| Contents | 5 |
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| A Note on Texts | 7 |
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| A. The Age of Criticism | 9 |
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| 1 Introduction | 11 |
| 2 Contemporary Discussions of Criticism and the Critic | 20 |
| 2.1 Definitions and Evaluations: The State of Criticism | 20 |
| 2.2 Imagining Criticism | 30 |
| B. The Authority of Criticism | 55 |
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| 1 Critical Authority | 57 |
| 2 Aristocratic Authority | 62 |
| 2.1 Court-Wits and Gentleman Critics | 63 |
| 2.2 Changes in the System of Patronage | 79 |
| 3 The Authority of Seniority: Ancient and Modern Criticism | 102 |
| 4 The Authority of Poetic Genius | 123 |
| 4.1 The Poet as Critic | 125 |
| 4.2 Poets and Editors | 144 |
| 5 Learning: Knowledge between Authority and Pedantry | 158 |
| 5.1 The Pedant as Exemplary | 159 |
| 5.2 Polite Learning against Erudition | 165 |
| 5.3 Specialized Knowledge | 172 |
| 6 Rules and the Critic | 185 |
| 6.1 Power Structures | 188 |
| 6.2 Rules and Reason | 201 |
| 7 Taste and the Critic | 209 |
| 7.1 Debating Taste | 211 |
| 7.2 The Taste of the Audience | 221 |
| 7.3 The Standard of Taste | 224 |
| 8 Name-Authority: The Critic as Institution | 237 |
| 8.1 The Anachronistic Critic: John Dennis | 241 |
| 8.2 The Institutional Critic: Samuel Johnson | 262 |
| 9 Authority and the Marketplace | 277 |
| 9.1 Overproduction | 283 |
| 9.2 “This process of chymical criticism”: The Critic as Gate-Keeper | 293 |
| 10 Institutionalizing Authority: Academies and Reviews | 309 |
| 10.1 Courts of Criticism I: The Academy | 309 |
| 10.2 Courts of Criticism II: The Reviews | 320 |
| 10.3 “The Theatre of War”: Attacks on the Reviews | 349 |
| C. Conclusion | 365 |
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| Distance and Democracy | 367 |
| Works Cited | 381 |
| Index | 413 |
