Ivor Armstrong Richards was the most influential literary theorist writing in English in the second and third decades of the twentieth-century. His impact on the teaching of English literature was immense, both through his own writings (mainly
Principles of Literary Criticism, 1925; and
Practical Criticism, 1929) and through his pupils at Cambridge, of whom only William Empson need be mentioned to illustrate their standing. Moreover, Richards' discussion of and insistence upon the importance of poetry, by which he often meant literature or, still more generally, “art”, was a controversial but invigorating brief for two generations of writers. Marginalized in literary circles by his work on improvements in language-teaching technique, and overshadowed by the post-structuralist…
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Citation: Constable, John. "I. A. Richards". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 28 October 2000 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=5183, accessed 21 November 2024.]
