{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.022046353872244205, 'fraction_numerical': 0.03787450537026569, 'mean_word_length': 4.919732441471572, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
“What Is Your Evidence?” R. S. Crane as Scholar, Critic, and Theorist of Methodology

Ronald Salmon Crane (1886–1967) is now largely forgotten outside of Chicago circles, but he was a prominent and controversial figure in the debates that raged over the theory and practice of literary history and criticism from the mid-1930s through the 1960s. He received a BA fromMichigan in 1908 and his PhD from the University of Pennsylvania in 1911. He taught at Northwestern from 1911 to 1924 as instructor, assistant professor, and associate professor before moving to the University of Chicago as professor in 1924. As editor ofModern Philology from 1930 to 1952 he unquestionably did much to make it one of the foremost journals on the planet in its realm. He served simultaneously as chair of English from 1936 to 1947. He was an enormously learned man and a much-feared reviewer in his day. Crane is now remembered almost entirely as the central figure and leader of the Chicago Critics, generally characterized as “the Chicago neoAristotelians.” The group’s 647-page manifesto, edited by Crane, was Critics and Criticism: Ancient and Modern, published by the University of Chicago Press in 1952. It comprised twenty chapters written by Crane and five of his colleagues, almost all of them historical or theoretical rather than literary-critical in topic and method. For obvious reasons that I shall note briefly in due course, the Chicago Critics campaign failed to attract many followers outside a small cadre teaching or trained at theUniversity of Chicago. Their ferocious critical disputes with New Critics in the 1940s and 1950s generated much heat but little light and ended with the New Critics decisively if temporarily triumphant, nationally and internationally.