Critical Quarterly

About Critical Quarterly

Critical Quarterly: a full profile

Critical Quarterly is one of Britain's longest-lived journals of literary and cultural criticism — a quarterly, as its name declares, that has been publishing poetry, criticism and cultural argument since the end of the 1950s and is now published by Wiley. It carries the print ISSN 0011-1562 and the online ISSN 1467-8705, both recorded on its Journals World record and confirmed in the foreground for this profile through OpenAlex's ISSN endpoint, which resolves either number to the same source. Its editor is Colin MacCabe, who has edited it since 1987. Few journals of criticism carry so legible a history in their own pages: founded by C. B. Cox and A. E. Dyson to take literary criticism to readers beyond the university, publisher of the Black Papers on education from 1969, an early home for Sylvia Plath, Thom Gunn, Philip Larkin and Ted Hughes, and, under MacCabe, a journal that opened literary study to film, television, theory and cultural studies while keeping poetry and the literary canon in the same issue.

That history is not decoration. Critical Quarterly — often shortened in citations to Crit. Q., its ISO 4 abbreviation — is a case where understanding what a journal is for requires understanding what it was founded against, what it changed in 1987, and what it still tries to hold together: specialist scholarship and a general educated readership, new writing and criticism of the established canon, literature and the other cultural forms that now surround it. This profile sets out those facts with their sources, then turns to the practical questions an author or evaluator actually asks — scope, editorship, indexing, metrics with attribution, access and charges, and how to judge fit.

At a glance

History: an expanding readership for criticism

Critical Quarterly was established in 1958 by its first editors, Brian Cox — C. B. Cox — and A. E. Dyson, and its inaugural issue appeared in March 1959, opening with the declaration that literature is for everyman. The two dates are both correct and are often confused: 1958 is the founding, 1959 the first issue, and the stored Journals World coverage window, which begins in 1959, reflects the publication run. Cox had been formed in the Cambridge English department then dominated by F. R. Leavis, and Leavis's legacy shaped the journal's early years — it published a new generation including Raymond Williams, David Lodge and Frank Kermode — but Cox and Dyson set out to modify that inheritance. They judged that Leavis and his followers unfairly ignored contemporary writing, in part from a settled belief in a culture in decline, and they wanted criticism to address living literature and to reach readers outside the university: schoolteachers, sixth-formers and general readers as well as academics, in what Cox called an expanding elite, served also by Critical Quarterly Society conferences and, from 1960 to 1973, by a twice-yearly supplement, Critical Survey, addressed to secondary education. In the 1960s the journal was sold to more than half the grammar schools in Britain — a circulation into schools that few literary journals before or since have matched.

Two early features still define the journal's reputation. The first is poetry. Critical Quarterly included contemporary poetry from the start and helped launch major careers: Sylvia Plath won one of its first poetry competitions, and Thom Gunn, Philip Larkin and Ted Hughes all appeared in its early years, alongside Donald Davie, and, in the following decade, poets including Seamus Heaney, Charles Tomlinson and R. S. Thomas. Prose fiction later became a regular feature as well. The second is education politics. From 1969 the journal published the Black Papers on education, the Cox and Dyson-led interventions that attacked progressive educational orthodoxy and made Critical Quarterly a name in national public argument, not only in literary circles. A journal that could carry a close reading, a new poem and a polemic about schooling in the same intellectual project was doing something distinctive: treating literary culture as a public concern.

The second founding came in 1987, when, after nearly thirty years of Cox's editorship, Colin MacCabe took over and set out new aims for the journal. Contemporary assessment expected a thorough revamping of a journal that had seemed stuck in a pleasant rut, and MacCabe — whose name was associated with bringing structuralist and post-structuralist thought into English studies, and with film studies at the British Film Institute — largely kept the original ethos while moving the journal in more theoretical directions and expanding it into film studies, cultural studies and history alongside literary criticism. Its own current self-description, as summarised in the journal's reference entries, is that it addresses the whole range of cultural forms, so that discussions of cinema and television can appear alongside analyses of the accepted literary canon. Under MacCabe it has published Fredric Jameson, Slavoj Žižek, Jacqueline Rose and Paul Gilroy, among many other prominent scholars. In 2007 it also began a Critical Quarterly book series with Wiley-Blackwell, including books by David Trotter, Moustapha Safouan and Ashley Tauchert — evidence that the journal functions as an intellectual project with a publishing programme around it, not only as a periodical.

Publisher and place: a correction to the stored record

Critical Quarterly is published by Wiley, through its Wiley-Blackwell imprint, and its OpenAlex record gives the publisher as Wiley with the journal's homepage on Wiley's online library under its online ISSN. The older thin Journals World record rendered the publisher as a bare number followed by the United States. That garbled form should not be reproduced. The journal is British in origin, editorship and intellectual history — founded by two British academics, rooted in Cambridge English, sold into British schools, and edited by Colin MacCabe — while its publisher is a global company whose corporate geography explains how a United States label entered a database field. For citation and reporting purposes the accurate statement is: Critical Quarterly, a British journal of literary and cultural criticism, published by Wiley-Blackwell. Its standard identifiers beyond the ISSNs include the OCLC number 317647332 recorded in its reference entries, which librarians use to distinguish this title from other quarterlies with similar names.

Scope: the whole range of cultural forms

The journal's scope follows directly from its history. Its core is literary criticism — close reading, critical argument and surveys of writing past and present, including the contemporary writing its founders insisted on taking seriously when others did not. Around that core, and especially since 1987, it ranges across cultural studies, film and television studies, and history, on the principle stated in its self-description that cinema and television belong in the same discussion as the literary canon. It also publishes creative work — poetry has been part of the journal since its first years, and prose fiction became a regular feature — which makes it a hybrid that pure research journals are not: a place where a poem, a critical essay and a cultural argument can be read against each other by design.

For an author, that hybridity defines the fit test. A submission to Critical Quarterly should be written as criticism in the journal's sense: an argued, readable engagement with a text, a body of work, a cultural form or a critical question, addressed to an intelligent reader who is not necessarily a specialist in the author's sub-field. Narrowly technical work that only a handful of specialists could follow, presented without any effort to open its question to the journal's wider readership, sits awkwardly with a founding purpose that was explicitly democratic about literature. Equally, theory is welcome here — the MacCabe era made the journal a home for theoretically ambitious work — but it is theory in contact with cultural material: a film, a novel, a television form, a historical moment, an educational argument. Purely abstract work with no cultural object, and purely descriptive work with no critical argument, are both weaker fits than the work the journal is known for, which characteristically has both an object and a position.

The Black Papers strand is also a live part of the scope in a broader sense: the journal has a tradition of intervening in public argument about education and culture, and essays that address the state of literary education, the university, publishing or cultural policy — argued to a scholarly standard — belong to a conversation this journal started in British public life. Authors with such an essay should still expect scholarly scrutiny, and should ground a polemic in evidence and in the journal's own back-history of the debate, which any informed reader will know.

Editorial leadership

The editor is Colin MacCabe, editor-in-chief in the journal's reference listings and editor since 1987 — an exceptionally long tenure that gives Critical Quarterly an unusual continuity of taste and direction. MacCabe's own intellectual profile is part of the journal's identity: a Cambridge-formed critic associated with the importation of structuralist and post-structuralist ideas into English, with the film journal Screen, with production and postgraduate education at the British Film Institute, and with the argument — made in his own Critical Quarterly writing of the early 1990s — that a textual scholar could and should study popular and ephemeral forms, including television, as serious cultural material. An author submitting here is submitting to that editorial intelligence and to the board and referees around it, and the most useful pre-submission step is the oldest one: read recent issues, which are the only reliable guide to the current balance of poetry, criticism, film and cultural argument, and to the length, tone and openness to non-specialist readers that the journal currently rewards.

Historical editorship should be cited accurately. C. B. Cox was the founding editor, with A. E. Dyson, from the 1958 founding until MacCabe succeeded Cox in 1987; an editorial board was formed in 1978, after which a more flexible editorial policy prevailed following a period in the late 1960s when the journal had been less receptive to innovative poetry. Those details matter for anyone writing the journal's history or assessing an article from a particular era: a Critical Quarterly poem or essay of 1962, 1975 and 1995 comes from three recognisably different editorial regimes within one continuing journal.

Indexing and standing

Critical Quarterly's reference record lists indexing that includes Scopus, with its ISO 4 abbreviation Crit. Q. used across citation databases, and its presence in OpenAlex is verified in this profile. As a Wiley humanities journal of its age, it is also the kind of title that libraries hold in long runs and that humanities bibliographies capture as a matter of course. Authors who need a named index for an institutional purpose should nevertheless do the direct check — by print ISSN 0011-1562 or online ISSN 1467-8705, in the named service, on the date the claim is made — because indexing lists change and because a journal of this age may be covered for different year ranges in different services. A Directory of Open Access Journals search-API query for either ISSN, performed for this profile, returned no matching listing, which is consistent with the journal's identity as a Wiley subscription journal with the access model described below; it should not be described as a DOAJ-listed open-access title.

Metrics, with attribution — two databases, two pictures

OpenAlex, resolved through its ISSN endpoint for 0011-1562 or 1467-8705 to source S81741214, records 4,649 works and 13,443 citations for Critical Quarterly, with summary statistics of an h-index of 40, an i10-index of 207 and a two-year mean citedness of about 0.038. That is a substantial historical corpus — nearly five thousand works across a run from 1959 — and an h-index of 40 on OpenAlex's broad coverage means forty works in that corpus have each been cited at least forty times there, a figure that reflects the journal's long back-run of widely taught and widely cited criticism.

SCImago-derived listings, which rest on Scopus data with a different coverage window, give a different and also attributable picture: a SCImago Journal Rank of 0.209, a best quartile of Q1 in Literature and Literary Theory with Cultural Studies at Q2 in the same listing, an h-index of 24 on that Scopus-based data, and coverage summarised as 1959–2024. One secondary summary of Journal Citation Reports data gives a Journal Impact Factor of 0.2, with a five-year figure also of 0.2, from the JCR list released in June 2025. This profile reports that impact figure as a secondary summary's account of Clarivate data, attributed as such; authors and evaluators who need the Journal Impact Factor for a formal purpose should take it from Journal Citation Reports directly. The differences between an OpenAlex h-index of 40, a Scopus-based h-index in the mid-twenties, and the lower stored figure of 26 in the older Journals World summary that this profile supersedes are differences of database, coverage and date, not errors to be hidden by picking the largest number.

The reading of these figures that an informed evaluator should make is straightforward. Critical Quarterly's citation life is long and slow, as befits literary criticism: its influence runs through syllabuses, through the careers of poets it published early, through the Black Papers debate, and through critics citing essays decades after publication — much of it imperfectly captured by any two-year or three-year window, which is why a two-year mean citedness near 0.04 and an impact figure of 0.2 coexist with an h-index of 40 over the full run. Judge this journal, and any article in it, primarily on the standing described in this profile — its history, editorship, publisher and readership — and use the metrics, with their sources named, as supporting evidence about visibility in a particular database, never as a substitute for reading the work.

Access, charges and what to verify with Wiley

Critical Quarterly is a Wiley journal distributed principally through institutional subscriptions and Wiley's online library, with the archive access that a run from 1959 makes valuable to libraries. No article processing charge for the journal was published in the sources verified for this profile, and author charges are recorded here as could not be verified. Wiley journals commonly offer routes that differ by title and by article — subscription publication without an author charge in many humanities titles, and optional open-access arrangements in some — and the only reliable statement for this journal is the one on its current Wiley journal page and in its current author guidelines, which an author should read before submitting and should re-check at acceptance, keeping a dated note of the terms that applied to their article. The same applies to self-archiving and licence terms, which are publisher-set and title-specific and are not guessed at here.

Guidance for authors and evaluators

Write for the journal's reader. That reader, by the journal's founding design, includes academics and educated non-specialists; the prose that succeeds here is argued, lucid and free of unnecessary jargon, whether its subject is a canonical poem, a contemporary novel, a film, a television form or the condition of literary education. Position the piece in an argument — Critical Quarterly publishes criticism, not summaries — and make the cultural object vivid enough that a reader outside your period or field can see why it matters. If you are submitting poetry or fiction, treat the journal as the serious literary venue its history shows it to be, and follow the current guidelines on Wiley's page for format, length and submission route, which govern over any general description, including this one.

Evaluators should record the journal accurately: British quarterly of literary and cultural criticism, founded 1958 with a first issue in March 1959, published by Wiley-Blackwell, edited by Colin MacCabe since 1987, print ISSN 0011-1562 and online ISSN 1467-8705, with the metrics they rely on named by source and date — OpenAlex, SCImago on Scopus data, or Journal Citation Reports through a direct check — rather than as unattributed single numbers. They should also avoid two common errors with this title: confusing it with other quarterlies of criticism, which the ISSN pair prevents, and treating its low short-window citation rates as a measure of its standing, which its long-run h-index and its documented place in post-war British literary culture contradict.

Frequently asked questions

When was Critical Quarterly founded? It was established in 1958 by C. B. Cox and A. E. Dyson, and its inaugural issue appeared in March 1959, opening with the statement that literature is for everyman.

Who edits it now? Colin MacCabe, who took over as editor in 1987 after nearly thirty years of Cox's editorship.

What are its ISSNs? Print 0011-1562 and online 1467-8705; its ISO 4 abbreviation is Crit. Q.

What did it publish besides criticism? Contemporary poetry from its early years — Plath, Gunn, Larkin and Hughes among others — later prose fiction, and, from 1969, the Black Papers on education.

What are its metrics? On OpenAlex: 4,649 works, 13,443 citations, h-index 40. On SCImago-derived, Scopus-based listings: SJR 0.209, best quartile Q1 in Literature and Literary Theory. A secondary summary of JCR data gives an impact factor of 0.2. Each figure belongs to its named source.

Is it open access? No DOAJ listing was found in the search-API query performed for this profile, and it is distributed by Wiley principally by subscription; author charges could not be verified from the sources checked and should be confirmed on the journal's Wiley page.

Conclusion

Critical Quarterly endures because its founding idea — that serious criticism and new writing belong to a wide, educated public, and that literature should be discussed alongside film, television and culture as a whole — has been renewed rather than abandoned, first by Cox and Dyson against a narrower orthodoxy and then, from 1987, by Colin MacCabe's theoretical and interdisciplinary editorship. Published by Wiley, identified by ISSN 0011-1562 and 1467-8705, and carrying a documented history from the Black Papers to the present, it remains a distinctive British venue where a poem, a critical argument and a cultural intervention can still appear, deliberately, in the same quarterly conversation.