Romantic Literary Criticism - Terry Eagleton (essay date 1984)
Terry Eagleton (essay date 1984)
SOURCE: Eagleton, Terry. “II.” In The Function of Criticism: From “The Spectator” to Post-Structuralism, pp. 29-43. London: Verso, 1984.
[In the following excerpt, Eagleton describes the economic conditions of literary production in the late eighteenth century leading up to the emergence of the professional critic in England and the politically-based criticism of the nineteenth century.]
The bourgeois public sphere of early eighteenth-century England is perhaps best seen not as a single homogenous formation, but as an interlaced set of discursive centres. The collaborative literary relations established by the Tatler and Spectator find a resonance elsewhere, though with a markedly different ideological tone, in the writings of Samuel Richardson. I have described elsewhere how Richardson's perpetual circulation of texts among friends and correspondents, with its attendant wranglings,...
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