I.A. Richards: Selected Works 1919-1938

by Ivor A. Richards, John Constable (Editor)

I. A. Richards was the most influential of the first generation of academic literary theorists. This definitive collection of his writing between 1919 and 1938 shows that Richards' position was distinct from the emerging consensus in university literary education.
Richards is often misunderstood as a master of a now superseded school of academic criticism and a forerunner of an institutionalised classroom method. This set will allow today's scholar and researcher to discover that Richards was actually one of its most severe critics.

3824 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2002

About the author

British literary critic Ivor Armstrong Richards helped to develop Basic English, a constructed language that British linguist Charles Kay Ogden introduced in 1930 and that uses a simplified form of the basic grammar and core vocabulary of English; he also founded the movement of New Criticism, a method of literary evaluation and interpretation that, practiced chiefly in the mid-1900s, emphasizes close examination of a text with minimum regard for the biographical or historical circumstances of its production.

Clifton college educated this influential rhetorician; the scholar 'Cabby' Spence nurtured his love of English. His books, especially The Meaning of Meaning, Principles of Literary Criticism, Practical Criticism, and The Philosophy of Rhetoric, proved founding influences. The concept of "practical criticism" led in time to the practices of close reading, what is often thought of as the beginning of modern literary criticism. Richards is regularly considered one of the founders of the contemporary study of literature in English.