I. A. Richards was the most influential of the first generation of academic literary theorists. This definitive collection of his writing between 1919 and 1938 shows that Richards' position was distinct from the emerging consensus in university literary education. Richards is often misunderstood as a master of a now superseded school of academic criticism and a forerunner of an institutionalised classroom method. This set will allow today's scholar and researcher to discover that Richards was actually one of its most severe critics.