The critic as amateur The Critic as Amateur brings leading and emerging scholars together to explore the role of amateurism in literary studies. While untrained reading has always been central to arenas beyond the academy – book clubs libraries used bookstores – its role in the making of professional criticism is often disavowed or dismissed. This volume the first on the critic as amateur restores the links between expertise autodidactic learning and hobbyist pleasure by weaving literary criticism in and out of the university