Abstract | Personal acts of evaluative judgment are at the heart of the way current small and independent publishers of fiction in the UK define themselves. This often goes hand in hand with their ethical commitment to broadening and diversifying work published without any acknowledgement, however, that this might be in tension with acts of personal judgment. Literary studies, though, has much to say about this tension. By returning to the question of judgment at the beginning of academic literary criticism in the UK – in the work of F.R. Leavis and Scrutiny – this chapter illuminates some of the dangers for small presses in the prioritisation of evaluative judgment at the same time as showing that the literary critical has always been imbricated with acts of publishing. |
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