The usual narrative of the development of English as a discipline is big on grand designs. In the 1860s Matthew Arnold thought that the appreciation of literature should supplant religion in providing spiritual nourishment in industrial life. FR Leavis, from the 1930s, continued this argument. He claimed that utilitarian values had so throttled the life force of twentieth-century culture, that it was only in reading really great literature that our moral and spiritual bearings could be recovered. More recently, the more politicised side of 'literary theory' (though in itself a beast with many shapes) proposed cultural criticism as a way of resisting ideological incorporation into the same social norms.