It would seem that literature these days is increasingly a matter of taste. We are helped, not to learn and practise discrimination between the good and the bad, but to buy and consume according to our ‘special interest’. We ask of a play or novel, not whether it will sharpen our understanding, nor whether it may damage our sensibilities, but that it should appeal. It has not always been so. When Chaucer chose to take his leave of the reader at the end of the Canterbury Tales with a formal apology—though no mere formality—for the ‘translacions and enditynges of worldly vanitees’ it was precisely their appeal for which he sought to make amends.

The recognition of the power of stories to shape character, and to shape language, has led to the Tradition, a canon judged worthy of study and constitutive of our culture. That Tradition is now under attack. Where it has not already been dismissed as irrelevant, it is rejected as ‘elitist’, a snub too hastily dismissive of Leavis’ wish for ‘an English School ... designed for an elite’ Literature, has even been deemed the creation of a powerful, wicked literary institution in which the universities are prime movers. Terry Eagleton has argued in his book Literary Theory that