George Orwell considered Animal Farm (1945) his breakthrough, the book which brought together his gifts as a novelist with his commitment as a political writer. 'Animal Farm was the first book in which I tried, with full consciousness of what I was doing, to fuse political purpose and artistic purpose into one whole', he wrote in his 1946 essay 'Why I Write'. The Spanish Civil War, which began in 1936, turned the storyteller and journalist into a political writer, and the experience of fighting in that war alongside idealistic young Trotskyists and anarchists made him deeply hostile to the Soviet Union. He felt that Stalin had damaged the Republican cause in Spain in his effort to control it, just as he had betrayed the revolution at home. As Orwell saw it, the Soviet Union had become a brutal dictatorship built around a cult of personality and enforced by a reign of terror. He was especially incensed by the apologetics of its Western sympathisers, who felt that the cause of building socialism in a backward country excused many abuses. As he saw it, the rise of totalitarianism in Russia and Germany in the 1930s made his own political commitments inescapable. 'Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism, as I understand it'. Above all, he adds, 'what I have most wanted to do throughout the past ten years is to make political writing into an art' (CEJL, 1:28).

Surveying the state of criticism in 1891, Henry James wrote: ‘If literary criticism may be said to flourish among us at all, it certainly flourishes immensely, for it flows through the periodical press like a river that has burst its dikes. The quantity of it is prodigious … Periodical literature is a huge, open mouth which has to be fed – a vessel of immense capacity which has to be filled.’ Filling this maw, James found, was a great deal of uninspired chatter of a generalised, mechanical kind, a deluge of ‘reviewing’ that ‘in general has nothing in common with the art of criticism’: ‘What strikes the observer above all, in such an affluence, is the unexpected proportion the discourse uttered bears to the objects discoursed of – the paucity of examples, of illustrations and productions, and the deluge of doctrine suspended in the void.’

Besides this periodical literature there was also academic scholarship that was either genteel-Arnoldian, concerned with upholding certain moral and social values, or historical-philological, oriented toward establishing literary facts, mainly biographical, and exact texts, some of which – the poems of Donne and other metaphysical poets, for example – would prove essential to the critical revolution that followed. But especially in America, there was little that we today – with our ingrained emphasis on close reading, with our view of literary commentary as professional discourse yet also as a political and social argument – would describe as criticism. Two longtime antagonists, the humanist Paul Elmer More and his iconoclastic opponent, H. L. Mencken, could agree on one thing: the sheer paucity of genuine aesthetic criticism in the first decade of the twentieth century, when each began writing. ‘When I did most of my work’, wrote More, ‘there was almost a critical vacuum in this country and in England … It was something of an achievement – I say it unblushingly – just to keep going in such a desert.’ Mencken said much the same thing. ‘When I began to practice as a critic, in 1908, … it was a time of almost inconceivable complacency and conformity.’