F.R. Leavis

F. R. Leavis (1895-1978), one of the most influential literary critics of the twentieth century, is described by Edward Greenwood in this 1978 essay as the greatest. This study touches Leavis's career at Cambridge during the early years of the English Faculty. Greenwood sketches the nature of other intellectual disciplines and influences which were prominent at that time, notably the Logico-mathematical, the Positivist, and the Marxist, and describes the opposition which Leavis encountered in pursuing his own methods and priorities in teaching. He pays special attention to New Bearings in English Poetry, Revaluation, and The Great Tradition, which he regards as Leavis's most important critical works, discusses the achievement of Leavis's famous periodical, Scrutiny, and surveys his later books and the evolution of his criticism of T. S. Eliot and D. H. Lawrence. A volume in the Writers and Their Work series, which draws upon recent thinking in English studies to introduce writers and their contexts. Each volume includes biographical material, an examination of recent criticism, a bibliography and a reappraisal of a major work by the writer.