Grub Street and the Ivory Tower Literary Journalism and Literary Scholarship from Fielding to the Internet

Literary criticism has been called a story of reading. In what conditions have the best critical stories been told? From Jenny Uglow's account of literary journalism in the world of Henry Fielding to Marjorie Perloff's praise for the impact of the Internet on poetry publishing and reviewing, Grub Street and the Ivory Tower gives lively case-histories of the commercial and institutional contexts of writing about writing, with an emphasis on the vexed but at best mutually beneficial relationship between journalism and literary scholarship. Topics include the traffic between universities and the wider literary world in the `long' nineteenth century; the role of Blackwood's Magazine in the First World War; Virginia Woolf's work as a literary journalist; the early days of the London Review of Books; and the contested terrain of book reviewing in contemporary Ireland. Most of the contributors are scholars who also command a non-academic readership, as reviewers and otherwise: among them Valentine Cunningham, Hermione Lee, Karl Miller, Lorna Sage, and John Sutherland.

Introduction; Jenny Uglow: Fielding, Grub Street, and Canary Wharf; Zachary Leader: Coleridge and the Uses of Journalism; Grevel Lindop: De Quincey and the Edinburgh and Glasgow University Circles; John Sutherland: Journalism, Scholarship, and the University College London English Department; Valentine Cunningham: Darke conceits: Churton Collins, Edmund Gosse, and the Professions of Criticism; David Finkelstein: Literature, Propaganda, and the First World War: The Case of Blackwood's Magazine; Hermione Lee: `Crimes of Criticism': Virginia Woolf and Literary Journalism; Jeremy Treglown: The TLS and the Second World War, and How to Fill Some Gaps in Modern British Cultural History; Stefan Collini: The Critic as Anti-Journalist: Leavis after Scrutiny; John Stokes: Saving Lives: Kenneth Tynan and the Duties of Dramatic Criticism; Edna Longley: `Between the Saxon Smile and the Yankee Yawp': Problems and Contexts of Literary Reviewing in Ireland; Marjorie Perloff: What We Don't Talk About When We Talk About Poetry: Some Aporias of Literary Journalism; Karl Miller: Teachers, Writers; Lorna Sage: Living on Writing; Notes on Contributors; Index

Treglown is a former editor of the Times Literary Supplement