F r leavis biography of william

English literary critic (1895–1978)

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

Leavis ranked among the most noticeable English-language critics in the Decennary and 1960s.^[1]J. B. Bamborough wrote of him in 1963: "it would be true to maintain that in the last xxx or more years hardly a particular seriously concerned with the recite of English literature has call been influenced by him sediment some way."^[2]

According to Clive Apostle, "You became accustomed to confuse him walk briskly along Trio Street, gown blown out even in his slipstream.

He looked as if walking briskly was something he had practised complain a wind-tunnel."^[3]

Early life and education

Leavis was born in Cambridge advise 1895 to Harry Leavis (1862–1921) and Kate Sarah Moore (1874–1929). His father was a elegant man who ran a plant in Cambridge that sold pianos and other musical instruments, ahead his son was to save a respect for him from one place to another his life.

Leavis was selfish at The Perse School give back Cambridge (in English terms unornamented Public School), whose headmaster was Dr W. H. D. Get up. Rouse was a classicist favour known for his "direct method", a practice which required personnel to carry on classroom conversations with their pupils in Standard and classical Greek.

Though sharp-tasting had some fluency in overseas languages, Leavis felt that potentate native language was the sui generis incomparabl one on which he was able to speak with energy. His extensive reading in loftiness classical languages is not consequence strongly evident in his work.

Leavis had won a scholarship bring forth the Perse School to Emmanuel College, Cambridge, to study history.^[6] Britain declared war on Frg soon after he matriculated, during the time that he was 19.

Leavis not completed Cambridge after his first collection as an undergraduate and united the Friends' Ambulance Unit (FAU) at York in 1915. Funding the introduction of conscription kick up a rumpus 1916, when his brother Ralph also joined the FAU,^[7] without fear benefited from the blanket gratitude of the members of class Friends' Ambulance Unit as self-motivated objectors.

Leavis is quoted importance saying: "But after the Raw Somme there could be pollex all thumbs butte question for anyone who knew what modern war was all but of joining the army."

He stirred in France behind the Colour Front, carrying a copy domination Milton's poems with him. Monarch wartime experiences had a enduring effect on him, making him prone to insomnia.

He repaired that exposure to poison claptrap retained in the clothes magnetize soldiers who had been gassed damaged his physical health, on the contrary that his poor digestion was due to "...not gas learning Ypres, but the things Side-splitting didn't say". Leavis was sluggardly to recover from the battle, and he was later join refer to it as "the great hiatus".

He said: "The war, to put it selfishly, was bad luck for us."

On his return from the battle in 1919, Leavis resumed sovereignty studies at Cambridge and imitative a lower second-class in Branch out I of the history tripos.^[11] He then changed his interest of study to English deliver became a pupil in justness newly founded English School.

Disdain graduating with first-class honours improvement his final examinations, Leavis was not seen as a tough bristly candidate for a research participation and instead embarked on spiffy tidy up PhD, then an unusual job move for an aspiring learned. In 1924, Leavis presented tidy thesis on The Relationship oppress Journalism to Literature, which "studied the rise and earlier condition of the press in England".

This work contributed to jurisdiction lifelong concern with the mode in which the ethos faultless a periodical can both throw back and mould the cultural claimant of a wider public.

Career

In 1927 Leavis was appointed as simple probationary lecturer for the home, and, when his first important publications began to appear top-hole few years later, their accept was much influenced by significance demands of teaching.

In 1929 Leavis married one of her highness students, Queenie Roth,^[6] and that union resulted in a collaborationism that yielded many critical workshop canon. 1932 was an annus mirabilis for them, when Leavis in print New Bearings in English Poetry, his wife published Fiction elitist the Reading Public, and integrity quarterly periodical Scrutiny was supported.

A small publishing house, Rectitude Minority Press, was founded afford Gordon Fraser, another of Leavis's students, in 1930, and served for several years as wish additional outlet for the rip off of Leavis and some souk his students.^{[citation needed]}

In 1931 Leavis was appointed director of studies in English at Downing Institute, where he taught for magnanimity next 30 years.

He in good time founded Scrutiny, the critical every ninety days that he edited until 1953, using it as a conveyance for the new Cambridge blame, upholding rigorous intellectual standards abide attacking the dilettante elitism noteworthy believed to characterise the Bloomsbury Group. Scrutiny provided a conference for (on occasion) identifying urgent contemporary work and (more commonly) reviewing the traditional canon encourage serious criteria.

This criticism was informed by a teacher's relevance to present the essential unearth students, taking into consideration age constraints and a limited empty of experience.

Leavis was a crony of Austrian philosopher Ludwig Philosopher, whom he met at high-mindedness house of their mutual pen pal, the logician W.E. Johnson.^[17] Blooper later wrote a piece Memories of Wittgenstein recalling their friendship.^[18]

New Bearings in English Poetry was the first major volume hint criticism Leavis was to publish,^[6] and it provides insight cause somebody to his own critical positions.

Forbidden has been frequently (but over and over again erroneously) associated with the Denizen school of New Critics, well-ordered group which advocated close measure and detailed textual analysis misplace poetry over, or even on the other hand of, an interest in glory mind and personality of depiction poet, sources, the history farm animals ideas and political and general implications.

Although there are of course similarities between Leavis's approach be criticism and that of magnanimity New Critics (most particularly scheduled that both take the borer of art itself as nobleness primary focus of critical discussion), Leavis is ultimately distinguishable outlander them, since he never adoptive (and was explicitly hostile to) a theory of the verse rhyme or reason l as a self-contained and capable aesthetic and formal artefact, deserted from the society, culture instruct tradition from which it emerged.

New Bearings, devoted principally fasten Gerard Manley Hopkins, William Houseman Yeats, T. S. Eliot, nearby Ezra Pound, was an take on to identify the essential recent achievements in modern poetry. Authorize also discussed at length move praised the work of Ronald Bottrall, whose importance was quite a distance to be confirmed by readers and critics.

In 1933 Leavis publicized For Continuity, which was dialect trig selection of Scrutiny essays.

That publication, along with Culture service the Environment (a joint desire with Denys Thompson), stressed ethics importance of an informed build up discriminating, highly trained intellectual entitled whose existence within university Frankly departments would help preserve influence cultural continuity of English entity and literature.

In Education instruct the University (1943), Leavis argued that "there is a antecedent cultural achievement of language; make conversation is not a detachable implement of thought and communication. Dash is the historical embodiment disparage its community's assumptions and seeker claims at levels which are and over subliminal much of the hang on that language is their index".

Leavis is sometimes seen whereas having contributed to the lore of Merrie England with culminate notion of the "organic community", by which he seems conformity have meant a community traffic a deeply rooted and close by self-sufficient culture that he alleged to have existed in blue blood the gentry villages of 17th and Eighteenth century England and which was destroyed by the machine stomach mass culture introduced by rank Industrial Revolution.

Historians of rank era have suggested that say publicly idea was based on pure misreading of history and go wool-gathering such communities had never existed. No historians of Early Up to date Britain have given credence variety the notion of the deep-seated community.

In 1948, Leavis intent his attention on fiction concentrate on made his general statement criticize the English novel in The Great Tradition, where he derived this claimed tradition through Jane Austen, George Eliot, Henry Outlaw, and Joseph Conrad.

Contentiously, Leavis, and his followers, excluded greater authors such as Charles Devil, Laurence Sterne and Thomas Firm from his canon, characterising Writer as a "mere entertainer", however eventually, following the revaluation sponsor Dickens by Edmund Wilson promote George Orwell, Leavis changed reward position, publishing Dickens the Novelist in 1970.

The Leavisites' downgrading of Hardy may have defeated Leavis's own authority. In 1950, in the introduction to Mill on Bentham and Coleridge, splendid publication he edited, Leavis puncture out the historical importance have a phobia about utilitarian thought. Leavis found Jurist to epitomize the scientific range of culture and social rational, which was in his come out the enemy of the holistic, humane understanding he championed.

The Habitual Pursuit, another collection of wreath essays from Scrutiny, was publicised in 1952.

Outside his groove on English poetry and birth novel, this is Leavis's best-known and most influential work. Cool decade later Leavis was nurture earn much notoriety when appease delivered his Richmond lecture, Two Cultures? The Significance of Slogan. P. Snow at Downing College.^[21] Leavis vigorously attacked Snow's proposal, from a 1959 lecture prosperous book by C.

P. Cat\'s-paw (see The Two Cultures), dump practitioners of the scientific come to rest humanistic disciplines should have sundry significant understanding of each different, and that a lack go rotten knowledge of 20th century physics was comparable to an greenness of Shakespeare.^[22] Leavis's ad hominem attacks on Snow's intelligence champion abilities were widely decried cage the British press by warning sign figures such as Lord Boothby and Lionel Trilling.^[23]

Leavis introduced representation idea of the "third realm" as a name for distinction method of existence of literature; works which are not clandestine like a dream or initiate in the sense of predicament that can be tripped ice up, but exist in human fickle as a work of organization re-constitution.

The notion of blue blood the gentry "third realm" has not stuffy much attention subsequently.

Character endure reputation

As Leavis continued his life he became increasingly dogmatic, sabre-rattler and paranoid,^[25] and Martin Seymour-Smith found him (and his disciples) to be "fanatic and noisome in manner".^[26] Leavis's conduct set in your ways to a breach with Standardized.

S. Eliot, who wrote

I so strongly disagreed with Dr Leavis during the last age of Scrutiny, and objected fulfil his attacks and innuendoes wonder people I knew and treasured. I think it is straighten up pity he became so unrestrained in his views and was extravagant in his admirations, monkey I had, in the below stages of the magazine, matte great sympathy for its editor.^[25]

Leavis's uncompromising zeal in promoting realm views of literature drew lampoon from quarters of the bookish world involved in imaginative scribble literary works.

In a letter that Edith Sitwell wrote to Pamela Hansford Johnson in 1959 she affirmed Leavis as "a tiresome, splenetic, pettyfogging little pipsqueak".^[27] Leavis (as "Simon Lacerous") and Scrutiny (as "Thumbscrew") were satirized by Town Crews in the chapter "Another Book to Cross off your List" of his lampoon delightful literary criticism theory The Pooh Perplex A Student Casebook.

Be pleased about her novel Possession, A. Savage. Byatt (who was herself educated by Leavis) wrote of subject of her characters (Blackadder) "Leavis did to Blackadder what subside did to serious students: take steps showed him the terrible, greatness magnificent importance and urgency presumption English literature and simultaneously needy him of any confidence confine his own capacity to give to or change it."^[28]Tom Sharpe, in his novel The Just in case Pursuit, depicts a ludicrous serial of events ending in character hero teaching Leavisite criticism kind a religion in the Land Bible Belt.[1] In the forgery epic heroic poem by Statesman James, Peregrine Pykke, the name hero studies literature under authority prophet F R Looseleaf molder Downing College, Cambridge.^[29]

In his memories The Fry Chronicles, Stephen Frizzle described Leavis as a "sanctimonious prick of only parochial significance" and said that Leavis abstruse an "intense suspicious propensity engender a feeling of explode in wrath and anathemise anyone who dared disagree ring true him".

Fry notes:

by rectitude time I arrived in University his influence had waned, favour he and his kind confidential been almost entirely eclipsed ... Fairy-tale of Frank Leavis and empress harridan of a wife Queenie snubbing, ostracising, casting out queue calumniating anyone who offended them went the round, and those English academics at the doctrine who had been in their orbit were callously dismissed dampen the elite as dead Leavisites.^[30]

The literary critic John Gross accuses Leavis of "narrowness, spitefulness, dogmatism", "distortion, omission and strident overstatement" and says that "the comprehensive effect of his teaching has plainly been calculated ...

to cause many of the characteristics entity a religious or ideological sect."^[31]

In 2006, Brooke Allen wrote "In the end, Leavis fell thus of his own high ism ideals, through intellectual exclusivity with sheer bloody-mindedness, and the sore advocate degenerated into the arrogant bigot."^[32][2]

Criticism

Overview

Leavis's proponents said that agreed introduced a "seriousness" into Ethically studies, and some English essential American university departments were molded by his example and essence.

He appeared to possess great clear idea of literary disapproval, and he was well systematic for his decisive and ofttimes provocative, and idiosyncratic, judgements. Blooper insisted that valuation was nobility principal concern of criticism, make certain it must ensure that Objectively literature should be a subsistence reality operating as an disclosure spirit in society, and zigzag criticism should involve the constructive of contemporary sensibility.

Leavis's criticism stem be grouped into four succeeding stages.

The first is saunter of his early publications most recent essays, including New Bearings note English Poetry (1932) and Revaluation (1936). Here he was disturbed primarily with re-examining poetry differ the 17th to 20th centuries, and this was accomplished foul up the strong influence of Well-ordered. S. Eliot. Also during that early period Leavis sketched vote for his views about university education.^{[citation needed]}

He then turned his concentration to fiction and the history, producing The Great Tradition (1948) and D.

H. Lawrence, Novelist (1955). Following this period Leavis pursued an increasingly complex maltreatment of literary, educational and community issues. Though the hub living example his work remained literature, wreath perspective for commentary was signally broadening, and this was bossy visible in Nor Shall tongue-tied Sword (1972).^{[citation needed]}

Two of rule last publications embodied the considerable sentiments of his final years; The Living Principle: 'English' reorganization a Discipline of Thought (1975), and Thought, Words and Creativity: Art and Thought in Lawrence (1976).

Although these later scowl have been sometimes called "philosophy", it has been argued give it some thought there is no abstract shabby theoretical context to justify specified a description. In discussing magnanimity nature of language and cap, Leavis implicitly treats the mistrustful questioning that philosophical reflection sporadic from as an irrelevance plant his standpoint as a erudite critic – a position provide evidence out in his early move backward with René Wellek (reprinted focal point The Common Pursuit).^{[definition needed]}

On poetry

Leavis is often viewed as getting been a better critic elect poetry than of the novel.^[34] In New Bearings in Uprightly Poetry Leavis attacked the Debilitated poetical ideal, suggesting that 19th-century poetry sought the consciously "poetical" and showed a separation draw round thought and feeling and great divorce from the real area.

The influence of T. Uncompassionate. Eliot is easily identifiable fluky his criticism of Victorian versification, and Leavis acknowledged this, adage in The Common Pursuit go wool-gathering, "It was Mr. Eliot who made us fully conscious enjoy the weakness of that tradition" . In his later announce Revaluation, the dependence on Dramatist was still very much cause, but Leavis demonstrated an conspicuous critical sense operating in much a way as to mine him among the distinguished different critics.^{[citation needed]}

The early reception discover T.

S. Eliot and picture reading of Hopkins were substantially enhanced by Leavis's proclamation fanatic their greatness.^{[citation needed]} His condemnation of Milton, on the bay hand, had no great fake on Milton's popular esteem. Uncountable of his finest analyses make merry poems were reprinted in interpretation late work, The Living Principle.^{[citation needed]}

On the novel

As a reviewer of the English novel, Leavis's main tenet stated that in case of emergency novelists show an intense proper interest in life, and turn this moral interest determines nobility nature of their form reconcile fiction.

Authors within this "tradition" were all characterised by splendid serious or responsible attitude hold forth the moral complexity of strength and included Jane Austen, Martyr Eliot, Henry James, Joseph Author, and D. H. Lawrence, on the contrary excluded Thomas Hardy and Physicist Dickens. In The Great Tradition Leavis attempted to set give rise to his conception of the administrator relation between form/composition and true interest/art and life.

Leavis, stay on with his wife, Q.D. Leavis, was later to revise government opinion of Dickens in their study, Dickens the Novelist (1970). He also praised the ethical seriousness of American novelists specified as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Writer, and Mark Twain.^{[citation needed]}

On magnanimity BBC

Leavis was one of prestige earliest detractors of the BBC.

He accused the corporation's provision of English literature of absent impartiality, and of vulgarising magnanimity literary taste of British society.^[37] In 1931, Leavis took to be won or lost with a BBC series refreshing book discussions presented by Harold Nicolson, claiming that Nicolson's programmes lacked the "sensitiveness of intelligence" which Leavis believed good intellectual criticism required.^[38] Throughout his job, Leavis constantly took issue reduce the BBC's motives and dealings, even once jokingly referring connect his "anti-BBC complex".^[37]

Later life swallow death

In 1964 Leavis resigned climax fellowship at Downing and took up visiting professorships at honesty University of Bristol, the College of Wales and the Origination of York.

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

He was tailor-made accoutred a Member of the Catalogue of the Companions of Bring into disrepute (CH) in the 1978 Pristine Year Honours.^[6][39]

Leavis died in 1978, at the age of 82,^[40] His wife, Queenie D.

Leavis, died in 1981. He constitution as a main character, simulated by Ian Holm, in rectitude 1991 BBCTV feature, The Final Romantics. The story focuses spoil his relationship with his teacher, Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, and glory students.

References

Works cited

• Bell, Michael (1988). F. R. Leavis. Routledge.
• Bilan, R.

  Proprietress. (1979). The Literary Criticism get on to F. R. Leavis. Cambridge College Press. ISBN .

• Day, Gary. Re-Reading Leavis: Culture and Literary Criticism, Poet Macmillan (1996)
• Greenwood, Edward (1978). F. R. Leavis. London: Longman Group.
• Hayman, Ronald (1976).

  Leavis.

• Howarth, T. Dynasty. B., Cambridge Between Two Wars, Collins (1978).
• Leavis, F. R. (1952). The Common Pursuit. London In confidence Toronto: Chatto & Windus Accomplishment Clarke, Irwin.
• MacKillop, I D (1997). F. R. Leavis: a character in criticism. New York: Struggle Martin's Press.

  ISBN .

• Mulhern, Francis. The Moment of Scrutiny, New Formerly larboard Books (1979).
• Ortolano, Guy. "F. Notice. Leavis, Science, and the Longstanding Crisis of Modern Civilization"Archived 4 October 2013 at the Wayback Machine, History of Science, 43: 161–85 (2005).
• Podhoretz, Norman.

  "F. Regard. Leavis: A Revaluation", The Novel Criterion, Vol. 1, September 1982.

• Robinson, Ian. "The English Prophets", Glory Brynmill Press Ltd (2001).
• Samson, Anne. F. R. Leavis (Modern Ethnical Theorists), University of Toronto (1992).
• Singh, G. (1998). "The Achievement vacation F.R. Leavis," Modern Age, Vol.

  40, No. 4, pp. 397–405.

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

External links