> as lemmas

1932 F. R. Leavis How to teach Reading ii. 40 To recommend close analytic study of a few poems of each of the authors in question is not to discourage further attention to those authors... On the contrary, it is impossible that anyone who had done such close work locally would not..go on to further exploration.

1937 J. C. Ransom in Virginia Q. Rev. Autumn 586 Philosophers have not proved that they can write close criticism by writing it; and I have the feeling that even their handsome generalizations are open to suspicion as being grounded more on other generalizations, those which form their prior philosophical stock, than on acute study of particulars.

1938 V. Woolf Diary 26 May (1984) V. 144 I think to fill in the time quietly by forcing myself to do a Horace Walpole sketch for America. Why not? It means close reading.

1951 Mind 60 103 Begin with the two short papers..only eleven pages in all. They certainly demand ‘close reading’.

1952 L. A. Fiedler in Sewanee Rev. LX. 259 In a world of..‘close-reading’ (a cant phrase of the antibiographist) as an ideal, one cannot even talk of so large an abstraction as poetry.

1959 Listener 20 Aug. 289/3 English ‘close’ criticism is at its best when it deals with writers such as Malraux, Sartre, and Camus.

1983 Times Lit. Suppl. 11 Feb. 134/3 A specifically literary criticism..would surely call for special concern for the text. Hence I am very sympathetic with de Man's concern for ‘close-reading’.

1984 Times Lit. Suppl. 23 Mar. 317/1 The chief virtue of his..book is found in his close readings of the ways Léger's drawings and paintings actually appear.