Introduction

Abstract

Some would perhaps have thought Versions of the Literary Past a more suitable title for a book subtitled The Canonical in the Criticism of T. S. Eliot, F. R. Leavis, Northrop Frye and Harold Bloom. But the omission of ‘literary’ in the title is very much deliberate, since canonical issues always seem to widen into renderings of the past which extend beyond the purely literary, renderings which at the same time imply an idealistic or even utopian vision of the future in broadly existential terms.