Bücher von F. R. Leavis

Education and the University was first published in 1943; this reissue follows the text of the 1948. The book deals with the problems facing universities in a world in which the demand for specialisation has increasingly overshadowed the ideal of a liberal education.

First published by Cambridge in 1979, this text is taken from the 1967 Clark Lectures and is a vigourous defence of the study of English in a modern university. Leavis is concerned with 'keeping alive, potent and developing the full human consciousness of ends and values and human nature that comes to us out of the long creative continuity of our culture'.

This volume gathers together some of F. R. Leavis's earliest work with the things he was working on before his death, as well as a representative sample of pieces reflecting the concerns he developed throughout his writing life. In an introductory essay Professor Singh discusses each piece and relates it to the development of Leavis's ideas.

In The Great Tradition, published in 1948, F. R. Leavis seemed to rate the work of Charles Dickens - with the exception of Hard Times - as lacking the seriousness and formal control of the true masters of English fiction. By 1970, when Dickens the Novelist was published on the first centenary of the writer's death, Leavis and his lifelong collaborator Q. D. (Queenie) Leavis, had changed their minds. 'Our purpose', they wrote, 'is to enforce as unanswerably as possible the conviction that Dickens was one of the greatest of creative writers . . .'In seven typically robust and uncompromising chapters, the Leavises grapple with the evaluation of a writer who was then still open to dismissal as a mere entertainer, a caricaturist not worthy of discussion in the same breath as Henry James. Q. D. Leavis shows, for example, how deeply influential David Copperfield was on the work of Tolstoy, and explores the symbolic richness of the nightmare world of Bleak House. F. R. Leavis reprints his famous essay on Hard Times, with its moral critique of utilitarianism, and reveals the imaginative influence of Blake on Little Dorrit. Q. D. Leavis contributes a pathbreaking chapter on the importance of Dickens's illustrators to the effect of his work.

F. R. Leavis was the chief editor of Scrutiny, which between 1932 and 1953 had some claim on being the most influential literary journal in the English-speaking world. The Common Pursuit is a selection of Leavis's essays from Scrutiny, including his robust defence of Milton against T. S. Eliot, his deeply-felt engagement with Shakespeare, and his severe strictures on attempts to import sociology and political activism into the study of literature. The title of the book comes from a passage in Eliot's 'The Function of Criticism', in which the poet argues that the critic must engage in 'the common pursuit of true judgment'. For Leavis, this meant a strenuous insistence on discriminatory criticism - clear statements about what is good and morally mature and admirable, and equally clear condemnation of what is trivial. The Common Pursuit, with its controversial judgments of Bunyan and Auden, Swift and Forster, remains as challenging now as it did in 1952, and it is easy to see why Leavis - who was never offered a professorship by Cambridge University - held such sway over the study of English literature in his time.

It is difficult now to imagine the shock that this book caused when it was first published in 1932. The author was a teacher at a Cambridge college, an intensely serious man who had been seriously wounded by poison gas on the Western Front, and he was not disposed to suffer foolishness gladly. His opening sentences were arresting: 'Poetry matters little to the modern world. That is, very little of contemporary intelligence concerns itself with poetry'. What followed was nothing less than the welcoming of a revolution in English verse, set against the moral and social crisis that followed the trauma of the First World War. It was this situation, this feeling of breakdown and disorder, that gave such force to Leavis's dismissal of most late Romantic poetry and his welcoming of the modernists T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, and of the writer who Leavis regarded as their forebear, Gerard Manley Hopkins. The tone of high moral urgency, and the message that the experience of literature could become an engagement with life that was almost a secular equivalent to religion, seemed new and abrasively refreshing. Leavis despised the reigning dilettantism in both poetry and criticism, and in this book he threw down the gauntlet to the establishment as he understood it. In the same year he founded the journal Scrutiny, and began his long career as the most formidably serious literary critic of his time.

'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