F. R. Leavis is widely considered the most important literary critic of the twentieth century. He is identified with the consolidation of English as a university subject and with the production of an ...
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Critical Essay by D. W. Harding
It is the distinction of [New Bearings in English Poetry] that it consistently treats poetry as one of the major products of normal human activity, and the making of po...
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Critical Essay by J. B. Bamborough
One thing is certain: when the literary history (and for that matter, the social history) of England in the mid-twentieth century comes to be written, Leavis'...
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Critical Essay by William Walsh
Criticism, as Leavis conducts it, is the relevant, delicately attentive analysis of a complete response to literature; it is a commentary upon the act by which one ente...
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Critical Essay by RenÉ Wellek
I am, I fear, too much of a theorist not to feel strongly the ambiguity, shiftiness, and vagueness of Leavis's ultimate value criterion. Life. In its implic...
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Critical Essay by George Steiner
Like certain writers of narrow, characteristic force, Leavis has set aside from the currency of language a number of words and turns of phrase for his singular purpose...
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Critical Essay by Philip Rahv
That F. R. Leavis is a first-rate critical personality is certain, but that is by no means the same thing as saying that he is a first-rate literary critic. No doubt he h...
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Critical Essay by George A. Panichas
For the shortcomings in Leavis' criticism we have cause for regret. Magnanimity, after all, is not without its place in the humane tradition of learning. Bu...
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Critical Essay by Peter Conrad
The problem of the practical critic who has ambitions as a social moralist as well is to stretch his microscopically intricate method of analysis into a medium of prophe...
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Critical Essay by Philip Hobsbaum
Up to, and more or less including, the D. H. Lawrence book of 1955, [Leavis's] work has a singular coherence. Revaluation and New Bearings mapped out the terra...
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Critical Essay by Charles Rossman
A new book by Leavis on Lawrence,… some two decades after the ground-breaking [D. H. Lawrence: Novelist], might well have been an extraordinary event. I, for e...
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Critical Essay by R. P. Bilan
The extensive critique of the Four Quartets which F. R. Leavis presents in The Living Principle (1975) perhaps brings to an end the lengthy history of his increasingly am...
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Critical Essay by Stephen Spender
There are obvious dangers attendant on any criticism which assumes that there are absolute standards of perfection against which we can measure works of art. The crit...
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Critical Essay by Eugene Goodheart
The humanist criticism of the nineteenth century persists in the work of F. R. Leavis. As critic and teacher for over forty years and as editor of Scrutiny, Leavis h...
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Critical Essay by John Harvey
The greatest problem of criticism has always been to work with a sound understanding of the relationship between literary qualities and the values of life in general; the...
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Critical Essay by H. M. Mcluhan
[It is not] possible to arrive at a critical evaluation of a poem or an age from the point of view of rhetorical exegesis, as one can see in the work of Richards and Em...
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Critical Essay by Arthur Mizener
It would be hard to over-rate the importance of Mr. Leavis' [The Great Tradition] for the present time. The critical problem of the novel is stirring once more,...
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Critical Essay by Martin Jarrett-kerr
[What] is the immediate and total impression of [The Common Pursuit]? Dr. Leavis's criticism is nothing if not personal (the word is not meant in a depreci...
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Critical Essay by J. B. Priestley
There could be, no doubt, a standard of literary values so high, so icily severe, that in its sight a Virginia Woolf would possess nothing but a slender talent. But f...
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Critical Essay by Eliseo Vivas
Nothing will be gained by beating about the bush. To my astonishment, I found [D. H. Lawrence: Novelist] both difficult to read and unsatisfactory in several fundamental...
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Critical Essay by John Fraser
That Dr. Leavis approaches literature with a singular intensity is presumably by now a commonplace; and the intensity is usually thought of, I imagine, as manifesting its...
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Critical Essay by R. J. Kaufmann
[I mean] to recommend Leavis as a thinker, a "critical thinker" whose subject matter is the moral (not the moralistic) use of literature. The stress must...
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It seems as though many students at the university level are English majors. This could be attributed to their indecisive nature upon entering a college: not sure of what to take as a major but havin...
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F(rank) R(aymond) Leavis
