, as prominently manifested in the work of the Irish poet and critic W.B. Yeats (1865-1939). Symbolism had roots in the English-speaking world in the theory and practice of figures such as Blake, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Shelley and Edgar Allan Poe. The symbolism of Yeats and subsequent writers was also influenced by French symbolism as developed in the work of Baudelaire, Mallarme, Verlaine and Rimbaud. French symbolism was introduced to English and American audiences largely through Arthur Symons' book The Symbolist Movement in Literature (1899). In this book Symons explained the history and rationale of French symbolism, which he saw as a reaction against nineteenth century scientism and materialism. Recoiling from materialism and pragmatism, French symbolism saw literature as affirming the reality of a higher, spiritual realm which could be divined not by rational thought but only in glimpses through a pure poetic language divested of any representational pretension. Symbolism is an attempt to reinvest both the world and language -- stripped by much bourgeois thought and science to a utilitarian literalness -- with metaphor, ambivalence and mystery. In symbolist poetry, concrete images are used to evoke emotions, moods and atmospheres otherwise ineffable. Symons' book had a profound influence on major British poet-critics such as T.S. Eliot. It was actually dedicated to W.B. Yeats whom Symons saw as the chief exponent of symbolism in Britain. Yeats' own theory and practice of symbolism drew from William Blake, Shelley, Irish mythology and magic. Yeats affirmed that external objects and scenes could express the profoundest internal states, and that the poet's task is to imbue such scenes and images with a symbolic significance transcending the time and place of their immediate origin. Symbols, for Yeats, evoke what he calls the "Great Mind" and "Great Memory." Yeats' own poetry uses numerous symbols with both private and public associations, such as the rose, the cross, the stairway and the tower. Yeats worked out hos own highly intricate cosmological symbolism in A Vision (1925-1937). His assessments of most poets were motivated by a search for symbolic predecessors and an attempt to explain their techniques.
 

The other major critic of the early twentieth century influenced by French symbolism was T.S. Eliot (1888-1965). Some of the assumptions underlying his renowned critical notions, such as "tradition" (expressed in his seminal essay of 1919 "Tradition and the Individual Talent"), "dissociation of sensibility" and "objective correlative," were derived in part from French writers. Eliot's concept of "dissociation of sensibility," for example, according to which a dissociation of thought from feeling had arisen subsequent to the Metaphysical poets, was informed by his perception of some of the nineteenth century French poets as "Metaphysical" in their attempt to harmonise these polarised faculties. Both Eliot's "dissociation of sensibility" and "objective correlative" may have had roots in the thought of French symbolists and especially Remy de Gourmont. Other major influences on Eliot's criticism were Ezra Pound's imagism and T.E. Hulme's classicism. Eliot's main critical contributions were (1) to combat provincialism by broadening the notion of "tradition" to include Europe; (2) to advocate, as against the prevailing critical impressionism, a closely analytical and even objective criticism which situated literary works alongside one another in the larger context of tradition. In this, he contributed to the development of notions of artistic autonomy which were taken up by some of the New Critics; and (3) to foster, by his own revaluation of the literary tradition (reacting against the Romantics, for example, and highlighting the virtues of the Metaphysical poets), a dynamic notion of tradition as always in the process of change. Eliot also brought to literary criticism a sophistication drawn from his philosophical studies, which helped to display the intricate connections between literary study and other fields such as religion, philosophy and psychology. Eliot's criticism, as he acknowledged, was motivated by a desire to explain and propagate the kind of poetry he was writing, as well as to draw attention to the various elements of literary tradition which had proved serviceable to his verse. Hence, his criticism was in part a manifesto of literary modernism, influenced by Ezra Pound and characteristically infused with political conservatism.
 

Another group of artist-critics associated with modernism was the highly iconoclastic Bloomsbury Group. This circle included Virginia Woolf and her sister Vanessa, daughters of the critic and agnostic philosopher Leslie Stephen, the art critics Roger Fry and Clive Bell, the economist John Maynard Keynes, the biographer Lytton Strachey and the novelist E.M. Forster. While each of these personalities had his or her own highly idiosyncratic artistic disposition, most members of the group fell under the influence of the Cambridge philosopher G.E. Moore's Principia Ethica. They saw this text as affirming an "aesthetic" approach to life inasmuch as it stressed the value of allegedly timeless states of consciousness which facilitated the enjoyment of beauty. In literary-critical terms, the most influential figure in this circle was Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) who had had read Moore's text closely.
 

Woolf's critical contributions spanned two broad areas: a modernistic redefinition of the novel which anticipated some of the more recent trends of literary theory, and a broadly feminist approach to literature and literary history. The nature of Woolf's critical modernism is complex, and her connections with Moore's realism and his common sense philosophical perspective are ambivalent.

While Woolf may have taken from Moore a realist distinction between consciousness and its object, she indicts the mechanical realism of some of her contemporaries such as Arnold Bennett and John Galsworthy. In the place of this, she advocates not any form of idealism but a more refined version of realism, in line with "reality" as conceived dynamically by Bergson and Proust. As many commentators have pointed out, Bloomsbury's relations with modernism are at best ambivalent. A favourite quotation cited by Woolf critics in support of her modernism comes from her famous essay "Modern Fiction":
 

Life is not a series of gig lamps symetrically arranged; but a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end.

...Let us record the atoms as they fall upon the mind in the order in which they fall, let us trace the pattern, however disconnected and incoherent in appearance, which each sight or incident scores upon the consciousness.
 

It has been argued by several commentators that the second paragraph suggests that the appropriate subject matter for a novelist is not "external" events but the contents of consciousness itself. As against this, one can see that the paragraph accords with Locke's theory of perception, whereby the mind receives ideas and impressions from the external world. Woolf's language, urging the novelist to "record the atoms as they fall upon the mind,"could be read as a call for a refined realism, one that is not constrained by frigid imperatives pertaining to plot, character and probability. When Woolf rejects these imperatives, she does so on the grounds that they cannot generate a "likeness to life."

However, there are passages in Woolf which gesture in the opposite direction. Reviewing Dorothy Richardson's The Tunnel, Woolf insists that: "We want to be rid of realism, to penetrate without its help into the regions beneath it, and further require that Miss Richardson shall fashion this new material into something which has the shapeliness of the old accepted forms." In A Writer's Diary Woolf observes, after noting Bennett's charge that her characters fail: "I haven't that `reality' gift. I insubstantise, wilfully to some extent, distrusting reality - its cheapness." But, although Woolf clearly wishes to shift novelistic attention away from the "actual event" and time-frame of conventional realism, these statements can be a little misleading. The basis of Woolf's critique of Richardson, for example, is that Richardson enables us to "find ourselves in the dentist's room, in the street, in the lodging-house bedroom frequently and convincingly; but never, or only for a tantalizing second, in the reality which underlies these appearances." It seems that Woolf does wish the novelist to engage with "reality" but this reality itself is reconceived: it is no longer in Moorean fashion an atomistic reality of independent objects but something beneath these surface appearances, something which binds them in a farther-reaching totality.
 

A further critical principle of Woolf's was a displacement of emphasis from moral function to the actual artistic structure of a literary text. Woolf also anticipated modern critical trends insasmuch as she wished to focus attention on texts rather than biography; moreover, she was persistently aware of the changing role and historical conditions of readers. She even saw the novel as formed by "the very process of reading..." Finally, she urged as a critical principle the attempt to enter a writer's mind and world.

A central figure in English literary criticism, also associated with the new English at Cambridge, was F.R. Leavis (1895-1978) who might broadly be placed in the moralistic and humanistic tradition of Matthew Arnold. Leavis stood aloof from both the Bloomsbury Group (a position expressed during his editorship of the journal Scrutiny from 1932 to 1953) and the New Criticism, though he was influenced by Richards' Practical Criticism courses which he attended. Leavis assumed both educational and critical roles. In the academy he attempted to foster an elite which might safeguard English culture against the technological and populist vulgarities of an industrial society. As a critic he attempted to foster rigorous intellectual standards informed by a sense of the moral and cultural importance of literature, as well as to revaluate the English literary tradition. His major works New Bearings in English Poetry (1932), Revaluation (1936) and The Great Tradition (1948) demoted Victorian and Georgian verse and sought to increase general appreciation of Eliot, Yeats and Pound; he argued that the mainstream of English poetry flowed through Donne, Pope, Johnson and Eliot; and he traced the main tradition of fiction from Jane Austen, George Eliot, Henry James and Joseph Conrad.

Leavis shared with Eliot and the New Critics the idea that literary criticism should be a separate and serious discipline. While he rejected any theory or system, he called for "a living critical inwardness with literature, and a mind trained in dealing analytically with it." He repeatedly insisted that literature should be approached as literature and not as a social, historical or political document. What separated him from the New Critics, however, was equally forceful counter-insistence that literary study cannot be confined to isolated works of art nor to a realm of purely literary values. Leavis invokes Eliot's notion of tradition as representing "a new emphasis on the social nature of artistic achievement." This social nature, for Leavis, is grounded in what he calls an "inherent human nature". Hence, the study of literature is a study of "the complexities, potentialities and essential conditions of human nature." In his essay "Sociology and Literature" he affirms that "a real literary interest is an interest in man, society and civilzation, and its boundaries cannot be drawn..." The apparent contradiction in Leavis' approach between viewing literature as literature and literature as inseparable from all aspects of life seems to be "resolved" by an appeal to the assimilating capacity of intuition and a maturing experience of literature, for which no conceptual or theoretical subtlety can substitute.
 

The two remaining fields in which British critics have made substantial contributions are Socialist-Marxist criticism and feminist studies. The somewhat discontinuous tradition of Socialist and Marxism criticism in Britain goes back, through the nineteenth century, to the sporadic literary insights of Marx's friend and collaborator Friedrich Engels and to William Morris who first applied Marxist perspectives on the theory of labour and alienation to artistic production. In 1884 the Fabian Society was formed with the aim of substituting for Marxist revolutionary action a Fabian policy of gradually introducing Socialism through influencing government policy and disseminating pamphlets to raise awareness of economic and class inequalities. The dramatist and critic George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) was a member of this society and produced one of its first pamphlets A Manifesto (1884). Shaw edited Fabian Essays in Socialism (1899) and advocated women's rights, economic equality and the abolition of private property. Despite his drawing on economic determinism, Shaw's brand of socialism has earned the scorn of some Marxists. Also in this vein might be mentioned George Orwell (1903-1950) who in his later career saw himself as a political writer and a democratic socialist, who, however became disillusioned with Communism as shown in his political satire Animal Farm (1945).
 

British communists did not produce any substantial works until the mid-1930's. With the menace of Fascism and the threat of war, several writers began to engage in Marxist criticism. These included the art historian Anthony Blunt and the economist John Strachey who produced two influential books, Literature and Dialectical Materialism (1934) and The Coming Struggle for Power (1933). A group of Marxist thinkers was centred around The Left Review (1934-1938). The poets W.H. Auden, Stephen Spender, and C. Day Lewis at various times espoused and propagated left-wing views. The most significant Marxist theorist of this generation was Christopher Caudwell (1907-1937) who died in Spain fighting in the International Brigade. Caudwell's best known work is his Illusion and Reality: A Study of the Sources of Poetry (1937). Here, Caudwell offers a Marxist analysis of the development of English poetry, somewhat crudely correlating the stages of this development with economic phases such as primitive accumulation, the Industrial Revolution and the decline of capitalism. In this wide-ranging book, Caudwell addressed the origins of poetry, the connection of poetry to mythology and the unconscious as well as the future role of poetry in the struggle for socialism. Caudwell's subsequent writings included Studies in a Dying Culture (1938) and Further Studies in a Dying Culture (1949).
 

The theoretical vacuum in British Marxist criticism which preceded Caudwell opened up again after him and endured until the emergence of the two major British Marxist critics of this century, Raymond Williams (1921-1988) and Terry eagleton (b. 1943). The revolutionary fervour of the 1960's gave Marxist criticism a revived impetus. A group of Marxist critics was centred around the New Left Review, founded in 1960 and edited first by Stuart Hall and then by Perry Anderson. Its contributors included E.P. Thompson and Raymond Williams. Williams' central project, which he would later term "Cultural Materialism," was to furnish an historical and materialist re-reading of the English cultural tradition, as in Culture and Society 1780-1950 (1958), which stressed that culture was a process. The Long Revolution (1961) continued and refined this project using categories such as dominant, residual and emergent cultures mediated by what Williams called "structures of feeling." Williams' work became overtly Marxist with the publication in 1977 of Marxism and Literature. In this work Williams undertook a critical review of earlier Marxist theories and offered his own analyses of fundamental Marxist notions such as ideology, hegemony, base and superstructure. His own cultural materialism as set forth here attempts to integrate a Marxist conceptions of language and literature. Keywords (1976) examines the history of fundamental concepts and categories.
 

Terry Eagleton's work initially undertook a critique of commonplace liberal-bourgeois notions about literature as well as of some of Williams' categories such as "structures of feeling." In his earlier work, enshrined most articulately in Criticism and Ideology (1976), Eagleton was influenced by Althusser's attempt to divest Marxism of Hegelian elements and to promote its scientific status. Eagleton argued that criticism must assume a scientific position beyond the domains of ideology. In this text Eagleton formulated the fundamental categories of a Marxist criticism, and insisted that the text is a producer of ideology. Eagleton's later work turned somewhat away from Althusser and was inspired instead by Walter Benjamin's revolutionary thought. It also engaged in a sustained dialogue with many branches of recent literary theory, including feminism, deconstruction and psychoanalysis. Eagleton skilfully situated these currents within their historical and political contexts, revealing the ways in which they were subversive of, and complicit with, liberal humanism in its manifold guises. Eagleton's Literary Theory: An Introduction (1983) has commanded a wide audience in both Britain and America, and he is undoubtedly the most widely read Marxist critic now living. Overall, his work has clarified the relationship of Marxism to other discourses; it has revaluated the tradition of Marxist criticism itself; and it has articulated a Marxist model of aesthetics both theoretically and in application in several studies of individual authors.
 

Twentieth century British criticism might be said to begin with Virginia Woolf who produced two works considered important in the history of feminist criticism, A Room of One's Own (1929) and Three Guineas (1938). Woolf's central concern here was to situate literature in a social and economic context, a procedure which highlighted the material, social and psychological disadvantages suffered by female writers. In both of these texts Woolf stresses that gender is socially constructed, and deals with issues such as the viability of a female consciousness and female language. In general, she asserts, following the Bloomsbury notion of androgyny, that female writers should rise above any exclusive focus on gender and adopt a "human" perspective which embraces both female and male elements. Woolf's contributions here include an attempt to search for neglected movements of female writers, and to examine female-male relations as portrayed in the history of literature.
 

Much British feminist criticism has had a political orientation, insisting on situating both feminist concerns and literary texts within a material and ideological context. In her landmark work "Women: The Longest Revolution," later expanded and produced as Women's Estate (1971), Juliet Mitchell examined patriarchy in in terms of Marxist categories of production and private property as well as psychoanalytic theories of gender. Her later works such as Psychoanalysis and Feminism (1974) continue to refine her attempt to integrate the insights of Marxism and psychoanalysis. Another seminal text was Michele Barrett's Women's Oppression Today: Problems in Marxist Feminist Analysis (1980) which attempted to formulate a materialist aesthetics and insisted on integrating Marxist class analysis with feminism in analysing and influencing gender representation. Other important critics have included Jacqueline Rose and Rosalind Coward who have integrated certain insights of Jacques Lacan into a materialist feminism, Catherine Belsey who also has drawn upon Lacan in assessing Renaissance drama from a materialist feminist perspective, and Toril Moi who has developed insights from Woolf and engaged in a critique of the humanism and implicit essentialism of some American feminists. Also critical of the tendency of American feminists to combat male stereotypes and to recover female traditions are Judith Newton and Deborah Rosenfelt. Finally, a number of critics such as Cora Kaplan, Mary Jacobus and Penny Boumelha have comprised the U.K. Marxist-Feminist Collective formed in 1976.
 

This article has attempted to cover the major trends and the most influential figures in British criticism of this century. British literary criticism continues to embrace a wide variety of perspectives, ranging from the more traditional approaches of scholars such as John Carey through those such as Christopher Norris who have attempted to clarify and situate movements such as Deconstruction to theorists of Black feminism, semiotics and film studies.
 

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Casey, John. The Language of Criticism. London: Methuen, 1966.

Goldberg, Gerald Jay, and Nancy Marmer Goldberg, eds. The Modern Critical Spectrum. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1962.

Solomon, Maynard, ed. Marxism and Art: Essays Classic and Contemporary. 1973; rpt. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1979.

Needham, John. The Completest Mode: I.A. Richards and the Continuity of English Literary Criticism. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1982.

Smith, Harold, ed. British Feminism in the Twentieth Century. Edward Elgar Publishing Inc., 1989.

Sutton, Walter, and Richard Foster, eds. Modern Criticism: Theory and Practice. New York: The Odyssey Press, 1963.

Watson, George. The Literary Critics: A Study of English Descriptive Criticism. Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield, 1973.

Wellek, Rene. A History of Modern Criticism: 1750-1950: Vol. 5: English Criticism, 1900-1950. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1986.