But if the rise of literary theory has been a necessary development in many respects, one of the casualties has been the concept of the ‘literary’ itself. Literature, as a discrete object of enquiry, has dissolved in a sea of cultural studies. Indeed, several of Lane’s ‘literary theorists’ are not really interested in literature at all, but in tangential issues, such as the implications of technological change and new forms of communication. The idea that literature, narrowly defined, has some intrinsic value has been challenged in a variety of ways, ranging from the legitimate to the simplistic and wrong-headed. The novelist Zadie Smith tells the story of being confronted by a pair of artists at a public forum after she raised the question of aesthetic merit. She could not, the artists asserted, legitimately claim that King Lear was any better than the text on the back of a cornflakes packet. This exchange, she goes on to observe, represents an ‘exceedingly stupid’ version of a very serious academic debate.

Smith is right on both counts: the debate is serious, and framing it in this way is indeed stupid. The fact that the media only seem interested in perpetuating the stupid version, and that the conservative backlash against theory returns obsessively to this caricature, is a measure of the ideological nature of the current public discussion. A little nuance certainly would not hurt at this point. We need to acknowledge that every attempt to establish ‘literature’ as a fixed, formal category has been unsuccessful. This is not an especially shocking idea, nor is it an indication of the terminal decadence of Western civilisation. The basic claim of cultural studies – that phenomena which fall outside the traditional canon are worthy of study – is perfectly reasonable. Anyone who still thinks that mass cultural forms such as cinema or popular music cannot develop sophisticated aesthetic principles or produce powerful works of art needs to broaden his or her horizons. It is also worth remembering that the institutional study of literature – as distinct from literary criticism, which has a history dating back to antiquity – was conceived in response to a specific cultural anxiety. Mid-century academics such as Leavis, Trilling and I.A. Richards deplored mass culture and promoted literature as an antidote. In this they followed the nineteenth-century critic Matthew Arnold, who turned to the idea of high culture as a bulwark against the ‘philistinism’ (Arnold’s word, and one of his favourites) of the middle class.

The sub-Arnoldian idea that literature promotes civilised ‘values’ is one of the stranger claims made on its behalf. If we must speak in such sweeping terms, we have to admit that the Marquis de Sade is as much a product of Western civilisation as Dr Johnson. It is difficult to see how anyone might extract a coherent set of values from such a contradictory collection of texts. Great literature certainly does not, if you actually read it, constitute an argument in favour of the social status quo. It is the pedagogical demand itself that makes the idea of literature ideologically contentious, but a sweeping rejection of such concerns creates its own problems. Harold Bloom, the one contemporary theorist who has developed the argument that the literary canon is a self-sustaining structure, denies any notion of social utility, emphasising the irreducible strangeness of great literature. But his high-Romantic gesture of projecting his personal experience into the realm of universal principle ultimately becomes a form of radical solipsism, in which reading great authors is a quasi-spiritual consolation for one’s inevitable solitude and mortality.

There are theorists who, rather like their conservative critics, have dragooned literature into the service of social and political agendas. But it is possible to accept that our aesthetic judgments are not innocent of political considerations, while understanding that they are not identical to politics. One need not go as far as Bloom in isolating literature from its social context to retain an appreciation for ‘canonical’ works. Nor can the blame for the perceived decline in the study of serious literature be laid entirely at the door of recent theory. Theorists and educational institutions have not, en masse, abandoned the canon. Most of the thinkers in Lane’s book, despite their very different perspectives and methodologies, have been drawn to classic texts: Jacques Derrida and Hélène Cixous both wrote on Joyce; Mikhail Bakhtin based his theories on readings of Dostoyevsky and Rabelais; Terry Eagleton’s many books include studies of Shakespeare and the Brontës; Edward Said had a great affection for Austen, Conrad and Kipling; Geoffrey Hartman is a Wordsworth specialist; and Stephen Greenblatt is an expert on the literature of the Renaissance. Even Stanley Fish – who was memorably satirised as the jet-setting academic Morris Zapp in David Lodge’s campus novel Small World (1984) and who really is a relativist – is an authority on the poetry of Milton. The reason the conservative backlash lacks credibility is not only because of its habit of treating a great swathe of theorists with major philosophical differences as an undifferentiated mass, but because it proposes as an alternative an unreconstructed version of Arnoldian thinking that takes no account of the kinds of social changes that have taken place in the interim. We now live in a society dominated by new forms of communication, where the printed word has ceased to be the principle source of information for most people, including the highly educated; a society whose grasping materialism would give Arnold an apoplexy. Our culture simply does not value the kind of knowledge represented by serious literature, and I am not convinced that the culprit is literary theory, which is ultimately a series of arguments about methodology that is necessary and, at its best, extremely thought-provoking. It is not theory that closes down classics departments; it is economics. As long as the idea of liberal education continues to be crammed into a box marked ‘vocational’, the study of serious literature for its own sake will continue to be a hard sell. Students encouraged to regard education as a means to an end will take the path of least resistance. I do not presume to offer any solutions, but I do submit that simply denouncing anything that smacks of Gallic subversion and cramming Great Books down people’s necks until they acknowledge their timeless wisdom won’t work.

The argument in favour of an education grounded in serious literature is that, rather like history, it provides, not any specific set of values, but perspective. On this count, the most significant omission from Lane’s book is Erich Auerbach (Maurice Blanchot probably deserved an entry, too). One of the virtues of the idea of literature is that it is always breaking down, resisting simple ideological attempts to appropriate it. It does have the potential to make us conscious of the subtleties of language, at the same time as it exposes us to ideas and situations beyond our range of experience. It can confront us with the many ways in which people far removed from us are both like and unlike ourselves. The most deleterious consequence of theory is not that it has introduced the question of ideological perspective into the problematic business of interpretation, but that it has caused literary studies to retreat into itself. Again, there are perhaps some material forces at work here. At a time when the humanities are underappreciated and subject to crimped conditions and shoestring funding, should we be surprised that literary studies – the most conspicuously useless of its disciplines – has sought to develop a harder theoretical edge, cultivating modes of expression that ape scientific and philosophical language? Leavis was once asked about his method. It is, he replied, to be very intelligent. Try putting that on your next grant application.