Criticism in Society

First Published in 2002. It is easy to see that we are living in a time of rapid and radical social change. New Accents is intended as a positive response to the initiative offered by such a situation. Each volume in the series will seek to encourage rather than resist the process of change; to stretch rather than reinforce the boundaries that currently define literature and its academic study. Literary criticism, if it is a discipline, is surely that discipline which has been most exclusively concerned with the question of its own function. The main subject within criticism seems always to have been "e;The Function of Criticism"e;. Featuring nine authors, the early history of these essays is the attempt to separate criticism off from the art that it deals with, generally with unhappy consequences for criticism.