Six lectures on literature

Delivered at the University of Manchester during the turbulent first two decades of the twentieth century, these six lectures capture a scholar grappling with the deep roots of English literature while the world around him transformed beyond recognition. C.H. Herford was not merely cataloging the canon; he was asking what literature is for, and why certain voices endure across centuries. His lectures move through the ages with a teacher's urgency and a critic's precision, tracing the strands of tradition that bind Chaucer to the modern moment. This is intellectual history as it was practiced when lectures were events, when scholars stood before their public and made the case for why the past still mattered. The lectures carry the particular charge of being written in real time, during years of unprecedented change, by a man who believed literature might be one of the few things worth preserving.