ABSTRACT
We can begin with two eruptions. The first occurs in the middle of Matthew Arnold’s famous essay of 1864, ‘The Function of Criticism At The Present Time’. Arnold has been addressing the linked questions of the true nature of literary criticism on the one hand and the true nature of British national culture on the other. If the first is ever to engage fruitfully with the second, he argues, literary criticism must become a de-politicised ‘absolutely and entirely independent’ activity. Only then will it be able to confront and finally defeat what he calls the ‘retarding and vulgarizing’ accounts of the current national way of life recently put forward by two home-grown journalist/politicians, Sir Charles Adderley and Mr John Arthur Roebuck.
