I.A. Richards: Nexus of Modernity, 1919-1929

Within the last two decades, critics have considered I. A. Richards a latter-day Romantic idealist; a proto-Marxian materialist; a critic who advised us to emulate certain authorial personalities; and an incipient post-structuralist. Which of these stories is right? Can they all be right? This dissertation takes both a historical and a theoretical approach, telling the story of Richards’s modernism through his immersion in various modernities and drawing out his intellectual complexity. Arguing that Richards was a forward-looking modernist with complicated ties to Romantic idealism, I look at early lectures on “Practical Criticism” and relate them to the post-war moment and Richards’s present-oriented secularism as a member of the “Cambridge Heretics.” Noting his admiration for the novels of E. M. Forster, I draw out what he shared with the Bloomsbury set: the profound influence of Cambridge philosopher G. E. Moore, who emphasized a holistic appreciation of experience in opposition to reductive accounts of "good" as "pleasure." I show how Richards participated more actively than has been recognized in the modernist milieu of evaluation and interpretation, sparring with his contemporaries in the pages of John Middleton Murry's Athenaeum; proposing an experiential poetics just as Woolf was theorizing the experiential potential of the novel in The Common Reader (1925); and building a capacious vision of personality that responded to and modified T. S. Eliot's stance on impersonality.

Ranging across his major work of the 1920s, and from lesser-known periodical essays to the moment of his first visit to New York City, I underline Richards's fascination with the future and point out that he saw art and literature as he did the city: as spurs to transform the subconscious into consciousness, and full of potential to revise ingrained traditions in finding out suppressed truths and values. This thread of his thought has been forgotten, but shows up in later thinkers and merits reviving: I talk about how Adrienne Rich would cite Richards's emphasis on the affirmative power of disillusionment in Principles as support for her poetics. Yet, at the same time, Richards was attempting to bring forward the insights of the past and to fuse disciplines across time and space, pairing Confucian philosophy with Pavlovian physiology: for him, the past is not to be discarded, but its teachings refashioned to help us live better in the present. I argue that a nuanced, systematic excavation of Richards’s literary theory alongside the writers who inspired him – from Confucius and Pavlov to Conrad, Lawrence, Hardy, and Eliot – offers a clearer picture of modernism: his response to these writers shaped our conception of what it means to be both “modern” and “modernist.” I hold that with some adjustments his thought – not just his oft-cited role as an inventor of close reading – can still offer us ways to move forward.