F r leavis biography channels
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F. R. Leavis: A Life in Criticism 0312163576, 9780312163570
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LEAVIS WAS UNDENIABLY ONE OF the great thinkers of the twentieth
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work on
century. His
literature exerted a pro-
found and lasting influence on the teaching ijU;
'
'*
'
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'
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' .
.
The
of English throughout the world. his
life,
as
story of
recounted by Ian MacKillop,
was one of Leavis’s students,
who
therefore a
is
chronicle of the development of the study of
modern
literature.
When '
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Cambridge
R. Leavis arrived at
F.
.
V
.
World War, there was no
just after the First
separate faculty of English, but within a few
was established and Leavis became
years one
young team lecturing
part of the
new
MacKillop charts the influences on
subject.
and work, from
Leavis’s life to T. S. Eliot
Leavis’s C. P.
in the
I.
A. Richards
and William Empson. He chronicles
famous pub
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1Although most academics and scholars would readily agree that there is no such thing as a stable literary canon, and that the fame of individual authors and texts may be subject to considerable reappraisal according to the prevailing tastes of a given period, the assessment of literary criticism is perhaps a more sensitive field. There is indeed some irony in the fact that this article should propose to revaluate F.R. and Q.D. Leavis, i.e. two academic figures who devoted so much time in their lives to the revaluation of literature and culture - or, to put it like Michael Bell, figures "best known for [their] radical revaluation of the canon of English literature" (Bell 389). Although they are both extremely well-known English critics and academics, their contribution to the redefinition of "culture" in the 1930s, '40s and early '50s needs close scrutiny – a term that takes of course pride of place in Leavisite studies. Several blind spots remain about the Leavises, e
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Review of The Cambridge Quarterly Leavis Special Issue, Vol. 25 No 4 1996, published in Leavis. Dr Mackillop and ‘The Cambridge Quarterly’ (Brynmill 1998).
Richard Stotesbury
They wept like anything to see
Such quantities of sand:
‘If this were only cleared away,’
They said, ‘it would be grand.’
To säga that The Cambridge Quarterly’s F.R. Leavis Special Issue, [1] occasioned by the publication of Ian MacKillop’s biography, makes depressing reading on the whole fryst vatten an understatement. True, there are some bright exceptions to the general run of the contributions. But these bits of gold ore are comparatively few; and for the most part the symposium contains such quantities of småsten that it makes one want to weep like anything..
One of the things that stands out about the symposium is the way in which highly subjective attitudes tend to take the place of an impersonal interest in Leavis. This is encouraged by the editorial policy described