David, Philip. "A Curse on Mean-Spirited Intellectuals, and Literary Scholars Above All." MORE INTELLIGENT LIFE (Spring 2008).

It is probably because when I was a young beginner, trying to write about literature, I did not feel encouraged or appreciated. Those were days of high theory in literary studies: it was naïve to be interested in realism, in emotion, in the human content of literature as I was. "Nobody came," says Thomas Hardy of the plight of his own young idealist, "because nobody does." But I was very pleased when a friend recently sent me a book of literary criticism that he said I would like, and I did. This is rare: I am sick of university teachers treating literature as though it were a branch of something else—Social Studies, Gender Studies, Post-Colonial Studies, Political Studies. The book was by Brigid Lowe and is called "Victorian Fiction and the Insights of Sympathy". . . . Read the rest here: http://www.moreintelligentlife.com/node/294.