This may be Hugh Kenner's crankiest book.

Kenner, a product of still-colonial Canada qualified by later USAn influence, never particularly liked England, and his overall theme is the collapse of a single public for serious literature in England proper, combined with a general turning away of the English literary establishment from international modernism.

He's entirely willing to grant talent to a fair number of writers individually, although he's equally willing to indicate where he thinks some of them wasted their talent. But the ones he thinks best of tend to be on the outside: English letters in general are another question.

He begins in 1895, identifying three publics for reading. There is a public for Tit-Bits, a sort of level below Reader's Digest (that public has now, had for some time even in 1988, become a consumer of television rather than printed matter). There is a public represented by Dent's Everyman's Library, now the broad consumer of both bestsellers and most "literary fiction". Finally, there's a small public with an interest in texts as such, and an interest in precision of diction and structural complexity.

Kenner makes a distinction between works with a certain level of complexity / ambition / thematic importance and those falling below it. The "classics" of Everyman's Library, even if they began as challenging, have been made comfortable by a tradition of acceptance and interpretation.

Following Kenner's narrative, although the English literary world learned from international modernism it turned away from it: the dominant poets run Auden, Thomas, Larkin, anti-modernists all. Not only that, but the serious public for literature splintered, and the world of authors splintered as well. There is little commonality between David Jones, Charles Tomlinson, and Geoffrey Hill, and although their publics overlap they are distinct.

In many ways this may be the closest Kenner, trained at the height of New Criticism, ever came to writing, implicitly, about the function of, the justification for, for criticism.

For Kenner, literature itself is self-justifying as something which is to be enjoyed; but enjoyment is tied to it being a challenge, or at least requiring a continued act of attention.

From this point of view, the point of criticism is to assist the reader in approaching and enjoying texts which require either or both of "background" or close reading for full enjoyment. This is certainly the function of Kenner's criticism, running from The Poetry of Ezra Pound and Dublin's Joyce through The Invisible Poet and The Pound Era at the height of his career, to the more minor works of his later years.

And, for all that it put various (primarily English) reviewers' backs up, I think that A Sinking Island has a point. England's retreat from empire has been a cultural turning in, away from ambition and into nostalgia, and a continuing failure to engage with anything coming from outside. It may not be too fanciful to see the decline which Kenner asserts as the beginning of a slide which led, eventually, to the Brexit vote and a political culture in which Boris Johnson can be taken to be a serious politician. ( )