Double Agent: The Critic and Society

The author provides a series of closely-linked essays on criticism in the 20th century, emphasizing the shift from journalistic and historical criticism - the "man of letters" tradition - to formal, academic and theoretical criticism. This is a development that comes full circle with the recent rediscovery by theorists of a number of cultural and historical approaches to literature that had been shunned in the 1960s and 1970s. At once a selective history of American criticism in this century and an overview of the tradition of social, historical and cultural criticism, this text aims to bring new light to the critical landscape.