Leavis, F(rank) R(aymond)

Leavis, F(rank) R(aymond) (1895-1978), influential literary critic who taught at Cambridge University. Born in Cambridge, he was University Reader there in English from 1959 to 1962, a Fellow of Downing College from 1937 until 1962, and an Honorary Fellow for the following two years. Going against the grain of belle-lettrism exemplified at Cambridge by Arthur Quiller-Couch, he developed the ideas of I. A. Richards on practical criticism and close reading into a polemic against mass culture. His embattled and abrasive personal style, coupled with a perverse but brilliantly articulate insistence on moral rigour made him notorious, to the extent that “Leavisite” remains a potent label in literary culture. While engaged in university teaching he helped start the well-known quarterly Scrutiny, which he edited from 1932 until 1953, when it ceased publication. Among his publications are New Bearings in English Poetry (1932), Revaluation (1936), The Great Tradition (1948), The Common Pursuit (1952), and D. H. Lawrence: Novelist (1955). His later publications include Dickens the Novelist (1970), written with his wife Q. D. Leavis, herself an important, though lesser critic.