I. A. Richards

I. A. Richards (Ivor Armstrong Richards, 26 February 1893 – 7 September 1979) was an influential English literary critic and rhetorician. He was educated at Clifton College and Magdalene College, Cambridge, where his love of English was nurtured by the scholar Charles Hickson 'Cabby' Spence. His books, especially The Meaning of Meaning, Principles of Literary Criticism, Practical Criticism, and The Philosophy of Rhetoric, proved to be founding influences for the New Criticism. The concept of 'practical criticism' led in time to the practices of close reading, what is often thought of as the beginning of modern literary criticism. Richards is regularly considered one of the founders of the contemporary study of literature in English.

Biographical sketch

Beginnings

Richards began his career without formal training in literature at all; he studied philosophy ("moral sciences") at Cambridge University. This may have led to one of Richards' assertions for the shape of literary study in the 20th century – that literary study cannot and should not be undertaken as a specialisation in itself, but instead studied alongside a cognate field (philosophy, psychology, rhetoric, etc.).