Richards, Ivor Armstrong (1893—1979) British literary critic, leading exponent of Practical Criticism, born in Sandbach in Cheshire. Richards’s parents were, as Eagleton, Terry puts it in his surprisingly affirmative essay ‘The Rise of English’ (chapter one of Literary Theory: An Introduction, 1983), ‘provincial petty bourgeoisie’, meaning that he belonged to a social class that had hitherto been excluded from university. He was educated at Clifton College in Bristol and at Cambridge University. He lectured and tutored in English and the Moral Sciences at Cambridge from 1922 until 1929, when he took a year off to take up a fellowship in Beijing. In 1931 he accepted a visiting position at Harvard. In due course his position there was made permanent and he spent the remainder of his career in the US. When Richards started teaching at Cambridge in the early 1920s, English Literature did not exist as a scholarly discipline and its study was viewed with suspicion. Yet within a decade it had become a vital part of the university and has only grown in strength since then. Richards, along with his former student James, C. L. R., was instrumental in this development. In large part, this was because Richards and Leavis transformed the study of literature from a question of mere taste (i.e. what one likes and doesn’t like) into a question of moral education and judgement (i.e. whether or not a text can teach us something important about how we should conduct our lives). As Eagleton puts it, English Literature became the arena in which the fundamental questions of human existence were thrown into relief and put under intense examination via a process that became known as ‘close reading’. Literature was to pick up where religion left off and provide moral order in the midst of chaos. Despite writing prolifically on the subject of what counts as good literature and why it is important, Richards did not really establish an aesthetic that could be emulated. He treated poetry, in particular, as transparent windows into the psyche of poets, yet did so in such a way that one would have to be him to see it as he does. Yet as Eagleton points out, the true achievement of Richards and Leavis is not the methods they created, which have been superseded anyway, but the transformation of literature into a scholarly object. Richards’s most important books are: The Meaning of Meaning (1923), which he co-authored with C. K. Ogden; The Principles of Literary Criticism (1924); and Practical Criticism (1929). Interestingly, Richards’s work proved more enduringly influential in the US (where he is credited as one of the fathers of New Criticism) than in his native country. Further Reading: J. Russo I. A. Richards: His Life and Work (1989). J. Schiller I. A. Richards’s Theory of Literature (1969).