Background
He was born on 14 July 1895 in Cambridge, United Kingdom.
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(The author's critique of modern literature. Includes Geor...)
The author's critique of modern literature. Includes George Eliot, Henry James, Joseph Conrad and more.
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(In The Great Tradition, published in 1948, F. R. Leavis s...)
In The Great Tradition, published in 1948, F. R. Leavis seemed to rate the work of Charles Dickens - with the exception of Hard Times - as lacking the seriousness and formal control of the true masters of English fiction. By 1970, when Dickens the Novelist was published on the first centenary of the writer's death, Leavis and his lifelong collaborator Q. D. (Queenie) Leavis, had changed their minds. 'Our purpose', they wrote, 'is to enforce as unanswerably as possible the conviction that Dickens was one of the greatest of creative writers ...' In seven typically robust and uncompromising chapters, the Leavises grapple with the evaluation of a writer who was then still open to dismissal as a mere entertainer, a caricaturist not worthy of discussion in the same breath as Henry James. Q. D. Leavis shows, for example, how deeply influential David Copperfield was on the work of Tolstoy, and explores the symbolic richness of the nightmare world of Bleak House. F. R. Leavis reprints his famous essay on Hard Times, with its moral critique of utilitarianism, and reveals the imaginative influence of Blake on Little Dorrit. Q. D. Leavis contributes a pathbreaking chapter on the importance of Dickens's illustrators to the effect of his work.
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He was born on 14 July 1895 in Cambridge, United Kingdom.
He was educated at the Perse School and Emmanuel College, Cambridge.
He received his degree in English and history in 1921.
In 1931 Leavis was appointed director of studies in English at Downing College where he was to teach for the next thirty years. He soon founded Scrutiny, the critical quarterly that he edited until 1953, using it as a vehicle for the new Cambridge criticism, upholding rigorous intellectual standards and attacking the dilettante elitism he believed to characterise the Bloomsbury Group.
New Bearings in English Poetry (1932) is a critical examination of Victorian moralism and a pioneering analysis of techniques in T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and Gerard Manley Hopkins. He excoriated "mass culture" in his writings on education and society: Mass Civilization and Minority Culture (1930), Education and the University (1943), and English Literature in Our Time and the University (1969).
Leavis' later work includes a collaboration with his wife, Q. D. Leavis, on a more appreciative study of Dickens (1970); critical essays on the novel under the title Anna Karenina and Other Essays (1967); and an argument in defense of literary studies, The Living Principle (1975).
His final volumes of criticism were notable for their more discursive treatment of the issues he had debated with René Wellek in the 1930s.
(In The Great Tradition, published in 1948, F. R. Leavis s...)
(The author's critique of modern literature. Includes Geor...)
A controversial exploration of scientific and literary perspectives, is an argument directed against C. P. Snow and the philistinism that Leavis believed to be endemic both at the universities and in society at large (1962).
He had a fellowship at Downing College till 1964. However, he took up visiting professorships at the University of Bristol, the University of Wales and the University of York.
Scrutiny was both an assault on conventional scholarship and an assertion of a distinctive critical position that what mattered was an author's moral seriousness.
