The Literary Criticism Of F R Leavis

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

‘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.

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

'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

This book illustrates the value of the cross-fertilisation of literary criticism with philosophy, something Leavis advocated in his later writings. Lonergan’s epistemology of Critical Realism supports Leavis’s account of how we reach a valid judgment concerning the worth of a poem or literary text and his exploration of the relationship between subjectivity and objectivity illustrates how close engagement with serious literature can be considered morally beneficial, something Leavis passionately believed in. Leavis and Lonergan are at one in providing convincing arguments against Cartesian dualism and the dominant positivist philosophies of their times. And Leavis’s method and practice as a literary critic, which he developed independently of Lonergan, exemplify Lonergan’s epistemology as applied to literature and, in this way, illustrate its versatility and fruitfulness.

This book offers a much needed reassessment of F.R. Leavis. Gary Day argues that post-structuralist theory has defined itself in opposition to Leavis when in fact there are certain parallels between the two types of criticism. Day also draws attention to the connections between Leavis's early work and the emergent discourses of consumerism and scientific management. In particular he notes how at the centre of each is an image of the body and he analyses what this means for Leavis's conception of reading. By situating Leavis in relation to the concerns of post-structuralism and by locating him firmly in his historical context, Day is able to chart how far criticism can justly claim to be oppositional. At the same time, Day is able to recuperate from Leavis's work a notion of value; a topic which is becoming increasingly important in literary and cultural studies today.

An introduction and overview of the work of 20th-century Cambridge literary and social critic Leavis, for students of philosophy. Looks at the close link between his literary and social criticism, his notion that the purpose of literature is to provide the moral basis for a truly human society, and the major influence he has had on the teaching of literature. Paper edition (unseen), $16.95. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR