I. A. Richards

Abstract A. Richards’s critical activity spans the period from Modernism—Principles of Literary Criticism appeared in 1924—to French structuralism. Richards reviewed a structuralist analysis of Shakespeare by his Harvard colleague, the Russian linguist Roman Jakobson, in 1970. He also commented on generative grammar in two articles published in 1967–8. He thus recalls a time when criticism acknowledged the importance of language and the existence of linguistics. Yet that acknowledgement also meant severing the academic study of literature from Germanic philology, which had ushered in the study of English literature over classics through the history of English: the chair of Anglo-Saxon at Cambridge was first occupied in 1878 by W. W. Skeat, editor of Beowulf.