ABSTRACT
If we want to understand English and American thinking about literature in the twentieth century a good starting-point is the nineteenth-century figure of Matthew Arnold (1822-88), English educator, poet (once famous for his rather depressing but much anthologized ‘Dover Beach’), and professor of poetry at Oxford University. Arnold’s views, which assigned a very special role to literature, and further enhanced its prestige, were not wholly new. In fact, his central idea that, apart from its aesthetic and pleasing qualities, literature also had important things to teach us, was already familiar in antiquity and we see it repeated time and again over the ages. So we find Thomas Jefferson, future president of the future United States of America, observing in a 1771 letter that ‘a lively and lasting sense of filial duty is more effectually impressed on the mind of a son or daughter by reading “King Lear” than by all the dry volumes of ethics and divinity that were ever written’. However, Arnold is not interested in the more practical aspects of the idea that literature is a source of instruction – literature as a set of how-to books – but places it in a spiritual context.
