ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The story of literary criticism's expanding ambitions and achieved cultural prominence forms a significant and at times sensational in the history of intellectual life in the modern English-speaking world. The efforts of nineteenth-century Aestheticism to detach criticism from the categories of morality comprise one major instance, and another is the determination of the American 'New Critics' in the middle of the twentieth century to release critical analysis from the domination of historical and linguistic scholarship. The institutional context and basis of literary criticism and theory in the period after 1890 is characterized above all by the spectacular development of professional academic criticism. The academic 'professionalization' of criticism and literary theory has had substantial consequences going well beyond the numbers of salaried critics. The best critical writing, past and present, of course still does satisfy that expectation, and Alvarez's prognosis applies only to the mediocre bulk.
