Collini, Stefan. "Trilling's Sandbags: Lionel Trilling's Critical Essays." THE NATION December 3, 2008.

Trilling, Lionel. The Liberal Imagination: Essays on Literature and Society. London: Martin Secker and Warburg, 1951. Rpt. New York: New York Review Books, 2008. It may be hard to understand why Trilling was, a couple of generations ago, one of academia's most cherished culture heroes, one of the few saints of modern literary criticism. It may be harder still to make the case for why Trilling, in his antique, mannered way, might matter now. But if so, there can be few better places to start than with a reconsideration of his most celebrated book, The Liberal Imagination (first published in 1950), reissued with a brief, deft introduction by Louis Menand, thought by some to come as near as anyone can to being Trilling's successor today. The scale of the book's success on first publication seems scarcely credible today. It belonged, after all, to a genre most present-day publishers shun as utterly unsalable. It was a collection of essays; the essays had all been previously published in some form; and perhaps most unpromising of all, they were essays in literary criticism. Yet the hardcover sold an initial 70,000 copies, and then the paperback a further 100,000. Menand remarks that the volume "made literary criticism matter to people who were not literary critics," which is true enough but may understate its reach. A similar work that sold, say, 20,000 copies would already be doing that. The Liberal Imagination made Trilling's version of literary criticism matter to a readership that was in search of something more than criticism, perhaps more than literature itself. His essays spoke to a cultural or political moment in a way that is now hard to reconstruct and surely impossible to repeat. But why does it seem unimaginable that any work by a literary critic might have a similar impact now? Has "the culture" changed too much? Has "literary criticism"? Have "we"? Read the rest here: http://www.thenation.com/doc/20081222/collini/single.