ABSTRACT
One of the most important assaults on the orthodoxy of expressive realism was the work in the 1940s and 1950s of the American New Critics, John Crowe Ransom, Cleanth Brooks, W.K.Wimsatt and others, whose position in turn owed a good deal to the writings of T.S.Eliot and I.A.Richards. In ‘The Intentional Fallacy’, first published in 1946, Wimsatt, working in conjunction with Monroe C.Beardsley, delivered a resounding blow to the expressive theory by arguing that the quest for the author’s intentions had nothing to do with literary criticism.
