SOURCE: “The Function of Matthew Arnold at the Present Time,” in College English, Vol. 56, No. 7, November, 1994, pp. 749-65.

In the following essay, Peltason contests the characterization of Arnold as a cultural conservative and emphasizes his continued significance as a literary theorist.

In recent debates about cultural politics, Matthew Arnold's name regularly appears as a kind of shorthand for a familiar and long discredited form of cultural conservatism. Sometimes it is not Arnold's name, but just a phrase, “the best that is known and thought” or “sweetness and light,” quoted without attribution and taken to represent an uncritical endorsement of received cultural values and a passive receptivity to accredited masterpieces. My project in this essay is to show how and why Arnold should be recuperated, indeed to show how insistently he is still with us. More broadly, I wish to illustrate the dangers of literary and cultural misunderstanding that...