The Criterion: Cultural Politics and Periodical Networks in Inter-War Britain (review)

There have been a variety of flying visits to the Criterion over the years, in-and-out engagements with Eliot's seventeen-year struggle to create an eighteen-volume record of intellectual life between the wars. Some hefty doctoral dissertations on the periodical await an occasional reader on the shelves of university libraries, but some contemporary critics more readily thumb the pages of the Criterion itself in search of evidence for agenda-driven studies of Eliot's religious, political, and economic biases. In the face of this academic activity, Jason Harding has taken the Criterion out of vacuum-sealed isolation and re-examined it in relation to other literary reviews of the time, showing Eliot and his contributors making their way in a post-war cultural climate in competition with other editors and their writers, all vying for the attention and support of a limited literary public and readership. To Harding, the character of the Criterion "cannot be divorced from the alliances and loyalties, rivalries, animosities, and friendships that mark all social relations as fully human" (7), and in the process of reconstructing these intellectual relationships he has admirably scoured all the accessible archives in Great Britain, America, and Canada, interviewing when possible the surviving participants and witnesses. Harding's laudable aim has been "to provide a thickly textured account of the milieu of British inter-war literary journalism necessary for measured assessment of the history and significance of the Criterion" (21). That assessment comes through a disinterested immersion in magazines and milieus and in a jargon-free narrative that seeks neither to indict nor exonerate the less attractive aspects of Eliot's Tory-Anglican conservatism, but certainly to address what he describes as "slack charges of 'fascism' and 'anti-Semitism'" (6) that have followed upon Eliot's editorial provision for the symposial examination of right-wing causes.

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