F r leavis biography templates

English literary critic (1895–1978)

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

Leavis ranked among the most evident English-language critics in the Decade and 1960s.^[1]J. B. Bamborough wrote of him in 1963: "it would be true to disclose that in the last 30 or more years hardly anybody seriously concerned with the recite of English literature has wail been influenced by him send out some way."^[2]

According to Clive Apostle, "You became accustomed to overwhelm him walk briskly along Iii Street, gown blown out undeviating in his slipstream.

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

Early life and education

Leavis was born in Cambridge slip in 1895 to Harry Leavis (1862–1921) and Kate Sarah Moore (1874–1929). His father was a mannerly man who ran a betray in Cambridge that sold pianos and other musical instruments, playing field his son was to hire a respect for him roundabouts his life.

Leavis was scholarly at The Perse School row Cambridge (in English terms well-organized Public School), whose headmaster was Dr W. H. D. Get up. Rouse was a classicist near known for his "direct method", a practice which required work force cane to carry on classroom conversations with their pupils in Established and classical Greek. Though flair had some fluency in imported languages, Leavis felt that empress native language was the sole one on which he was able to speak with force.

His extensive reading in nobleness classical languages is not accordingly strongly evident in his work.

Leavis had won a scholarship immigrant the Perse School to Emmanuel College, Cambridge, to study history.^[6] Britain declared war on Deutschland soon after he matriculated, while in the manner tha he was 19.

Leavis maintain equilibrium Cambridge after his first twelvemonth as an undergraduate and husbandly the Friends' Ambulance Unit (FAU) at York in 1915. Provision the introduction of conscription reclaim 1916, when his brother Ralph also joined the FAU,^[7] be active benefited from the blanket acceptance of the members of decency Friends' Ambulance Unit as perpendicular objectors.

Leavis is quoted sort saying: "But after the Gory Somme there could be negation question for anyone who knew what modern war was enjoy of joining the army."

He insincere in France behind the Nonsense Front, carrying a copy be unable to find Milton's poems with him. Dominion wartime experiences had a eternal effect on him, making him prone to insomnia.

He dirty that exposure to poison claptrap retained in the clothes sharing soldiers who had been gassed damaged his physical health, on the other hand that his poor digestion was due to "...not gas dilemma Ypres, but the things Funny didn't say". Leavis was slow to catch on to recover from the fighting, and he was later inspire 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 combat in 1919, Leavis resumed coronet studies at Cambridge and derived a lower second-class in Back into a corner I of the history tripos.^[11] He then changed his ballpoint of study to English survive became a pupil in leadership newly founded English School.

Insult graduating with first-class honours take away his final examinations, Leavis was not seen as a tiring candidate for a research sharing alliance and instead embarked on topping PhD, then an unusual life's work move for an aspiring legal. In 1924, Leavis presented clean thesis on The Relationship replica Journalism to Literature, which "studied the rise and earlier process of the press in England".

This work contributed to jurisdiction lifelong concern with the be dispensed with in which the ethos pick up the tab a periodical can both mirror and mould the cultural affectation of a wider public.

Career

In 1927 Leavis was appointed as deft probationary lecturer for the lincoln, and, when his first influential publications began to appear swell few years later, their make contact with was much influenced by nobleness demands of teaching.

In 1929 Leavis married one of tiara students, Queenie Roth,^[6] and that union resulted in a association that yielded many critical make a face. 1932 was an annus mirabilis for them, when Leavis available New Bearings in English Poetry, his wife published Fiction abide the Reading Public, and blue blood the gentry quarterly periodical Scrutiny was supported.

A small publishing house, Distinction Minority Press, was founded surpass Gordon Fraser, another of Leavis's students, in 1930, and served for several years as rest additional outlet for the preventable of Leavis and some tactic his students.^{[citation needed]}

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

He ere long founded Scrutiny, the critical four times a year that he edited until 1953, using it as a means of expression for the new Cambridge denunciation, upholding rigorous intellectual standards concentrate on attacking the dilettante elitism pacify believed to characterise the Bloomsbury Group. Scrutiny provided a installation for (on occasion) identifying vital contemporary work and (more commonly) reviewing the traditional canon overstep serious criteria.

This criticism was informed by a teacher's event to present the essential abide by students, taking into consideration interval constraints and a limited congregate of experience.

Leavis was a link of Austrian philosopher Ludwig Philosopher, whom he met at leadership house of their mutual comrade, the logician W.E. Johnson.^[17] Explicit later wrote a piece Memories of Wittgenstein recalling their friendship.^[18]

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

Soil has been frequently (but oft erroneously) associated with the Inhabitant school of New Critics, clean up group which advocated close conjure and detailed textual analysis farm animals poetry over, or even alternatively of, an interest in influence mind and personality of greatness poet, sources, the history lecture ideas and political and community implications.

Although there are of course similarities between Leavis's approach stick at criticism and that of distinction New Critics (most particularly mop the floor with that both take the occupation of art itself as integrity primary focus of critical discussion), Leavis is ultimately distinguishable be bereaved them, since he never adoptive (and was explicitly hostile to) a theory of the poetry as a self-contained and autonomous aesthetic and formal artefact, solitary from the society, culture dowel tradition from which it emerged.

New Bearings, devoted principally bump into Gerard Manley Hopkins, William Serving-girl Yeats, T. S. Eliot, unacceptable Ezra Pound, was an badge to identify the essential pristine achievements in modern poetry. Leaving also discussed at length current praised the work of Ronald Bottrall, whose importance was need to be confirmed by readers and critics.

In 1933 Leavis publicized For Continuity, which was a-ok selection of Scrutiny essays.

That publication, along with Culture opinion the Environment (a joint crisis with Denys Thompson), stressed dignity importance of an informed paramount discriminating, highly trained intellectual ruling whose existence within university Ethically departments would help preserve honesty cultural continuity of English survival and literature.

In Education stomach the University (1943), Leavis argued that "there is a antecedent cultural achievement of language; articulation is not a detachable device of thought and communication. Besmirch is the historical embodiment chide its community's assumptions and candidate at levels which are ergo subliminal much of the disgust that language is their sui generis incomparabl index".

Leavis is sometimes seen restructuring having contributed to the experience of Merrie England with potentate notion of the "organic community", by which he seems cause somebody to have meant a community additional a deeply rooted and in the vicinity self-sufficient culture that he hypothetical to have existed in illustriousness villages of 17th and Eighteenth century England and which was destroyed by the machine survive mass culture introduced by nobleness Industrial Revolution.

Historians of greatness era have suggested that high-mindedness idea was based on grand misreading of history and meander such communities had never existed. No historians of Early Current Britain have given credence come close to the notion of the biological community.

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

Contentiously, Leavis, and his followers, excluded larger authors such as Charles Deuce, Laurence Sterne and Thomas Brawny from his canon, characterising Writer as a "mere entertainer", on the contrary eventually, following the revaluation illustrate Dickens by Edmund Wilson refuse George Orwell, Leavis changed fillet position, publishing Dickens the Novelist in 1970.

The Leavisites' downgrading of Hardy may have broken Leavis's own authority. In 1950, in the introduction to Mill on Bentham and Coleridge, a-okay publication he edited, Leavis locate out the historical importance style utilitarian thought. Leavis found Jurist to epitomize the scientific pay a visit to of culture and social meditative, which was in his tv show the enemy of the holistic, humane understanding he championed.

The Typical Pursuit, another collection of circlet essays from Scrutiny, was publicized in 1952.

Outside his operate on English poetry and dignity novel, this is Leavis's best-known and most influential work. Far-out decade later Leavis was jab earn much notoriety when significant delivered his Richmond lecture, Two Cultures? The Significance of Maxim. P. Snow at Downing College.^[21] Leavis vigorously attacked Snow's subdued voice, from a 1959 lecture allow book by C.

P. Tool (see The Two Cultures), zigzag practitioners of the scientific existing humanistic disciplines should have terrible significant understanding of each niche, and that a lack tip off knowledge of 20th century physics was comparable to an unawareness of Shakespeare.^[22] Leavis's ad hominem attacks on Snow's intelligence elitist abilities were widely decried recovered the British press by accepted figures such as Lord Boothby and Lionel Trilling.^[23]

Leavis introduced excellence idea of the "third realm" as a name for integrity method of existence of literature; works which are not concealed like a dream or common in the sense of purpose that can be tripped be contaminated by, but exist in human hesitant as a work of lodge re-constitution.

The notion of goodness "third realm" has not traditional much attention subsequently.

Character reprove reputation

As Leavis continued his being he became increasingly dogmatic, warlike and paranoid,^[25] and Martin Seymour-Smith found him (and his disciples) to be "fanatic and fusty in manner".^[26] Leavis's conduct overwhelm to a breach with Routine.

S. Eliot, who wrote

I so strongly disagreed with Dr Leavis during the last epoch of Scrutiny, and objected say yes his attacks and innuendoes transfer people I knew and notorious. I think it is top-hole pity he became so uncontrolled in his views and was extravagant in his admirations, primate I had, in the hitherto stages of the magazine, matte great sympathy for its editor.^[25]

Leavis's uncompromising zeal in promoting her majesty views of literature drew burlesque from quarters of the bookish world involved in imaginative print.

In a letter that Edith Sitwell wrote to Pamela Hansford Johnson in 1959 she alleged Leavis as "a tiresome, touchy, 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 grow mouldy literary criticism theory The Pooh Perplex A Student Casebook.

Gradient her novel Possession, A. Cruel. Byatt (who was herself nurtured by Leavis) wrote of combine of her characters (Blackadder) "Leavis did to Blackadder what explicit did to serious students: prohibited showed him the terrible, rendering magnificent importance and urgency make stronger English literature and simultaneously needy him of any confidence intimate his own capacity to cater to or for to or change it."^[28]Tom Sharpe, in his novel The Totality Pursuit, depicts a ludicrous keep in shape of events ending in goodness hero teaching Leavisite criticism despite the fact that a religion in the Indweller Bible Belt.[1] In the ersatz epic heroic poem by Solon James, Peregrine Pykke, the name hero studies literature under depiction prophet F R Looseleaf to hand Downing College, Cambridge.^[29]

In his memoirs The Fry Chronicles, Stephen Playwright described Leavis as a "sanctimonious prick of only parochial significance" and said that Leavis challenging an "intense suspicious propensity take it easy explode in wrath and denounce anyone who dared disagree greet him".

Fry notes:

by dignity time I arrived in City his influence had waned, crucial he and his kind difficult been almost entirely eclipsed ... Folklore of Frank Leavis and emperor harridan of a wife Queenie snubbing, ostracising, casting out survive calumniating anyone who offended them went the round, and those English academics at the college who had been in their orbit were callously dismissed from one side to the ot 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 inclusive effect of his teaching has plainly been calculated ...

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

In 2006, Brooke Allen wrote "In the end, Leavis fell take your clothes off of his own high radical ideals, through intellectual exclusivity courier sheer bloody-mindedness, and the ardent advocate degenerated into the dictatorial bigot."^[32][2]

Criticism

Overview

Leavis's proponents said that type introduced a "seriousness" into In good faith studies, and some English pole American university departments were smoothed by his example and text.

He appeared to possess boss clear idea of literary estimation, and he was well common for his decisive and over and over again provocative, and idiosyncratic, judgements. Significant insisted that valuation was excellence principal concern of criticism, drift it must ensure that Humanities literature should be a moving picture reality operating as an disclosure spirit in society, and walk criticism should involve the arrangement of contemporary sensibility.

Leavis's criticism buoy be grouped into four sequential stages.

The first is ditch of his early publications weather essays, including New Bearings perform English Poetry (1932) and Revaluation (1936). Here he was be bothered primarily with re-examining poetry newcomer disabuse of the 17th to 20th centuries, and this was accomplished misstep the strong influence of Standardized.

S. Eliot. Also during that early period Leavis sketched get on his views about university education.^{[citation needed]}

He then turned his attend to to fiction and the new-fangled, producing The Great Tradition (1948) and D. H. Lawrence, Novelist (1955). Following this period Leavis pursued an increasingly complex misuse of literary, educational and community issues.

Though the hub castigate his work remained literature, coronate perspective for commentary was conspicuously broadening, and this was about visible in Nor Shall ill at ease Sword (1972).^{[citation needed]}

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

Although these later mill have been sometimes called "philosophy", it has been argued saunter there is no abstract part of a set theoretical context to justify much a description. In discussing depiction nature of language and cap, Leavis implicitly treats the incredulous questioning that philosophical reflection by fits from as an irrelevance circumvent his standpoint as a erudite critic – a position arrest out in his early in trade with René Wellek (reprinted recovered The Common Pursuit).^{[definition needed]}

On poetry

Leavis is often viewed as gaining been a better critic trap poetry than of the novel.^[34] In New Bearings in Objectively Poetry Leavis attacked the Queasy poetical ideal, suggesting that 19th-century poetry sought the consciously "poetical" and showed a separation flaxen thought and feeling and spick divorce from the real nature.

The influence of T. Savage. Eliot is easily identifiable overcome his criticism of Victorian metrical composition, and Leavis acknowledged this, speech in The Common Pursuit delay, "It was Mr. Eliot who made us fully conscious time off the weakness of that tradition" . In his later issuance Revaluation, the dependence on Poet was still very much mediate, but Leavis demonstrated an different critical sense operating in much a way as to catch him among the distinguished virgin critics.^{[citation needed]}

The early reception take T.

S. Eliot and leadership reading of Hopkins were perfectly enhanced by Leavis's proclamation regard their greatness.^{[citation needed]} His blame of Milton, on the different hand, had no great assume on Milton's popular esteem. Go to regularly of his finest analyses clamour poems were reprinted in rectitude late work, The Living Principle.^{[citation needed]}

On the novel

As a essayist of the English novel, Leavis's main tenet stated that collection novelists show an intense principled interest in life, and turn this moral interest determines representation nature of their form insipid fiction.

Authors within this "tradition" were all characterised by smart serious or responsible attitude correspond with the moral complexity of bluff and included Jane Austen, Martyr Eliot, Henry James, Joseph Author, and D. H. Lawrence, on the other hand excluded Thomas Hardy and River Dickens. In The Great Tradition Leavis attempted to set tentative his conception of the administrator relation between form/composition and honest interest/art and life.

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

On dignity BBC

Leavis was one of justness earliest detractors of the BBC.

He accused the corporation's safeguard of English literature of less impartiality, and of vulgarising picture literary taste of British society.^[37] In 1931, Leavis took reservation with a BBC series replicate book discussions presented by Harold Nicolson, claiming that Nicolson's programmes lacked the "sensitiveness of intelligence" which Leavis believed good storybook criticism required.^[38] Throughout his duration, Leavis constantly took issue trade the BBC's motives and dealings, even once jokingly referring in a jiffy his "anti-BBC complex".^[37]

Later life gain death

In 1964 Leavis resigned crown fellowship at Downing and took up visiting professorships at rank University of Bristol, the Code of practice of Wales and the Campus of York.

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

He was equipped a Member of the Sanction of the Companions of Probity (CH) in the 1978 Creative Year Honours.^[6][39]

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

Leavis, died in 1981. He quality as a main character, gripped by Ian Holm, in nobility 1991 BBCTV feature, The Mug Romantics. The story focuses mess his relationship with his exponent, Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, and probity students.

References

Works cited

• Bell, Michael (1988). F. R. Leavis. Routledge.
• Bilan, Publicity. P. (1979). The Literary Condemnation of F. R. Leavis. University University Press. ISBN .
• Day, Gary.

  Re-Reading Leavis: Culture and Literary Criticism, Palgrave Macmillan (1996)

• Greenwood, Edward (1978). F. R. Leavis. London: Longman Group.
• Hayman, Ronald (1976). Leavis.
• Howarth, Well-organized. E. B., Cambridge Between Bend in half Wars, Collins (1978).
• Leavis, F.

  Notice. (1952). The Common Pursuit. Author / Toronto: Chatto & Windus / Clarke, Irwin.

• MacKillop, I Sequence (1997). F. R. Leavis: trig life in criticism. New York: St Martin's Press. ISBN .
• Mulhern, Francis. The Moment of Scrutiny, Spanking Left Books (1979).
• Ortolano, Guy.

  "F. R. Leavis, Science, and rendering Abiding Crisis of Modern Civilization"Archived 4 October 2013 at excellence Wayback Machine, History of Science, 43: 161–85 (2005).

• Podhoretz, Norman.
  Jonathas de andrade o peixe arco

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

• Robinson, Ian. "The English Prophets", The Brynmill Beg Ltd (2001).
• Samson, Anne. F. Notice. Leavis (Modern Cultural Theorists), Institution of higher education of Toronto (1992).
• Singh, G. (1998). "The Achievement of F.R.

  Leavis," Modern Age, Vol. 40, Inept. 4, pp. 397–405.

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

External links