[While serving as a professor at Cambridge, Lewis wrote An Experiment in Criticism in response to the increasingly popular critical theories of his fellow Cambridge don, F. R. Leavis. Lewis believed that Leavis wrongly placed critical emphasis on the subjective extraction of meaning from literary texts, rather than on simply receiving and evaluating them according to the authors' own purposes. Kermode, himself a distinguished critic, saw much to Lewis's approach.]

Modern criticism, perhaps because it is multitudinous and arcane, is often thought, by modern critics especially, to be very valuable. Now Professor Lewis does not think so; he has an air of strenuous disinterest, but one comes to see that the cause of his book [An Experiment in Criticism] is disquiet at the possible fate of literature when it falls into the wrong hands. Not until the end does he, with much art, reveal that he has had...