A Study Of F.R. Leavis’s Criticism

As one of the forerunners of“cultural studies”and founders of the influential Scrutiny, F.R. Leavis (1895-1978) rewrote the English history of poetry and the novel, fundamentally shaped the landscape of literary criticism in middle twentieth-century Britain, and elevated the status of“English”and criticism per se. He was the most influential though controversial critic in 20th century Britain and is one of the ever greatest critics in Britain. With the placement of Leavis in Britain’s cultural and historical context, this study is an attempt to scrutinize, restore, explore and evaluate Leavis’s trilogy of criticism, namely, cultural criticism, poetry criticism and fiction criticism, and discuss their contents, dimensions, nature, advantages and inadequacies, and significance.As regards the domain of Leavis’s cultural criticism, the study explores his ideas of“organic community”,“literarism”,“minority culture”,“anti-Technologico-Benthamite”, and the“ideal reader”, and tries to present the link between his cultural criticism and his concern with social health and ultimate human purposes. Regarding Leavis’s ideas about criticism, the study focuses on his conceptions regarding the nature, the standards and the functions of criticism, the nexus between criticism and philosophy, and language itself. In the realm of his poetry criticism, the study examines Leavis’s effort to reconstruct or revaluate poetic traditions, including the line of wit in the 17th century, the Augustan tradition in the 18th century, the concern with the creation of the“dream world”in the 19th century, and the new orientation as set by T.S. Eliot, Pound and Hopkins in the early 20th century, and his attempt to judge poems and poets from diversified dimensions. About Leavis’s novel criticism, the study explores“the great tradition”, his ideas about the novel as a literary genre, his various criteria for valuation such as artistry, concreteness, reality, maturity, completeness, morality and life, gains and losses in his novel criticism, and various misunderstandings about his novel criticism and relevant restorations and evaluations hereof.Leavis’s criticism is characterized by the rejection of“abstractness”, anti-elite elitism, humanism, and extra-literariness based on“close reading”. His unique system, methodology, dimensions and concern with life, human nature and morality, can serve as a frame of reference in our effort to reconstruct critical discourse and practice alike in China.