'The great English novelists are Jane Austen, George Eliot, Henry James and Joseph Conrad.' So begins F. R. Leavis's most controversial book, The Great Tradition, an uncompromising critical-polemical survey of English fiction, first published in 1948. Leavis makes his case for moral seriousness as the necessary criterion for an author's inclusion in any list of the finest novelists. In the course of his argument he adds D. H. Lawrence to the pantheon, and singles out Hard Times as Dickens' one 'completely serious work of art'; while Lawrence Sterne, Henry Fielding, and James Joyce are among those weighed in the balance and found wanting. '[Leavis] gave one a new idea of what it meant to read... the whole business of criticism acquired a new and exhilarating quality.' Frank Kermode, London Review of Books

‘informative, succint, circumspect; an exacting introduction to Leavis as an incisive master critic. Ideal for today’s students and general readers’ – Chris Terry, Times Higher Education F.R. Leavis is a landmark figure in twentieth-century literary criticism and theory. His outspoken and confrontational work has often divided opinion and continues to generate interest as students and critics revisit his highly influential texts. Looking closely at a representative selection of Leavis’s work, Richard Storer outlines his thinking on key topics such as: literary theory, ‘criticism’ and culture canon formation modernism close reading higher education. Exploring the responses and engaging with the controversies generated by Leavis’s work, this clear, authoritative guide highlights how Leavis remains of critical significance to twenty-first-century study of literature and culture.

‘informative, succint, circumspect; an exacting introduction to Leavis as an incisive master critic. Ideal for today’s students and general readers’ – Chris Terry, Times Higher Education F.R. Leavis is a landmark figure in twentieth-century literary criticism and theory. His outspoken and confrontational work has often divided opinion and continues to generate interest as students and critics revisit his highly influential texts. Looking closely at a representative selection of Leavis’s work, Richard Storer outlines his thinking on key topics such as: literary theory, ‘criticism’ and culture canon formation modernism close reading higher education. Exploring the responses and engaging with the controversies generated by Leavis’s work, this clear, authoritative guide highlights how Leavis remains of critical significance to twenty-first-century study of literature and culture.

A comprehensive analysis and assessment of the many strands of Leavis's work, emphasising the basic unity of his ideas.

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First published in 1988. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

The importance of science and technology and future of education and research are just some of the subjects discussed here.

This is a critical introduction to the educational thought of F. R. Leavis (1895–1978), the greatest English literary critic of the twentieth century, providing the first in-depth examination of Leavis’s ideas in relation to contemporary mass higher education. During the course of a long, prolific and controversial academic career, which saw him take issue with figures such as Wittgenstein, T. S. Eliot and C. P. Snow, Leavis became one of the most articulate advocates for the idea of the university as ‘a centre of consciousness and human responsibility’ in the face of what he saw as the relentless technological drive of civilisation. With the journal Scrutiny which he co-founded, as well as his critical writings, Leavis became a decisive influence on generations of teachers in Britain and overseas. Widely misrepresented as narrowly elitist, his ideas about ‘the creative university’, with their radical, student-centred approach to teaching, constitute a powerful resource for a higher education system grappling with the contradictory demands of continuity and change. Based on original research, the study provides an overview of Leavis’s life, work and heritage and his educational world view, and a comprehensive exploration of Leavis’s pedagogy from theoretical and practical perspectives. It also includes a first-hand account by the author of being taught by Leavis in person.

This volume considers the highly convoluted relationship between F. R. Leavis and T. S. Eliot, comparing their ideas in literary and cultural criticism, and connecting it to the broader discourse of English Studies as a university subject that developed in the first half of the twentieth century. Comparing and contrasting all the many writings of Leavis on Eliot, and the two on Lawrence, the study examines how Eliot is formative for the theory and practice of Leavis’s literary criticism in both positive and negative ways, and investigates Lawrence’s significance in relation to Leavis’s changing attitude to Eliot. It also examines how profound differences in social, cultural, religious and national thinking strengthened Leavis’s alliance with Lawrence to the detriment of his relationship with Eliot. These differences between the two writers are presented as dichotomies between nationalism and Europeanism/internationalism, ruralism/organicism and industrialism/metropolitanism, and relate to the two men’s views on literary education, the subject of ‘English’ and the position of the Classics in the curriculum. It explores how Leavis’s increasingly conflicted feelings about a figure to whom he owned an enormous critical debt and inspiration, but whose various beliefs and literary affiliations caused him much misgiving, result in a deep sense of division in Leavis himself which he sought to transfer onto Eliot as what he called a pathological ‘case’.

It is difficult now to imagine the shock that this book caused when it was first published in 1932. The author was a teacher at a Cambridge college, an intensely serious man who had been seriously wounded by poison gas on the Western Front, and he was not disposed to suffer foolishness gladly. His opening sentences were arresting: 'Poetry matters little to the modern world. That is, very little of contemporary intelligence concerns itself with poetry'. What followed was nothing less than the welcoming of a revolution in English verse, set against the moral and social crisis that followed the trauma of the First World War. It was this situation, this feeling of breakdown and disorder, that gave such force to Leavis's dismissal of most late Romantic poetry and his welcoming of the modernists T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, and of the writer who Leavis regarded as their forebear, Gerard Manley Hopkins. The tone of high moral urgency, and the message that the experience of literature could become an engagement with life that was almost a secular equivalent to religion, seemed new and abrasively refreshing. Leavis despised the reigning dilettantism in both poetry and criticism, and in this book he threw down the gauntlet to the establishment as he understood it. In the same year he founded the journal Scrutiny, and began his long career as the most formidably serious literary critic of his time.