Ideology of the Text

This book is a polemical response to "the mystifying dislocations of theory and practice embodied in the forms of literary discource produced out of the culture of industrial capitalism - from Arnold to Leavis and Eliot, and from the structuralism of Levi-Strauss and Althusser to the proto-idealist theories of the post-structuralists". As such, it represents an attack on currently critical theories through a reassertion of historically-grounded criticism. This interactive process is demonstrated in a sequence of case-study chapters moving from Shakespeare to Milton, Blake and the Romantics, to Arnold and Morris, and finally from Eliot and the writers of the 1930s to the work of Raymond Williams and E.P.Thompson.