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“... Academic publishers in Britain are relying increasingly upon the series of monographs, a form which permits the development of brand loyalty and which allows a few excellent literary introductions and re-interpretations to carry in their wake any number of inferior works. The rise of the series is most pronounced in the oppositional subculture of academic feminism, socialism and deconstruction which seeks in various ways to challenge traditional notions of method, of canon, and of the status of literature ...”

“... The plot of Frankenstein, Chris Baldick points out, can be summed up in two sentences. ‘Frankenstein makes a living creature out of bits of corpses. The creature turns against him and runs amok.’ The mystery is why so many people know the plot of Frankenstein, and have known it, as this book ably demonstrates, since shortly after the work’s first appearance in 1818, without necessarily reading a line of Mary Shelley’s prose ...”

“... was exactly summed up by one of its exponents, Mrs Anna Laetitia Barbauld, whom I am surprised Chris Baldick does not refer to in his thoughtful and well-informed introduction. In the course of a long career which spanned the last half of the 18th century and the first quarter of the 19th she edited Collins’s and Akenside’s poems and ...”

“... application of technology to learning, and unfounded hopes as to the ‘culture’ of science. As Baldick writes in his fine The Social Mission of English Criticism, the educational model of the Leavises ‘revolves around the opposition between society at large and “society” in the 18th-century sense; between an unconscious mass and its conscious ...”

“... spirit. Eagleton’s account of the growth of English studies leans heavily on research done by Chris Baldick and published as The Social Mission of English Criticism. Indisputably his own, however, are such jeux d’esprit as the descriptions of the Scrutiny project as ‘at once hair-raisingly radical and really rather absurd’, and of the founders ...”

“... a large public which expected poets, above all others, to take the pulse of the age. The 1930s, as Chris Baldick observed in his excellent recent volume in the Oxford English Literary History, 1910-40: The Modern Movement, were ‘the last years in which that assumption was widely shared’. Quite how widely is hard to say, of course, just as it would be ...”