SOURCE: Eagleton, Terry. “II.” In The Function of Criticism: From “The Spectator” to Post-Structuralism, pp. 29-43. London: Verso, 1984.

In the following excerpt, Eagleton describes the economic conditions of literary production in the late eighteenth century leading up to the emergence of the professional critic in England and the politically-based criticism of the nineteenth century.

The bourgeois public sphere of early eighteenth-century England is perhaps best seen not as a single homogenous formation, but as an interlaced set of discursive centres. The collaborative literary relations established by the Tatler and Spectator find a resonance elsewhere, though with a markedly different ideological tone, in the writings of Samuel Richardson. I have described elsewhere how Richardson's perpetual circulation of texts among friends and correspondents, with its attendant wranglings, pleadings, revisions, interpretations of interpretations, comes to constitute an entire discursive community of its own, a kind of public sphere in miniaturized or...