ABSTRACT
In 1935 R. S. Crane (1886-1967) published an essay, 'History versus Criticism in the University Study of Literature', which was enthusiastically welcomed by John Crowe Ransom in his article 'Criticism Inc.' (see above, pp. 227-39)' Ransom clearly saw Crane as potentially a valuable ally of the American New Critics in their efforts, over the next two decades, to direct English Studies away from traditional literary scholarship towards evaluative and analytical criticism. Crane and his associates at the University of Chicago, however, had ideas of their own about the way criticism should develop. As Crane himself commented much later, they soon began to have misgivings about two aspects of the New Criticism:
One was the fact that, despite the great flourishing of practical criticism, there were few signs that this was moving beyond the rather narrow set of ideas and interests which the critics of the thirties had derived from Eliot, Hulme and Richards, or had taken over from the psycho-analysis, analytical psychology and cultural anthropology of the first years of the century .... The other thing was the striking effect of unscholarly improvisation that characterized much of the literary theorizing of the period from Richards on -as if none of the essential problems of literature had ever been discussed before or any important light thrown on them in more than a score of centuries during which literature had been an object of critical attention.
