SOURCE: “The Heimlich Manoeuvre,” inTextual Practice, Vol. 8, No. 2, Summer, 1994, pp. 302-16.

In the following essay, Hawkes analyzes Arnold's understanding of the role of criticism in culture, asserting that, like T. S. Eliot, Arnold views the role of English literature criticism as the mirror that reflects the “true nature of English national culture.”

I in Custody

I will focus on two eruptions. The first occurs in the middle of Matthew Arnold's essay of 1864, ‘The Function Of Criticism At The Present Time’. Arnold has been addressing the linked questions of the true nature of English literary criticism on the one hand and the true nature of English national culture on the other. If the first is ever to engage fruitfully with the second, literary criticism must become, he says, a de-politicized ‘absolutely and entirely independent’ activity. Only then will it be able to confront and finally defeat what he...