Conditions for Criticism: Authority, Knowledge, and Literature in the Late Nineteenth Century

This book studies changes in the practice of literary criticism in nineteenth-century Britain and locates those changes within wider movements in intellectual culture. The growth of knowledge and its subsequent institutionalization in universities produced new forms of intellectual authority. Small examines these processes in a wide variety of disciplines, including economics, historiography, sociology, psychology, and philosophical aesthetics, and explores their impact upon literary criticism.