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Lionel Trilling was one of the two or three most influential literary intellectuals in the period from 1950, when he published The Liberal Imagination, until his death in 1975, by which time he was widely regarded as a spokesman on general cultural issues. Unlike his contemporaries in the New Criticism who concentrated their energies on the formal and autonomous attributes of literature, Trilling's concern was with literature as a part of cultural history, specifically as literature spoke of the moral issues at stake in the self's quarrel with culture. He took seriously, and often defended, Matthew Arnold's dictate that literature is a "criticism of life." Thus René Wellek, in American Criticism, 1900-1950 (1986; volume 6 of A History of Modern Criticism: 1750-1950), begins his not wholly sympathetic chapter on Trilling by stating that "It is not easy to focus on the literary criticism of Lionel Trilling if literary criticism is understood strictly as comment on literature; theories about it, principles, and specific texts." While Trilling in fact shares the aesthetic standards of the New Critics, he makes explicit the cultural debates and value judgments these standards involve.
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