NationMaster - Encyclopedia: F. R. Leavis

Frank Raymond Leavis (July 14, 1895 - April 14, 1978) was an influential British literary critic of the early-to-mid-twentieth century. He taught and studied for nearly his entire life at Downing College, Cambridge. July 14 is the 195th day (196th in leap years) of the year in the Gregorian Calendar, with 170 days remaining. ... 1895 (MDCCCXCV) was a common year starting on Tuesday (see link for calendar) of the Gregorian calendar (or a common year starting on Thursday of the 12-day-slower Julian calendar). ... April 14 is the 104th day of the year in the Gregorian calendar (105th in leap years). ... 1978 (MCMLXXVIII) was a common year starting on Sunday (the link is to a full 1978 calendar). ... Literary criticism is the study, discussion, evaluation, and interpretation of literature. ... (19th century - 20th century - 21st century - more centuries) Decades: 1900s 1910s 1920s 1930s 1940s 1950s 1960s 1970s 1980s 1990s The 20th century lasted from 1901 to 2000 in the Gregorian calendar (often from (1900 to 1999 in common usage). ... Full name Downing College Motto Quaerere Verum Seek the truth Named after Sir George Downing Previous names - Established 1800 Sister College(s) Lincoln College Master Prof. ...

1 Early life
2 Later life and career
3 Criticism
4 Criticism of poetry
5 Criticism of the novel
6 References
7 Further reading
- 7.1 Publications
- 7.2 Writings about Leavis

Early life

Frank Raymond Leavis was born in Cambridge England on the 14th of July 1895; at least a decade after T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, D.H. Lawrence and Ezra Pound, literary figures whose reputations he would later be responsible for elevating. His father Harry Leavis, a cultured man, operated a small shop in Cambridge which sold pianos and other musical instruments (Hayman 1), and his son was to retain a respect for him throughout his life. Frank Leavis was educated at a local independent fee-paying school, the Perse, whose headmaster at the time was Dr. W. H. D. Rouse. Rouse was a classicist and known for his ‘direct method’, a practice which required teachers to carry on classroom conversations with their pupils in Latin and classical Greek. Though he enjoyed languages to a certain extent, Leavis felt that his native language was the only one on which he was able to speak with authority, thus his reading in the classical languages is not particularly evident in his critical publications (Bell 3). Thomas Stearns Eliot (September 26, 1888 - January 4, 1965), was a major Modernist Anglo-American poet, dramatist, and literary critic. ... James Augustine Aloysius Joyce (Irish name SÃ©amas Seoighe; 2 February 1882 â€“ 13 January 1941) was an expatriate Irish writer and poet, widely considered to be one of the most influential writers of the 20th century. ... D. H. Lawrence David Herbert Lawrence (11 September 1885 - 2 March 1930) was one of the most important, certainly one of the most controversial, English writers of the 20th century, who wrote novels, short stories, poems, plays, essays, travel books, and letters. ... Ezra Pound in 1913. ... The Perse School is a fee-paying secondary day school for boys 11â€“18 and girls at 16+ situated in Cambridge, England. ... W.H.D.Rouse (1863-1950) was an exceptional teacher. ...

Leavis was nineteen when Britain declared war on Germany in 1914. Not wanting to kill, he took a position as a stretcher-bearer, working with the Friends’ Ambulance unit and carrying a copy of Milton’s poems with him as he worked at the front. His experience at the front was to have a lasting effect on Leavis; mentally he was prone to insomnia and suffered from intermittent nightmares, but exposure to gas permanently damaged his physical health, primarily his digestive system. The Religious Society of Friends (commonly known as Quakers or Friends) was founded in England in the 17th century by people who were dissatisfied with the existing denominations and sects of Christianity. ...

Leavis was slow to recover from the war, and he was later to refer to it as ‘the great hiatus’. He had won a scholarship from the Perse School to Emmanuel College, Cambridge, and in 1919 began to read for a degree in History. In his second year he changed to English and became a pupil at the newly founded English School at Cambridge. Despite graduating with first-class Honours Leavis was not seen as a strong candidate for a research fellowship, and instead embarked on a PhD, a lowly career move for an aspiring academic in those days. In 1924 Leavis presented a thesis on ‘The relationship of journalism to literature: studied in the rise and earlier development of the press in England’ (Bell 4). This work was to contribute to his lifelong concern with the way in which the ethos of a periodical can both reflect and mould the cultural aspirations of a wider public (Greenwood 8). In 1927 Leavis was appointed as a probationary lecturer for the university, and when his first substantial publications began to appear a few years later, their style was very much influenced by the demands of teaching. Full name Emmanuel College Motto - Named after Immanuel Previous names - Established 1584 Sister College(s) Exeter College Master The Lord Wilson of Dinton Location Regent Street Undergraduates 494 Postgraduates 98 Homepage Boatclub Emmanuel front court and the Wren chapel Emmanuel College is a constituent college of the University of Cambridge...

Later life and career

In 1929 Leavis married one of his students, Queenie Roth, and this union resulted in a productive collaboration which yielded many great critical works culminating with their annus mirabilis in 1932 when Leavis published New Bearings in English Poetry, his wife published Fiction and the Reading Public, and the quarterly periodical Scrutiny was founded (Greenwood 9). Also in this year Leavis was appointed director of studies in English at Downing College where he was to teach for the next thirty years. Leavis remained the chief editor of Scrutiny until 1953. During this time he used it as a vehicle for the new Cambridge criticism, upholding rigorous intellectual standards and attacking the dilettante elitism which he believed to characterize the Bloomsbury Group. Scrutiny provided a forum for identifying important contemporary work and for reviewing the traditional canon by comparably serious criteria (Bell 6). This criticism was informed by a teacher’s concern to present the essential to students, taking into consideration time constraints and a limited range of experience. Q. D. (Queenie) Leavis (1906-1981), nee Roth, was an English literary critic and essayist. ... Full name Downing College Motto Quaerere Verum Seek the truth Named after Sir George Downing Previous names - Established 1800 Sister College Lincoln College Master Prof. ... The Bloomsbury Group or Bloomsbury Set or just Bloomsbury, as its adherents would generally refer to it, was an English group of artists and scholars that existed from around 1905 until around World War II. // History The elite group deficated as an informal social assembly of recent Cambridge University alumni...

New Bearings in English Poetry was the first major volume of criticism Leavis was to publish, and it revealed insights into his own critical understandings. He was a member of a group known as the New Critics, a group which advocated close reading and detailed textual analysis of poetry over an interest in the mind and personality of the poet, sources, the history of ideas and political and social implications. New Bearings, devoted principally to Hopkins, Yeats, Eliot and Pound, was an attempt to identify the essential new achievements in modern poetry (Bell 6). New Criticism was the dominant trend in English and American literary criticism of the early twentieth century, from the 1920s to the early 1960s. ... Gerard Manley Hopkins (July 28, 1844 - June 8, 1889) was a British Victorian poet and Jesuit priest. ... Yeats is the surname of a notable Irish family: John Butler Yeats (1839-1922), Irish artist and portrait painter William Butler Yeats (1865-1939), Irish poet and playwright, Nobel prize winner Susan Yeats, also known as Lily, (1866-1949), active in the Arts and Crafts movement and Dun Emer Guild...

In 1933 Leavis published For Continuity, which was a selection of Scrutiny essays, this publication along with Culture and the Environment (a joint effort with Denys Thompson) stressed the importance of an informed and discriminating, highly-trained intellectual elite whose existence within university English departments would help preserve the cultural continuity of English life and literature. In Education and the University (1943), Leavis argued that ‘there is a prior cultural achievement of language; language is not a detachable instrument of thought and communication. It is the historical embodiment of its community’s assumptions and aspirations at levels which are so subliminal much of the time that language is their only index’(Bell 9).

In 1948, Leavis focused his attention on fiction and made his general statement about the English novel in The Great Tradition where he traced this tradition through Jane Austen, George Eliot, Henry James, and Joseph Conrad. Leavis purposely excluded major authors such as Sterne and Hardy, but eventually changed his position on Dickens, publishing Dickens the Novelist in 1970. Jane Austen, in a portrait based on one drawn by her sister Cassandra Jane Austen (December 16, 1775 â€“ July 18, 1817) was an English novelist whose work is considered part of the Western canon. ... George Eliot Mary Ann Evans, better known by the pen name George Eliot (22 November 1819 - 22 December 1880), was an English novelist. ... For other uses of this name, see Henry James (disambiguation). ... Joseph Conrad. ... Dickens redirects here. ...

In 1950, in the introduction to Mill on Bentham and Coleridge, a publication he edited, Leavis set out the historical importance of utilitarian thought. Leavis found Bentham to epitomize the scientific drift of culture and social thinking, which was in his view the enemy of the holistic, humane understanding he desiderated (Bell 9).

1952 saw the publication of another collection of essays from Scrutiny in the form of The Common Pursuit. Outside of his work on English poetry and the novel, this is Leavis’s best-known and most influential work. A decade later Leavis was to earn much notoriety when he delivered his Richmond lecture, ‘Two cultures? The significance of C.P. Snow’ at Downing College. Leavis vigorously attacked Snow’s suggestion that practitioners of the scientific and humanistic disciplines should have some significant understanding of each other, and that a lack of knowledge of twentieth-century physics was comparable to an ignorance of Shakespeare (Bell 10). Leavis introduced the idea of the ‘third realm’ as a name for the method of existence of literature; works which are not private like a dream or public in the sense of something that can be tripped over, but exist in human minds as a work of collaborative re-constitution (Greenwood 11). William Shakespeare—born April 1564; baptised April 26, 1564; died April 23, 1616 (O.S.), May 3, 1616 (N.S.)—has a reputation as the greatest of all writers in English. ...

It was in 1962 that his readership and fellowship at Downing were terminated; however, he took up Visiting Professorships at the University of Bristol, the University of Wales and York. His final volumes of criticism were Nor Shall My Sword (1972), The Living Principle (1975) and Thought, Words and Creativity (1976). These later works are generally accepted as the weaker part of his canon, his best cultural criticism having shown itself in the form of his literary critical practices. The University of Bristol is a university in Bristol in the United Kingdom. ... The University of Wales (Prifysgol Cymru in Welsh) is a federal university founded in 1893. ... York is a city in northern England, at the confluence of the Rivers Ouse and Foss. ...

F.R. Leavis died at the age of eighty-two on the 14th of April 1978 having been made a Companion of Honour in the New Year. His wife Q.D. Leavis died in 1981.

Criticism

Leavis in his writing was one of the most influential figures in twentieth-century English literary criticism. He introduced a ‘seriousness’ into English studies, and the modern university subject has been shaped very much by Leavis’s example. Leavis possessed a very clear idea of literary criticism and he was well known for his decisive and often provocative judgements. Leavis insisted that evaluation was the principal concern of criticism, and that it must ensure that English literature should be a living reality operating as an informing spirit in society, and that criticism should involve the shaping of contemporary sensibility (Bilan 61).

Leavis’s criticism is difficult to directly classify, but it can be grouped into four chronological stages. The first is that of his early publications and essays including New Bearings in English Poetry (1932) and Revaluation (1936). Here he was concerned primarily with reexamining poetry from the seventeenth to twentieth centuries, and this was accomplished under the strong influence of T.S. Eliot. Also during this early period Leavis sketched out his views about university education.

He then turned his attention to fiction and the novel, producing The Great Tradition (1948) and D.H. Lawrence, Novelist (1955). Following this period Leavis pursued an increasingly complex treatment of literary, educational and social issues. Though the hub of his work remained literature, his perspective for commentary was noticeably broadening, and this was most visible in Nor Shall my Sword (1972).

Two of his last publications embodied the critical sentiments of his final years; The Living Principle: ‘English’ as a Discipline of Thought (1975), and Thought, Words and Creativity: Art and Thought in Lawrence (1976). Despite a natural aversion to it in the early part of his career, his criticism became progressively philosophical in nature during the last years of his life.

Criticism of poetry

Though his achievements as a critic of poetry were impressive, Leavis is widely accepted to have been a better critic of fiction and the novel than of poetry. Much of this is due to the fact that a large portion of what he had to say about poetry was being said by others around him at the time. Nonetheless, in New Bearings in English Poetry Leavis attacked the Victorian poetical ideal, suggesting nineteenth-century poetry rejected the ‘poetical’ and instead showed a separation of thought and feeling and a divorce from the real world. The influence of T.S. Eliot is easily identifiable in his criticism of Victorian poetry, and Leavis acknowledged this, saying in The Common Pursuit that, ‘It was Mr. Eliot who made us fully conscious of the weakness of that tradition’ (Leavis 31). In his later publication Revaluation, the dependence on Eliot was still very much present, but Leavis demonstrated an individual critical sense operating in such a way as to place him among the distinguished modern critics.

The early reception of T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound's poetry, and also the reading of Gerard Manley Hopkins, were considerably enhanced by Leavis's proclamation of their greatness. His dislike of John Milton, on the other hand, had no great impact on Milton's popular esteem. Thomas Stearns Eliot (September 26, 1888 - January 4, 1965), was a major Modernist Anglo-American poet, dramatist, and literary critic. ... Gerard Manley Hopkins (July 28, 1844 - June 8, 1889) was a British Victorian poet and Jesuit priest. ... John Milton, English poet John Milton (December 9, 1608 â€“ November 8, 1674) was an English poet, best-known for his epic poem Paradise Lost. ...

Criticism of the novel

As a critic of the novel, Leavis’s main tenet stated that great novelists show an intense moral interest in life, and that this moral interest determines the nature of their form in fiction (Bilan 115). Authors within this tradition were all characterised by a serious or responsible attitude to the moral complexity of life and included Jane Austen, George Eliot, Henry James, Joseph Conrad, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Charles Dickens, and D.H. Lawrence. In The Great Tradition Leavis attempted to set out his conception of the proper relation between form/composition and moral interest/art and life. This proved to be a contentious issue in the critical world, as Leavis refused to separate art from life, or the aesthetic or formal from the moral. He insisted that the great novelist’s preoccupation with form was a matter of responsibility towards a rich moral interest, and that works of art with a limited formal concern would always be of lesser quality. Jane Austen, in a portrait based on one drawn by her sister Cassandra Jane Austen (December 16, 1775 â€“ July 18, 1817) was an English novelist whose work is considered part of the Western canon. ... For other uses of this name, see Henry James (disambiguation). ... Nathaniel Hawthorne illustrated in an 1870 publication. ... Herman Melville Herman Melville (August 1, 1819 â€“ September 28, 1891) was an American novelist, essayist and poet. ... Dickens redirects here. ...

References

Michael Bell, F. R. Leavis (1988)

R. P. Bilan, The Literary Criticism of F. R. Leavis (1979)

Greenwood, Edward, F.R. Leavis, Longman Group: London,(1978)

Leavis, F.R., The Common Pursuit, Chatto & Windus: London; Clarke, Irwin: Toronto, 1952.

Contents

Early life GA_googleFillSlot("encyclopedia_square");

Later life and career

Criticism

Criticism of poetry

Criticism of the novel

References

Further reading

Publications

Writings about Leavis

Early life