The Conservative Turn in Literary Studies

There’s a conservative turn happening in literary studies, although it hasn’t received much public attention. Those involved certainly haven’t banded together under a banner. In literature departments, there are no “conservatives” to compete with, say, “surface readers” or any other new, branded trend. In fact, it seems likely that those engaged in the movement are not fully aware they belong to it. After all, it isn’t easy to call oneself a conservative in the humanities these days. Yet this conservative turn is significant. It marks a pivotal moment of recognition in the discipline of English’s history.

What defines the conservative turn? A return to disciplinary bedrock, an insistence that the methods and purposes that first defined the discipline be respected and, in some form or other, resuscitated. The conservative turn also, therefore, revives interest in the discipline’s history. It remembers and reappraises not just English’s pathways and achievements but also its core values.

Only a small number of people are involved in this conservative turn. But it is nevertheless driven by powerful political and historical forces. It should be better understood — and, at least in part, endorsed.

Compared to, say, history or philosophy, English is a relatively modern discipline. There is widespread agreement that literary criticism in the form in which it came to dominate Anglophone English departments across much of the 20th century (and which made English the most popular academic discipline of them all in the period) began in and around Cambridge, England in the 1920s when I.A. Richards and William Empson applied T.S. Eliot’s radical revision of critical values and techniques to academic pedagogy and writing. Attention turned to words on the page. Overlooked linguistic and rhetorical effects — ambiguity, irony — took on a new importance. And so on. This account of disciplinary history may involve simplifications but it defines the lineage the conservative turn focuses on.

To some degree, the current conservative turn shares the spirit of the “post-critique” movement we associate most with Rita Felski. Both movements recoil from the humanities’ refashioning of themselves as society’s conscience. But the new movement is not a critique of critique, with the contradictions such a task involves. It turns, instead, toward the institutional and disciplinary past for regeneration.

We can catch sight of this conservative turn in a suite of books beginning with Helen Thaventhiran’s Radical Empiricists: Five Modernist Close Readers (2015), which examines the works of some of English’s founding figures, using their own techniques of close reading, ambiguity-detection and so on, to place them in a new context — William James’s “radical empiricism.” Intentionally or not, this move also canonizes the discipline’s founders; hence its conservative force.

Joseph North’s Literary Criticism: A Concise Political History (2017) is one of the conservative turn’s most noticed books. It is a spirited leftist polemic promoting I.A. Richards’s “practical criticism” (which became the post-Eliotic English department’s core program) as a form of “aesthetic education” associated above all with the 19th-century critic and educational theorist Matthew Arnold. Practical criticism began as an effort to ensure that students could accurately understand the meaning of poems as well as accurately distinguish between which were good and which were not by paying close attention to the words on the page. Richards, whose training was in experimental psychology, believed that practical criticism was important because good poetry had the power to rebalance the psyche against the ravages of modern culture. North (implicitly following Richards’s student F.R. Leavis) turns Richards’s neurological materialism into an appeal for literature professors to consciously shape their students’ sensibilities against the culture they find themselves in. North’s call for a “return to Richards” thus has a simultaneously conservative and left-radical force.

Taking a different entry point into the same area, Stefan Collini’s The Nostalgic Imagination: History in English Criticism (2019) is an account of how literary criticism in Eliot’s mode developed an influential, if nostalgic, vision of British history which stood against the histories presented by professional historians at the time. Collini enriches the discipline’s past by pointing out how far its intellectual ambitions extended. And his argument implies that literary history, as the discipline of English has known it, is an element in any full understanding of the past.

Like North’s book, Michael Clune’s A Defence of Judgment (2021) has attracted attention for its emphasis on aesthetic education. As its title suggests, it argues that literary judgment should once again become core business for English classrooms as it was in the days of Eliot, Richards, and Leavis, although Clune doesn’t mention Leavis, the critic most committed to judgment of them all. Clune also makes the case that literary judgment can help us resist the common notion, embedded in the contemporary consumer market, that all tastes are merely personal and thus equivalent, so that to judge one thing better than another has an elitist edge.

John Guillory’s Bourdieuean sociology of literary studies has provided the conservative turn’s most important contextualization. In his book Professing Criticism: Essays on the Organization of Literary Study (2022), he sets out “rationales” for a “re-establishment of the discipline” — a program as much of retrieval as of innovation, which the conservative turn is effectively committed to carrying out. Despite his relation to critical sociology, Guillory, like Clune, wants to restore judgment to the discipline’s center as well as to insist on modern literary studies’ continuity with its longue durée. And in his more recent On Close Reading (2025), Guillory returns focus to the foundational technique of modern literary study. Close reading is also the subject of Jonathan Kramnick’s Criticism and Truth: On Method in Literary Studies (2023), which mounts a defense of close reading as a core practice, here reinvented as writerly “craft” and thought of as a way of uncovering “truth.”

Terry Eagleton’s Critical Revolutionaries: Five Critics Who Changed the Way We Read (2022) is a trade book making the revisionist case for the intellectual vitality of T.S. Eliot’s criticism and all that flowed from it. Eagleton is an especially telling recruit to the conservative turn because his earlier Criticism and Ideology (1976), Literary Theory (1983), and The Functions of Criticism (1984) played a central a role in the abandonment of the Eliotic/New Critical program in the ’70s and ’80s. Eagleton was largely responsible for the idea that Arnoldian aesthetic education and its successors in English departments offered a false cultural solution to a material political and social problem, namely class inequity. His re-engagement with T.S. Eliot is a telling sign of the times.

This conservative turn among literary academics focuses just on English as a discipline. It is, as it were, a disciplinary conservativism that asks us to conserve academic English in particular. But it is backed up by a more general tendency across the humanities.

Thus in Nihilistic Times: Thinking With Max Weber (2023), which is really about Donald Trump although his name is barely mentioned, the political theorist Wendy Brown resuscitates Weber’s conservative critique of so-called political nihilism in a way that allows us to see the current hyperpoliticization of the humanities, and its failure to adhere to a corporate project based in restraint and disciplinarity, as forms of the social-political nihilism that has underpinned Trump’s success. In a similar spirit, Richard Bourke’s Hegel’s World Revolutions (2023) turns to Hegel to propose that the moralism and politicization that now dominate the humanities need to be resisted. We might follow Brown’s and Bourke’s lead and apply Weber and Hegel to the literary humanities, thereby endowing a Guillory-like program of disciplinary re-establishment with a broad conceptual and historical framework and transdisciplinary oomph.

To repeat: The conservative turn is being made by people who are not, in terms of electoral politics, conservative at all. The conservative turn is only conservative in the context of the academic humanities, not in terms of wider social politics. Indeed, paradoxically, the disciplinary conservative turn belongs to the left.

In the face of this paradox, perhaps our first challenge in trying to understand the conservative turn concerns the word “conservative” itself. Instead of being petrified by it, we need to re-examine it. We need to think about its various, in fact very different, modalities and its various relations to culture and society both historically and conceptually. Such an effort is especially useful today because it seems as if conservativism, in some of its modes at least, can stand against the popular authoritarianisms that have recently become so powerful around the world.

At the same time, disciplinary conservatism can avoid becoming entangled with those forms of the humanities that take on the role of society’s conscience — let’s call them the evangelical humanities. Once the evangelical humanities embraced identity rather than class politics, they were endorsed by the educated class quite generally. But, as many have noted, that triggered a reaction that has helped unleash popular authoritarianisms. Disciplinary conservatism pushes back on this process.

In general terms, then, the current conservative turn in the humanities can be understood as a course correction designed to protect liberalism against the radical right and popular authoritarianism à la Trump. This is the situation in which, today, liberalism and conservativism don’t oppose one another but combine.

For all that, this political dimension cannot explain why English in particular is harboring such a strong disciplinary conservative turn.

The most obvious reason is that while the humanities as a whole are losing ground, English specifically is bleeding students, scholars, funding. In this context, it seems to some that maintaining the discipline’s original disciplinary practices will help secure it from further depredation.

Beyond that, though, something larger is at stake — literature itself.

First-wave academic literary criticism was based on a love of literature. It was a way of asserting literature’s powers, personal, ethical, conceptual, and cultural, inside the educational system. The discipline was formed as a program to secure and extend that love. In Weber’s term, it was a bureaucratization of literature’s own charisma. So from one point of view, losing the discipline’s methodological bases and cultural purposes, is to put literature itself at risk.

Is this understanding correct?

Not unambiguously so. The disciplinary conservative turn seems to underestimate the power of the various forces that swept away the discipline that Eliot and Richards founded and which now threaten to marginalize the literary humanities as a whole. As Guillory in particular has noted, vernacular literature seemed so culturally important only under a particular technological regime — that of the printed book — and then too as a placeholder for the Latin and Greek classics around which the liberal arts had turned at least since the15th century but which by 1900 was dying and is now firmly in its grave.

At the same time the conservative turn seems to fail sufficiently to recognize that in the era of Amazon and the internet, literature itself has been transformed. Is literature still the kind of thing that needs careful judgment, close reading, sensitivity to language’s reserves, and subtleties? Can it occupy and justify an academic bureaucracy built on all that?

Probably not. No program of recovery and re-establishment is likely to restore the discipline as a truly central cultural presence.

But once we acknowledge that, from now on, the discipline will exist on the margins not just of the culture but of the academic humanities, too; once we accept that it will possess minimal charisma and be addressed to a small cohort of erudite fandom, then (a version of) the older program may help provide purpose and cohesion. In these terms, the conservative turn makes sense. Especially because, while it resists what Trump and Elon Musk stand for and thus gains heft and purpose, it also resists some of the left politics of culture that have not only ended up helping Trumpism come to power but put a serious historical grasp of the literary heritage at some risk.

Writing in the aftermath of the first World War, Eliot insisted that serious literary criticism would only matter to a tiny group, what Leavis was later to call a “minority.” The discipline developed out of that thought. At its most persuasive, knowingly or not, the conservative turn in the literary humanities settles us back to accepting our relative insignificance, albeit with a purpose and legitimation Eliot could not have imagined.