John Carey (critic)


John Carey, is a British literary critic, and post-retirement emeritus Merton Professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford. He is known for his anti-elitist views on high culture, as expounded in several books. He has twice chaired the Booker Prize committee, in 1982 and 2004, and chaired the judging panel for the first Man Booker International Prize in 2005.

Education and career

He was born in Barnes, London, and educated at Richmond and East Sheen Boys' Grammar School, winning an Open Scholarship to St John's College, Oxford. He has held posts in a number of Oxford colleges, and is an emeritus fellow of Merton, where he became a Professor in 1975, retiring in 2002.

Literary criticism

He has twice chaired the Booker Prize committee, in 1982 and 2004, and chaired the judging panel for the first Man Booker International Prize in 2005. He is chief book reviewer for the London Sunday Times and appears in radio and TV programmes including Saturday Review and Newsnight Review.

Views

He is known for his anti-elitist views on high culture, as expressed for example in his book What Good Are the Arts?. Carey's 1992 book The Intellectuals and the Masses: Pride and Prejudice among the Literary Intelligentsia, 1880–1939 was a critique of Modernist writers for what Carey argues were their elitist and misanthropic views of mass society. In his review of the book Geoff Dyer wrote that Carey picked out negative quotations from his subjects. Stefan Collini responded that disdain for mass culture amongst some Modernist writers was already well-known among literary historians.

Personal

Carey was born in April 1934 in Barnes, then on the Surrey/London border, the youngest of their four recorded children, to Charles W. Carey and Winifred E. Carey, née Cook.

Works