John Carey

thumb John Carey (5 April 1934 – 11 December 2025) was a British literary critic, and Merton Professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford from 1975 (emeritus from 2001). He was known for his anti-elitist views on high culture, as expounded in several books, twice chairing the Booker Prize committee, in 1982 and 2003, and chaired the judging panel for the first Man Booker International Prize in 2005. Quotes As an element in the reaction against mass values the intellectuals brought into being the theory of the avant-garde, according to which the mass is, in art and literature, always wrong. What is truly meritorious in art is seen as the prerogative of a minority, the intellectuals, and the significance of this minority is reckoned to be directly proportionate to its ability to outrage and puzzle the mass. Though it usually purports to be progressive, the avant-garde is consequently always reactionary. That is, it seeks to take literacy and culture away from the masses, and so to counteract the progressive intentions of democratic educational reform. The Intellectuals and the Masses: Pride and Prejudice among the Literary Intelligentsia, 1880–1939 (Faber & Faber, 1992), p. 18 Quotes about John Carey Carey argued that the intelligentsia was driven to create literary modernism by a profound loathing of ordinary common readers. The intellectuals feared the masses not because they were illiterate but because, by the early twentieth century, they were becoming more literate, thanks to public education, adult education, scholarships, and cheap editions of the great books. If more and more working people were reading the classics, if they were closing the cultural gap between themselves and the middle classes, how could intellectuals preserve their elite status as arbiters of taste and custodians of rare knowledge? They had to create a new body of modernist literature which was deliberately made so difficult and obscure that the average reader could not understand it. Jonathan Rose, 'A Conservative Canon: Cultural Lag in British Working-Class Reading Habits', Libraries & Culture, Vol. 33, No. 1 (Winter 1998), p. 102 Carey is extremely well read, and uses his impressive knowledge to point out some of the sillinesses of writers, such as in their attacks on "tinned food" and cremation as possible causes for the decline of British civilization. He is a healthy questioner of received opinions. It forces one to rethink one's preconceptions. Peter Stansky, review of The Intellectuals and the Masses: Pride and Prejudice among the Literary Intelligentsia, 1880–1939 by John Carey in Albion: A Quarterly Journal Concerned with British Studies, Vol. 25, No. 3 (Autumn 1993), p. 550 External links Category:1934 births Category:2025 deaths Category:Literary critics Category:People from London Category:Fellows of the Royal Society of Literature Category:Fellows of the British Academy Category:University of Oxford faculty Category:University of Oxford alumni