Centenary of a landmark in literary criticism

The lasting reputation of a founder of modern literary criticism, I A Richards, was established a hundred years ago this year by his seminal work, The Principles of Literary Criticism, published in 1924.

Ivor Armstrong Richards (1893–1979), literary critic, aesthetician, poet, dramatist and educator, is an important figure because he changed the way imaginative literature, especially poetry, was studied. As a theorist rather than a descriptive critic, he pioneered the technique of ‘practical criticism’ which involved the rigorous analysis of literary texts isolated from history and context.

This procedure was, essentially, to study only ‘the words on the page’, the discrete components of a text. It eschewed working from preconceived ideas and taking into account ‘extraneous’ factors, for example, the character of a particular historical moment, say, the Romantic period, distinct with its typical outlook, social structures and mores and so on, and how the text fitted into that scenario.

Richards was 31 when The Principles of Literary Criticism came out; it was his second book, following The Foundations of Aesthetics (1922). His approach derived from his study of psychology, and in Principles he deals with issues including value, form, allusion and belief, putting forward a finely reasoned theory of how the mind…