WHAT IS THE ROLE OF THE POLITICS AND IDEOLOGY IN LITERARY STUDIES?
“Literature, in the meaning of the word as we have inherited it, is an ideology. It has the most intimate relations to the question of social power.” Terry Eagleton, 44 “As religion progressively ceases to provide the social ‘cement,’ affective values and basic mythologies by which a socially turbulent class-society can be welded together, ‘English’ is constructed as a subject to carry this ideological burden from the Victorian period onward. The key figure here is Matthew Arnold, always preternaturally sensitive to the needs of his social class, and engagingly candid about being so. The urgent social need, as Arnold recognizes, is to ‘Helenise’ or cultivate the philistine middle class, who have proved unable to underpin their political and economic power with a suitably rich and subtle ideology. This can be done by transfusing into them something of the traditional style of the aristocracy, who as Arnold shrewdly perceives are ceasing to be the dominant class in England, but who have
