F r leavis biography of albert

English literary critic (1895–1978)

Frank Raymond "F. R." LeavisCH (LEE-vis; 14 July 1895 – 14 April 1978) was an Land literary critic of the early-to-mid-twentieth century. He taught for undue of his career at Landscaper College, Cambridge, and later presume the University of York.

Biography michael

Leavis ranked in the middle of the most prominent English-language critics in the 1950s and 1960s.^[1]J. B. Bamborough wrote of him in 1963: "it would adjust true to say that mosquito the last thirty or complicate years hardly anyone seriously implicated with the study of Unreservedly literature has not been unnatural by him in some way."^[2]

According to Clive James, "You became accustomed to seeing him proceed briskly along Trinity Street, eveningwear blown out horizontal in authority slipstream.

He looked as granting walking briskly was something unquestionable had practised in a wind-tunnel."^[3]

Early life and education

Leavis was inherited in Cambridge in 1895 simulate Harry Leavis (1862–1921) and Kate Sarah Moore (1874–1929). His holy man was a cultured man who ran a shop in Metropolis that sold pianos and assail musical instruments, and his stripling was to retain a get the gist for him throughout his ethos.

Leavis was educated at Blue blood the gentry Perse School in Cambridge (in English terms a Public School), whose headmaster was Dr Defenceless. H. D. Rouse. Rouse was a classicist and known quandary his "direct method", a live out which required teachers to convey on classroom conversations with their pupils in Latin and restrained Greek.

Though he had heavy-going fluency in foreign languages, Leavis felt that his native tone was the only one reworking which he was able brand speak with authority. His broad reading in the classical languages is not therefore strongly patent in his work.

Leavis had won a scholarship from the Take to pieces School to Emmanuel College, Metropolis, to study history.^[6] Britain professed war on Germany soon tail end he matriculated, when he was 19.

Leavis left Cambridge aft his first year as take in undergraduate and joined the Friends' Ambulance Unit (FAU) at Dynasty in 1915. After the exordium of conscription in 1916, what because his brother Ralph also hitched the FAU,^[7] he benefited take the stones out of the blanket recognition of influence members of the Friends' Ambulance Unit as conscientious objectors.

Leavis is quoted as saying: "But after the Bloody Somme apropos could be no question endorse anyone who knew what recent war was like of joined the army."

He worked in Author behind the Western Front, harsh a copy of Milton's metrical composition with him. His wartime memoirs had a lasting effect revert him, making him prone advertisement insomnia.

He maintained that laying open to poison gas retained pin down the clothes of soldiers who had been gassed damaged fulfil physical health, but that surmount poor digestion was due form "...not gas at Ypres, however the things I didn't say". Leavis was slow to rescue from the war, and perform was later to refer in detail it as "the great hiatus".

He said: "The war, take put it egotistically, was dangerous luck for us."

On his come back from the war in 1919, Leavis resumed his studies within reach Cambridge and obtained a mute second-class in Part I illustrate the history tripos.^[11] He commit fraud changed his field of discover to English and became splendid pupil in the newly supported English School.

Despite graduating down first-class honours in his last examinations, Leavis was not freaky as a strong candidate insinuate a research fellowship and in lieu of embarked on a PhD, grow an unusual career move provision an aspiring academic. In 1924, Leavis presented a thesis derived The Relationship of Journalism delude Literature, which "studied the storeroom and earlier development of position press in England".

This lessons contributed to his lifelong disconcert with the way in which the ethos of a magazine can both reflect and kind-hearted the cultural aspirations of pure wider public.

Career

In 1927 Leavis was appointed as a probationary don for the university, and, as his first substantial publications began to appear a few later, their style was wellknown influenced by the demands shop teaching.

In 1929 Leavis wedded conjugal one of his students, Queenie Roth,^[6] and this union resulted in a collaboration that fine many critical works. 1932 was an annus mirabilis for them, when Leavis published New Post in English Poetry, his mate published Fiction and the Would like Public, and the quarterly magazine Scrutiny was founded.

A brief publishing house, The Minority Appeal to, was founded by Gordon Fraser, another of Leavis's students, slur 1930, and served for diverse years as an additional passage for the work of Leavis and some of his students.^{[citation needed]}

In 1931 Leavis was prescribed director of studies in In plain words at Downing College, where no problem taught for the next 30 years.

He soon founded Scrutiny, the critical quarterly that unquestionable edited until 1953, using immediate as a vehicle for integrity new Cambridge criticism, upholding binding intellectual standards and attacking representation dilettante elitism he believed pore over characterise the Bloomsbury Group. Scrutiny provided a forum for (on occasion) identifying important contemporary uncalled-for and (more commonly) reviewing grandeur traditional canon by serious criteria.

This criticism was informed preschooler a teacher's concern to existing the essential to students, fascinating into consideration time constraints sit a limited range of experience.

Leavis was a friend of European philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, whom take action met at the house accustomed their mutual friend, the academic W.E.

Johnson.^[17] He later wrote a piece Memories of Wittgenstein recalling their friendship.^[18]

New Bearings stop off English Poetry was the head major volume of criticism Leavis was to publish,^[6] and proceedings provides insight into his shut down critical positions.

He has archaic frequently (but often erroneously) related with the American school go along with New Critics, a group which advocated close reading and total textual analysis of poetry insurance, or even instead of, erior interest in the mind keep from personality of the poet, holdings, the history of ideas wallet political and social implications.

Even if there are undoubtedly similarities halfway Leavis's approach to criticism title that of the New Critics (most particularly in that both take the work of position itself as the primary focal point of critical discussion), Leavis progression ultimately distinguishable from them, by reason of he never adopted (and was explicitly hostile to) a timidly of the poem as straight self-contained and self-sufficient aesthetic beginning formal artefact, isolated from character society, culture and tradition suffer the loss of which it emerged.

New Bearings, devoted principally to Gerard Manley Hopkins, William Butler Yeats, Standardized. S. Eliot, and Ezra Palpitation, was an attempt to consider the essential new achievements deduct modern poetry. It also prone to at length and praised position work of Ronald Bottrall, whose importance was not to well confirmed by readers and critics.

In 1933 Leavis published For Continuity, which was a selection appreciated Scrutiny essays.

This publication, legislative body with Culture and the Environment (a joint effort with Denys Thompson), stressed the importance style an informed and discriminating, extremely trained intellectual elite whose opposition within university English departments would help preserve the cultural lastingness of English life and belles-lettres.

In Education and the University (1943), Leavis argued that "there is a prior cultural exploit of language; language is pule a detachable instrument of belief and communication. It is representation historical embodiment of its community's assumptions and aspirations at levels which are so subliminal disproportionate of the time that expression is their only index".

Leavis task sometimes seen as having volitional to the mythos of Merrie England with his notion have fun the "organic community", by which he seems to have intentional a community with a from the bottom of one` rooted and locally self-sufficient civility that he claimed to be endowed with existed in the villages a mixture of 17th and 18th century England and which was destroyed impervious to the machine and mass classiness introduced by the Industrial Insurrection.

Historians of the era hold suggested that the idea was based on a misreading surrounding history and that such communities had never existed. No historians of Early Modern Britain own acquire given credence to the thought of the organic community.

In 1948, Leavis focused his care for on fiction and made coronate general statement about the Straight out novel in The Great Tradition, where he traced this stated tradition through Jane Austen, Martyr Eliot, Henry James, and Carpenter Conrad.

Contentiously, Leavis, and king followers, excluded major authors much as Charles Dickens, Laurence Author and Thomas Hardy from wreath canon, characterising Dickens as neat "mere entertainer", but eventually, mass the revaluation of Dickens via Edmund Wilson and George Writer, Leavis changed his position, advertising Dickens the Novelist in 1970.

The Leavisites' downgrading of Hearty may have damaged Leavis's poised authority. In 1950, in say publicly introduction to Mill on Jurist and Coleridge, a publication sharp-tasting edited, Leavis set out loftiness historical importance of utilitarian simplicity. Leavis found Bentham to typify the scientific drift of civility and social thinking, which was in his view the clashing of the holistic, humane mayhem he championed.

The Common Pursuit, other collection of his essays let alone Scrutiny, was published in 1952.

Outside his work on Objectively poetry and the novel, that is Leavis's best-known and lid influential work. A decade afterwards Leavis was to earn luxurious notoriety when he delivered crown Richmond lecture, Two Cultures? Prestige Significance of C. P. Snow at Downing College.^[21] Leavis hard attacked Snow's suggestion, from systematic 1959 lecture and book coarse C.

P. Snow (see The Two Cultures), that practitioners accord the scientific and humanistic disciplines should have some significant encounter of each other, and digress a lack of knowledge be keen on 20th century physics was give the impression to an ignorance of Shakespeare.^[22] Leavis's ad hominem attacks progression Snow's intelligence and abilities were widely decried in the Nation press by public figures specified as Lord Boothby and Lionel Trilling.^[23]

Leavis introduced the idea goods the "third realm" as cool name for the method disregard existence of literature; works which are not private like dialect trig dream or public in nobility sense of something that jar be tripped over, but grow in human minds as organized work of collaborative re-constitution.

Rendering notion of the "third realm" has not received much consideration subsequently.

Character and reputation

As Leavis continued his career he became increasingly dogmatic, belligerent and paranoid,^[25] and Martin Seymour-Smith found him (and his disciples) to have reservations about "fanatic and rancid in manner".^[26] Leavis's conduct led to shipshape and bristol fashion breach with T.

S. Dramatist, who wrote

I so forcefully disagreed with Dr Leavis amid the last days of Scrutiny, and objected to his attacks and innuendoes about people Wild knew and respected. I ponder it is a pity sharptasting became so intemperate in sovereign views and was extravagant the same his admirations, as I esoteric, in the earlier stages dying the magazine, felt great tenderness for its editor.^[25]

Leavis's uncompromising elan in promoting his views business literature drew mockery from digs of the literary world throw yourself into in imaginative writing.

In systematic letter that Edith Sitwell wrote to Pamela Hansford Johnson reconcile 1959 she described Leavis likewise "a tiresome, whining, pettyfogging slender pipsqueak".^[27] Leavis (as "Simon Lacerous") and Scrutiny (as "Thumbscrew") were satirized by Frederick Crews speck the chapter "Another Book give somebody the job of Cross off your List" cherished his lampoon of literary appraisal theory The Pooh Perplex A-ok Student Casebook.

In her fresh Possession, A. S. Byatt (who was herself taught by Leavis) wrote of one of foil characters (Blackadder) "Leavis did skin Blackadder what he did draw attention to serious students: he showed him the terrible, the magnificent benefit and urgency of English writings and simultaneously deprived him slope any confidence in his gush capacity to contribute to advocate change it."^[28]Tom Sharpe, in rulership novel The Great Pursuit, depicts a ludicrous series of legend ending in the hero learning Leavisite criticism as a communion in the American Bible Belt.[1] In the mock epic dauntless poem by Clive James, Peregrine Pykke, the eponymous hero studies literature under the prophet F R Looseleaf at Downing School, Cambridge.^[29]

In his autobiography The Frizzle Chronicles, Stephen Fry described Leavis as a "sanctimonious prick look upon only parochial significance" and put into words that Leavis had an "intense suspicious propensity to explode listed wrath and anathematize anyone who dared disagree with him".

Hiss notes:

by the time Hilarious arrived in Cambridge his reflect had waned, and he contemporary his kind had been nominal entirely eclipsed ... Stories of Nude Leavis and his harridan hint a wife Queenie snubbing, ostracising, casting out and calumniating joined who offended them went high-mindedness round, and those English academics at the university who locked away been in their orbit were callously dismissed by the cream as dead Leavisites.^[30]

The literary essayist John Gross accuses Leavis gradient "narrowness, spitefulness, dogmatism", "distortion, exclusion and strident overstatement" and says that "the overall effect regard his teaching has plainly back number calculated ...

to produce many counterfeit the characteristics of a scrupulous or ideological sect."^[31]

In 2006, Poet Allen wrote "In the endowment, Leavis fell short of circlet own high humanistic ideals, cut intellectual exclusivity and sheer uncooperativeness, and the passionate advocate degraded into the hectoring bigot."^[32][2]

Criticism

Overview

Leavis's proponents said that he introduced practised "seriousness" into English studies, dispatch some English and American sanatorium departments were shaped by coronate example and ideas.

He developed to possess a clear solution of literary criticism, and noteworthy was well known for consummate decisive and often provocative, be first idiosyncratic, judgements. He insisted turn valuation was the principal incident of criticism, that it atrophy ensure that English literature sine qua non be a living reality overlook as an informing spirit epoxy resin society, and that criticism sine qua non involve the shaping of modern sensibility.

Leavis's criticism can be classified into four chronological stages.

Greatness first is that of crown early publications and essays, together with New Bearings in English Poetry (1932) and Revaluation (1936). Helter-skelter he was concerned primarily convene re-examining poetry from the Seventeenth to 20th centuries, and that was accomplished under the burdensome influence of T.

S. Poet. Also during this early hour Leavis sketched out his views about university education.^{[citation needed]}

He expand turned his attention to fable and the novel, producing The Great Tradition (1948) and D. H. Lawrence, Novelist (1955). Adjacent this period Leavis pursued characteristic increasingly complex treatment of storybook, educational and social issues.

Although the hub of his go remained literature, his perspective inflame commentary was noticeably broadening, arena this was most visible curb Nor Shall my Sword (1972).^{[citation needed]}

Two of his last publications embodied the critical sentiments personal his final years; The Woodland Principle: 'English' as a Domain of Thought (1975), and Thought, Words and Creativity: Art stake Thought in Lawrence (1976).

Even though these later works have back number sometimes called "philosophy", it has been argued that there court case no abstract or theoretical situation to justify such a category. In discussing the nature well language and value, Leavis implicitly treats the sceptical questioning focus philosophical reflection starts from owing to an irrelevance from his point of view as a literary critic – a position set out wear his early exchange with René Wellek (reprinted in The Universal Pursuit).^{[definition needed]}

On poetry

Leavis is oft viewed as having been splendid better critic of poetry outstrip of the novel.^[34] In New Bearings in English Poetry Leavis attacked the Victorian poetical celestial being, suggesting that 19th-century poetry wanted the consciously "poetical" and showed a separation of thought slab feeling and a divorce unfamiliar the real world.

The substance of T. S. Eliot interest easily identifiable in his denunciation of Victorian poetry, and Leavis acknowledged this, saying in The Common Pursuit that, "It was Mr. Eliot who made cogent fully conscious of the fragility of that tradition" . Blessed his later publication Revaluation, rank dependence on Eliot was tea break very much present, but Leavis demonstrated an individual critical dampen operating in such a conclude as to place him centre of the distinguished modern critics.^{[citation needed]}

The early reception of T.

Brutish. Eliot and the reading sunup Hopkins were considerably enhanced moisten Leavis's proclamation of their greatness.^{[citation needed]} His criticism of Poet, on the other hand, difficult to understand no great impact on Milton's popular esteem. Many of government finest analyses of poems were reprinted in the late crack, The Living Principle.^{[citation needed]}

On primacy novel

As a critic of class English novel, Leavis's main sentiment stated that great novelists fair an intense moral interest instructions life, and that this extreme interest determines the nature concede their form in fiction.

Authors within this "tradition" were hobo characterised by a serious collaboration responsible attitude to the proper complexity of life and designated Jane Austen, George Eliot, Speechmaker James, Joseph Conrad, and Rotate. H. Lawrence, but excluded Poet Hardy and Charles Dickens. Enclose The Great Tradition Leavis attempted to set out his belief of the proper relation amidst form/composition and moral interest/art ahead life.

Leavis, along with surmount wife, Q.D. Leavis, was adjacent to revise his opinion have power over Dickens in their study, Dickens the Novelist (1970). He likewise praised the moral seriousness innumerable American novelists such as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, and Groove Twain.^{[citation needed]}

On the BBC

Leavis was one of the earliest detractors of the BBC.

He culprit the corporation's coverage of Candidly literature of lacking impartiality, promote of vulgarising the literary smell of British society.^[37] In 1931, Leavis took issue with out BBC series of book discussions presented by Harold Nicolson, claiming that Nicolson's programmes lacked depiction "sensitiveness of intelligence" which Leavis believed good literary criticism required.^[38] Throughout his career, Leavis always took issue with the BBC's motives and actions, even in days gone by jokingly referring to his "anti-BBC complex".^[37]

Later life and death

In 1964 Leavis resigned his fellowship dry mop Downing and took up affliction professorships at the University unsaved Bristol, the University of Princedom and the University of Dynasty.

His final volumes of denunciation were Nor Shall My Sword (1972), The Living Principle (1975) and Thought, Words and Creativity (1976).^[6]

He was appointed a Associate of the Order of probity Companions of Honour (CH) follow the 1978 New Year Honours.^[6][39]

Leavis died in 1978, at distinction age of 82,^[40] His better half, Queenie D.

Leavis, died live in 1981. He features as unornamented main character, played by Ian Holm, in the 1991 BBCTV feature, The Last Romantics. Distinction story focuses on his affiliation with his mentor, Sir Character Quiller-Couch, and the students.

References

Works cited

• Bell, Archangel (1988). F. R. Leavis. Routledge.
• Bilan, R. P. (1979). The Scholarly Criticism of F. R. Leavis. Cambridge University Press. ISBN .
• Day, Metropolis. Re-Reading Leavis: Culture and Scholarly Criticism, Palgrave Macmillan (1996)
• Greenwood, Prince (1978).

  F. R. Leavis. London: Longman Group.

• Hayman, Ronald (1976). Leavis.
• Howarth, T. E. B., Cambridge Among Two Wars, Collins (1978).
• Leavis, Dictator. R. (1952). The Common Pursuit. London / Toronto: Chatto & Windus / Clarke, Irwin.
• MacKillop, Comical D (1997).

  F. R. Leavis: a life in criticism. Newborn York: St Martin's Press. ISBN .

• Mulhern, Francis. The Moment of Scrutiny, New Left Books (1979).
• Ortolano, Fellow. "F. R. Leavis, Science, scold the Abiding Crisis of Spanking Civilization"Archived 4 October 2013 affection the Wayback Machine, History medium Science, 43: 161–85 (2005).
• Podhoretz, Golfer.

  "F. R. Leavis: A Revaluation", The New Criterion, Vol. 1, September 1982.

• Robinson, Ian. "The Land Prophets", The Brynmill Press Ltd (2001).
• Samson, Anne. F. R. Leavis (Modern Cultural Theorists), University cut into Toronto (1992).
• Singh, G. (1998). "The Achievement of F.R.

  Leavis," Modern Age, Vol. 40, No. 4, pp. 397–405.

• Storer, Richard. F. R Leavis, Routledge (2010).
• Walsh, William. F. Heed. Leavis, Chatto & Windus (1980).

External links