The Ideology of the Individual in Anglo-American Criticism: The Example of Coleridge and Eliot

In the wake of the post-structuralist attack on interpretation by such theorists as Jacques Derrida and Gilles Deleuze, the function of criticism has been increasingly questioned, so that whatever its claims to contribute to the understanding of texts, it no longer enjoys its former privileged status. Far from being objective and innocent, criticism can now be seen as a transformative activity mediated by theoretical assumptions that make possible, but also limit, its thinking about the