No Treatment Of Modern Criticism Is Possible Without Discussing I.A. Richards, Since In The Most Literal Sense His Influence Combined With That Of T.S. Eliot And F.R. Leavis Served To Create It. As One Of Seminal Thinkers Paving The Way For The Development Of New Criticism, Richards Made A Systematic Attempt To Formulate A Theory Of Poetry In Consonance With The Demands Of Modern Scientific Thought.The Present Book Stems From The Need To Offer An Objective Appraisal Of Richards Thought System In The Context Of The Evolution Of His Ideas In Foundations Of Aesthetics, The Meaning Of Meaning, Principles Of Literary Criticism, Science And Poetry (Later Reissued As Poetries And Sciences) And Practical Criticism. In The Context Of Wide-Spread Misinterpretations And Distortions Of Richards Point Of View, The Author Has Tried Throughout This Inter-Disciplinary Work To Allow Richards To Speak For Himself. While Unfolding The Subtle, Suggestive And Consistent Nature Of Richards Early Writings, The Book Studies His Criticism Of Modern Poets Like T.S. Eliot, W.B. Yeats, G.M. Hopkins, Thomas Hardy And D.H. Lawrence. The Chapter On Practical Criticism Throws Light On Richards Technique Of Evaluating Poems And Teaches The Art Of Appreciating Poetry.

Ivor Armstrong Richards was one of the founders of modern literary criticism. He enthused a generation of writers and readers and was an influential supporter of the young T.S. Eliot. Principles of Literary Criticism was the text that first established his reputation and pioneered the movement that became known as the 'New Criticism'. Highly controversial when first published, Principles of Literary Criticism remains a work which no one with a serious interest in literature can afford to ignore.

Cover -- Title Page -- Copyright -- Contents -- Preface -- Introduction -- 1. The Critical Revolution Turns Right -- 2. The Scholarly Turn -- 3. The Historicist/Contextualist Paradigm -- 4. The Critical Unconscious -- Conclusion: The Future of Criticism -- Appendix: The Critical Paradigm and T.S. Eliot -- Notes -- Acknowledgments -- Index

Radical Empiricists presents a new history of criticism in the first half of the twentieth-century, against the backdrop of the modernist crisis of meaning. Our received idea of modernist criticism is that its novelty lay in being very empirical: critics believed in looking closely at words on the page. Such close reading has since been easy to ridicule, but this book seeks to consider whether this is fair: have we, in the rush either to dismiss, or even to defend, the idea of close reading, often failed to look closely at what it involves in practice? Against this oversight, Radical Empiricists turns close reading back on itself, proposing some innovative readings of the prose of five major modernist poet-critics: I.A. Richards, T.S. Eliot, William Empson, R.P. Blackmur, and Marianne Moore. The book is divided into two parts, preceded by an introduction that explores what these five writers share: a radical self-consciousness about the key critical concept, "meaning." Part I, "How to read," considers the prose techniques of Eliot, Richards, and Empson as they push at the boundaries of verbal analysis in other disciplines: experimental psychology and anthropology, classical commentary, and textual criticism. Part II introduces Blackmur and Moore, alongside Empson, and takes a more polemical look at how their critical styles defy various modernist orthodoxies about "how not to read" (for example, that paraphrase always destroys poetic meaning). Many of these orthodoxies remain current: re-visiting their history, and attending to the rich detail of critical prose styles, can allow us to lift some old, unreflective constraints on our ways of knowing about poems.

Enhancing our understanding of how people and places are affected by globalization at the level of everyday interactions within ’Nordic Peripheries’, this book sheds light on local particularities as well as global confluences, by illuminating how gender, mobility and belonging contribute to ruptures and/or stability in the lives of men and women living in and/or moving within these northern localities. Crossing disciplinary and geographical boundaries the focus of the book is specifically on how global processes shape and influence the Nordic countries at the social level: Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Iceland, Finland, as well as the Faroe Islands. The book starts from the premise that the Nordic peripheries offer an especially powerful lens on ’peripherality’ in a globalized and globalizing world, because the region as a whole is traditionally perceived as relatively affluent, stable and with high levels of social equality. Yet, as the different chapters in the book demonstrate - with case studies that illuminate diverse gendered processes - globalization produces ruptures and new social constellations also at the rims of Nordic societies, well beyond the cushioning of comprehensive social welfare regimes. By elevating the empirical findings to more general debates about the gendered effects of globalization the book invites the reader to reflect upon not only Nordic particularities but also how insights from this part of the world can be instructive for understanding the nuances and complexities of global confluences at large.

The reissue of this essay is an important event. The controversy between the life of the imagination and the life of technology has never been as strong as it is today, and so Professor Richards observations are of special value."

First Published in 2001. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.