ABSTRACT
Beyond the mass-circulation journals which strove simultaneously to satisfy the cravings of the public and to refashion their tastes, readers were also beginning to receive instruction and advice from a number of other quarters. Despite its more elevated tone and avowedly scholarly purposes, this most prestigious form of criticism achieved considerable prominence in the cultural perspectives of significant numbers of academic and non-academic readers alike. Yet criticism was also a sincere endeavour to advance a broader set of values and assumptions to which, for the most part, their creators genuinely clung. Naturally, these often had political and social implications. Intimately bound up with the impulse towards the evaluation of an entire literary culture was the quest for an inclusive and definitive canonicity—for the secure identification, in other words, of a national tradition of authorship and creativity linking a glorious past inextricably with a richly-promising present.
