Close reading, as it gained prestige from the 1920s in Cambridge Practical Criticism and then the American New Criticism, was not only a product of the modernist period but a product of modernism. Whatever else modernism involved, it advocated what we might call ‘close writing’: a minute attention to the words being used, the word choices being justified by the effects they produced. When I. A. Richards distributed anonymized poems to his students and colleagues for them to analyse, and then analysed their responses in turn, he wrote up his findings in the book that effectively launched close reading as an academic practice, Practical Criticism (1929). This chapter investigates two kinds of context for the attention to close reading exemplified by Richards. One is the network of writers and thinkers around Richards; the other is literary modernism itself
