The History of Critical Quarterly
Critical Quarterly (CQ) was started in 1959 by two
young university lecturers in English, C. Brian Cox at Hull University
and A.E. Dyson at University College of Wales, Bangor. This was
a private enterprise, without public subsidy, dependent in its first
years on income from sales and advertisements. The journal quickly
achieved an international reputation, with more than 5,000 subscribers
across the world.
After one year Oxford University Press took over the handling of subscriptions, to be succeeded in 1973 by Manchester University Press. In 1990 Blackwell Publishing replaced MUP.
CQ originally published just new poetry and literary criticism, dealing with literature from Chaucer to the present day and with its main emphasis on twentieth century literature. In the 1980s the journal started accepting short stories. It soon established a reputation for poetry and criticism of the highest standard. Poets who published regularly in its early days included Donald Davie, Thom Gunn, Ted Hughes, Philip Larkin, R.S. Thomas and Charles Tomlinson. American poets included Robert Bly, Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath, Louis Simpson and Gary Snyder. Many well-know poems first appeared in Critical Quarterly: Larkin's 'Love Songs in Age', Ted Hughes's 'Hawk Roosting', Thom Gunn's 'Back to Life', R.S. Thomas's 'Here', Sylvia Plath's 'A Birthday Present' and Louis Simpson's 'On the Eve'.
Many young British and American academics who were just making their reputations published their criticism in Critical Quarterly: Bernard Bergonzi, Malcolm Bradbury, Barbara Everett, Stanley Fish, Laurence Lerner and David Lodge. Their essays appeared alongside those of older established academics and poets: W.H. Auden, William Empson, Graham Hough, Frank Kermode, Helen Gardner, C.S. Lewis and E.M.W. Tillyard.
The editors chose not to link the journal to a specific school of literary criticism. Their aim was to bring the best of contemporary poetry and criticism to a wide audience, particularly teachers outside the university system. They allowed debate and a variety of conflicting viewpoints. Perhaps best know is William Empson's virulent attack on Helen Gardner's edition of Donne. In contrast to specialised academic journals read by initiates, the editors looked for essays written in clear, accessible prose, without jargon or specialised language, easily available to any intelligent reader.
Both founding editors were trained at Cambridge, and for one term
attended F.R. Leavis's seminar at Downing College. They were influenced
by his belief in the moral value of literature, but they strongly
disliked his Puritanism and his fierce denunciations of contemporary
writers. The editors were in tune with George Steiner's views as
expressed in 1974 in an open letter to the first issue of The New
Review: 'One trusts critical ferocity when it has behind it either
a manifest creative achievement or a parallel impulse to advocacy….
It is an open question whether it is ever productive to discard
courtesy, humaneness, a complete alertness to the vulnerabilities
involved, when one is writing criticism.' The editors believed that
F.R. Leavis's journal, Scrutiny, so full of vitality in the 1930s,
had lost this impulse to advocacy. They celebrated creative achievements
by publishing new poetry in each issue, often by unknowns. They
rejected cultural pessimism and the myth of decline so influential
in the 1950s. The post-1945 war period included writers of high
quality such as Pasternack, Nabokov, Gunter Grass, Saul Bellow,
Sylvia Plath and Robert Lowell; the editors believed their journal
should help their readers to enjoy and understand their works. Critical Quarterly would take its place among all other publications which,
in Northrop Frye's words, make literature 'accessible to any student
with goodwill' and prevent it from 'stagnating among groups of mutually
unintelligible elites.'
The success of the journal led to an extension of its work in a second journal, Critical Survey, intended specifically for teachers in schools, and an annual poetry pamphlet which brought together about twenty of the best poems of the year. The first issues of these annual pamphlets sold over 10,000. Poetry competitions were organised for those who had not published a volume of verse. The first competition was won by Alan Brownjohn and an unknown called Sylvia Plath, who then edited a second pamphlet, American Poetry Now.
This activity changed direction in 1969 when the editors devoted a whole issue of Critical Survey to an attack on the excesses of progressive education and the introduction by the Labour Party of a system of 11-18 comprehensives to replace the grammar school. This was called the 'Black Paper', in contrast to government White Papers, and the furore it created led to the publication of four more pamphlets. Contributors included Kingsley Amis, Robert Conquest, Geoffrey Bantock, Jacques Barzun, Iris Murdoch and Rhodes Boyson.
The Black Papers were not opposed in principal to progressive education, only to its excesses, which were rampant in British schools in the 1960s and 1970s. They criticised selection for grammar schools at the age of eleven and advocated it should be delayed until children were at least thirteen years of age. They criticised the student sit-ins which were damaging the reputation of British universities. Edward Short, the Labour Minister for Education, called the publication of the Black Paper 'one of the blackest days for education in the past hundred years'. The editors became leaders in a national campaign; today the Black Paper proposals for schools by and large are accepted by both the Conservative and Labour Parties in Britain.
In the 1970s and the 1980s Critical Quarterly continued
its policy of publishing new poetry and criticism. Unfortunately
A.E. Dyson fell seriously ill in the early 1970s and had to withdraw
from much of the editing, which continued at Manchester University
where C. Brian Cox was now Professor of English. In the late 1980s
he was appointed Chair of the British National Curriculum English
Working Group. He was very busy and after almost thirty years he
felt it was time for a new editor for Critical Quarterly.
There was a need for new blood, new ideas. The new editor was Colin
MacCabe, who at that time taught part-time for Pittsburgh University
and also worked for the British Film Institute.
For Colin MacCabe the mid-1960s in Paris were an astonishingly creative period which rocked the foundations of both the humanities and the social sciences. In one of his early editorials in CQ, he wrote: 'Lacan, Barthes, Derrida, Foucault, Althusser: the names roll off the tongue like a summons to some epic battle of the intellect.' In the 1980s there was a great shift in concepts of English national identity, as feminism and multi-cultural values transformed scholarly thinking. Under MacCabe's editorship CQ has responded to this ferment of ideas. The main change is that the journal now deals with all aspects of cultural studies. There are regular essays, for example, on film. Each issue usually has a central theme. Recent issues have dealt with 'Law and Literature' (edited by Anthony Julius). 'Education' (edited by Brian Cox and Bethan Marshall), 'Film and Television' (edited by Richard Kelly and Colin MacCabe) and 'The Scottish Issue', (edited by Simon Frith).
In the New Pelican Guide to English Literature John Holloway said that CQ was 'probably the most influential English literary-critical journal in the academic field over the post war decades.' In the Times Higher Education Supplement, Brian Morton wrote that CQ 'has become an institution without the slightest sign of ossification'. Rosalind Coward has said that under Colin MacCabe CQ has become 'the only journal to remain faithful to the original spirit of cultural studies. It mixes "high" and "low" culture, criticism and creative writing without losing sigh of political and social questions.'
