Critical approach: liberal-humanist formalism

Abstract

At the present time there is generally felt to be a crisis in English studies, which, as Terry Eagleton has put it, constitutes a ‘crisis in the definition of the subject itself’ [1983, p. 214]. For Eagleton, literature should be treated as part of the whole field of cultural studies, and similarly Peter Widdowson would like to see a ‘re-siting of literature in history … as one specific discourse in the general study of culture’ [1982, p. 14]. This call for a radical shift in the definition of literature and literary criticism challenges the mainstream of liberal-humanist criticism on the grounds that, in Terry Eagleton’s words, it is little more than a ‘suburban moral ideology’ [p. 207], out of touch with the larger world of history, and political and cultural studies. This book is not the place to enter the debate, but it is against this background of a general revaluation of criticism as an activity that the reader is invited to consider, along with the other critical methodologies I have discussed, my own approach to Sons and Lovers, which is perhaps best characterised by the phrase ‘liberal-humanist formalism’, a widely held critical position embracing a variety of kindred modes of inquiry.