Leavis FR
ACHIEVEMENT(S): One of the most influential literary critics of the 20th century
NAME: Leavis, Frank Raymond
DATE AND PLACE OF BIRTH: July 14, 1895, Cambridge, England
DATE/PLACE OF DEATH/AGE AT DEATH: April 14, 1978, Cambridge, England. Aged 82
DISCIPLINE: Literary critic, editor, teacher
FIELD: Education
EDUCATION: Perse School, Cambridge; Emmanuel College, Cambridge,
MAJOR WORK: "The Great Tradition"
LIFE AND TIMES:
After service during the first World War, Leavis returned to Emmanuel College Cambridge in 1919, and switched from history to English literature, having become fascinated by contemporary English-language poetry -- particularly that of Yeats* and T.S. Eliot*.
In 1927, Leavis was appointed probationary faculty lecturer in English at Emmanuel, and was already gaining a reputation for encouraging students to read works by modern writers such as James Joyce, Eliot and D.H. Lawrence, none of whom was given any serious consideration at the time.
In 1929, he married Queenie Dorothy Roth, an English graduate from Girton College, Cambridge, herself a talented literary critic. Her PhD thesis on the relationship between literature and literacy was published in 1932 as "Fiction and the Reading Public". It was a socio-literary study that Leavis called "a wholly original kind of research", and which extended the central theme of his own first published work, "Mass Civilization and Minority Culture" (1930), the first of his several scathing attacks on mass culture.
Leavis’s lectureship at Emmanuel College lasted only four years when he was released, mainly because of his unorthodox literary views.
In 1932, he published his first major book, "New Bearings in English Poetry" (1932), in which he censured late Victorian and Georgian poetry, including that of the Victorian giants Tennyson* and Swinburne*, claiming that Gerald Manley Hopkins*, Yeats, Eliot, and Pound* were the most significant and creative writers of the modern period.
Also in 1932, Leavis was offered the new directorship of studies in English at Downing College, Cambridge. With his wife he founded "Scrutiny", a quarterly journal of criticism that was published until 1953 and is largely regarded as his greatest contribution to English letters.
Leavis believed that since literature should be a criticism of life, it was therefore a critic’s duty to assess works according to the author’s moral position. "Scrutiny" quickly gained a reputation for its critical rigor, its detailed textual "revaluations" of a wide range of writers and themes, its pioneering analyses of "novels as dramatic poems" -- particularly those of George Eliot*, of Henry James* and of [Conrad](https://app.thebrain.com/brain/f3e16344-7cd9-4fa3-ae1d-59876e128474/d2c831b7-a67f-5c5e-8ac7-e9c3e57bd32d)* – and its equally as severe criticisms of music, education, mass society and the cultural establishment.
In 1933, Leavis, his wife, and Denys Thompson published a teaching textbook "Culture and Environment: The Training of Critical Awareness". It was a critique of mass culture which had a huge influence on teachers and their students. He followed with two other works in the same vein, " For Continuity" (1933) and "Education and the University" (1943).
Both stressed the importance of creating within universities an informed, discriminating, and highly-trained intellectual elite, whose task was to preserve the cultural continuity of English life and literature -- a continuity he believed threatened by mass media, technology, and advertising. This also was the theme of his notoriously vehement criticism of British novelist C.P. Snow*, whose theories on the division between the literature and science establishments were outlined in Snow’s Richmond lecture of 1962, published as "Two Cultures?: The Significance of C.P. Snow".
In 1936, Leavis’s important critical work, "Revaluation: Tradition and Development in English Poetry" attempted again to reshape the main line of English poetry, tracing it through Donne, Pope, and Dr. Samuel Johnson to Hopkins and Eliot, and producing iconoclastic attacks on Spenser*, Milton*, Percy Bysshe Shelley* and Tennyson.
Turning his attention to the novel, Leavis published in 1948 "The Great Tradition", possibly his finest work, which reassessed English-language fiction, proclaiming Austen*, George Eliot, Henry James, and Joseph Conrad as the great novelists of the past, and D.H. Lawrence*, then disparaged as an author, as their only successor.
After 1955, other novelists engaged his attention. In 1967, he wrote "Anna Karenina and Other Essays", about the work of Tolstoy, and, with his wife in 1970, "Dickens the Novelist." In 1962, at 67, Leavis retired from his university readership and was given an honorary fellowship at Downing.
However, he resigned this fellowship in 1964, feeling the college was turning its back on his theories and approach to English studies. Leavis, however, continued teaching. In 1964, he was Chichele lecturer at Oxford.
In 1965, he became visiting professor at the University of York. And in 1968, he and his wife made their first lecturing visit to the United States, from which came "Lectures in America" (1969).
In 1967, he delivered the Clark Lectures at Trinity College, Cambridge, (published in 1969 as "English Literature in Our Time and the University”), in which he took up the major themes of his 1943 book, "Education and the University", stating that a university’s task was to be "a focus of humane consciousness, a centre where . . . intelligence, bringing to bear a mature sense of values, should apply itself to the problems of civilization."
Leavis continued to be productive until his last years.
ASSESSMENT: Often called the archetypal liberal humanist because he found the moral position in a text much more important than structure, symbol, or design.
EXTRA CONNECTIONS:
As Leavis continued his career he became increasingly dogmatic, belligerent and paranoid,[22] and Martin Seymour-Smith found him (and his disciples) to be "fanatic and rancid in manner".[23] Leavis's conduct led to a breach with T. S. Eliot, who wrote
I so strongly disagreed with Dr Leavis during the last days of Scrutiny, and objected to his attacks and innuendoes about people I knew and respected. I think it is a pity he became so intemperate in his views and was extravagant in his admirations, as I had, in the earlier stages of the magazine, felt great sympathy for its editor.[22]
Leavis was one of the earliest detractors of the BBC. He accused the corporation's coverage of English literature of lacking impartiality, and of vulgarising the literary taste of British society.
ONELINER: FR Leavis, major 20th century literary-criticism figure
BIBLIOGRAPHY:
EB, DNB
MacKillop, Ian, F.R. Leavis: A Life in Criticism, London: Penguin Press, 1995.
LANGUAGE: English
PARENTS: Harry Leavis; Kate Sarah Moore
SIBLINGS: Ruth; Ralph Moore
SPOUSE: Queenie Dorothy Roth
CHILDREN: Ralph; Katherine Laura; Lawrence Robin