Leavis, F. R.

Leavis, F. R. Frank Raymond Leavis (1895–1978), critic, was Cambridge born, bred, and educated. He read history, then English, at Emmanuel College, was appointed probationary lecturer 1927–31, and a college lecturer at Downing in 1935. He continued to teach in Cambridge until 1964, establishing a new critical approach that largely superseded the historical and narrative type of literary history favoured by Émile Legouis, Oliver Elton, and Saintsbury. As a young man he attended and contributed to the Practical Criticism courses of I. A. Richards, which encouraged close attention to the text. In 1929 he married Q. D. Leavis (1906–81), whose study of the relationship between literature and literacy, Fiction and the Reading Public (1932), originated as a thesis under Richards's supervision. From 1932 to 1953 he was chief editor of Scrutiny, a periodical which was a vehicle for the new Cambridge criticism, upholding rigorous intel-lectual standards and attacking the dilettante élitism which he believed to characterize the Bloomsbury Group. For Continuity (1933), Culture and Environment (1933, with Denys Thompson), followed by Education and the University (1943) stress the importance of creating within universities, and particularly within English departments, an informed, discriminating, and highly-trained intellectual élite whose task it would be to preserve the cultural continuity of English life and literature, a continuity he believed to be threatened by mass media, technology, and advertising. New Bearings in English Poetry (1932) attacked Tennysonian and Swinburnian ‘late Victorian poetastry’ and Georgian verse, presenting in their place the claims of E. Thomas, T. S. Eliot, Pound, and (with qualifications) Yeats: he also made an important reassessment of G. M. Hopkins. Revaluation (1936) continued to reshape the main line of English poetry, tracing it through Donne, Pope, and Dr Johnson to Hopkins and Eliot, and producing iconoclastic attacks on Spenser, Milton, and Shelley. In 1948 he turned his attention to fiction in The Great Tradition; he traced this tradition through J. Austen, G. Eliot, H. James, and Conrad, dismissing other major authors (e.g. Sterne and Hardy). In later years he changed his position on Dickens, whose Hard Times was the only novel to win unqualified admiration in this volume. (See Dickens the Novelist, with Q. D. Leavis, 1970.) D. H. Lawrence: Novelist (1955) presented the claims of Lawrence, then much underrated, as a great English writer and moralist.

Leavis in his writing thus radically altered the literary map of the past and laid out new patterns for the future; but perhaps his most vital contribution lay not in his assessment of individual authors, but in his introduction of a new seriousness into English studies. His vehement dismissal of opposing views earned him much hostility, notably on the occasion of his response to C. P. Snow's Rede Lecture on ‘The Two Cultures’: Two Cultures?: The Significance of C. P. Snow (1962), but he also inspired deep devotion. See also New Criticism.