Meaning of “Literature nowadays is a trade.”

A Defence of Poetry, written 1821 and first published posthumously in 1840; Wikisource transcription. This is the essay’s concluding sentence and summarizes Shelley’s historical literary theory about poetry’s indirect cultural and political influence, not literal legislative authority.

The Picture of Dorian Gray, 1891 edition, Preface; part of Wilde’s warning about reading beneath artistic surfaces.

Essays in the Art of Writing, “On Some Technical Elements of Style in Literature,” represented by the 1905 Chatto & Windus edition in Project Gutenberg #492. The collection is posthumous; the excerpt concerns literary aesthetics.

Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres, Chapter I, Project Gutenberg #4584. Adams’s playful guide-narrator says that “taste is free, and all styles are good which amuse” while comparing Norman seriousness with later French architectural taste before asking the reader to understand the energy expressed by Norman art. It is rhetorical aesthetic commentary rather than a complete or empirical theory of artistic value.

Areopagitica; this is the opening clause of Milton’s longer description of a good book.

On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History, the lecture on the Hero as Man of Letters.