The Literary Criticism of F. R. Leavis PDF
Preview The Literary Criticism of F. R. Leavis
R.P. Bilan Hf # r *>., This book is an attempt at a comprehensive analysis and assessment of the many strands of Leavis’s work, emphasising the basic unity of his ideas. The literary criticism needs to be under¬ stood in the context of his wider social concerns, and so this study begins with a discussion of his views on society and culture, explaining his critique of modern civilisation and the importance he attributed to the values of the cultural tradition and to the educated public who are the effective embodiment of those values. From here, Professor Bilan moves on to consider the basic ideas informing Leavis’s criticism of both poetry and the novel, devo.ting more attention to the novel, because it is here that Leavis wrote with most origin¬ ality. Attention is drawn to the kind of criteria that Leavis employed in his writings and, in particular, to the sense in which they can be described as ‘moral’. There follows a detailed discussion of Leavis’s work on D. H. Lawrence and of the way Leavis’s sense of‘life’ relates to Lawrence’s sense of‘life’. It is followed by an assessment of Leavis’s writings on another major twentieth-century figure, T. S. Eliot. Professor Bilan shows that over the last fifty years, Leavis’s preoccupations persisted and evolved, and that the principle under¬ lying them is not, as is often thought to be the case, a moral one, but rather a religious one. The final chapter attempts to clarify the nature of the religious sense that informs Leavis’s work. Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2018 with funding from Kahle/Austin Foundation https://archive.org/details/literarycriticisOOOObila THE LITERARY CRITICISM OF F. R. LEAVIS TO MT MOTHER THE LITERARY CRITICISM OF F. R. LEAVIS R. P. BILAN Assistant Professor, University College, University of Toronto CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS CAMBRIDGE LONDON • NEW YORK • MELBOURNE Published by the Syndics of the Cambridge University Press The Pitt Building, Trumpington Street, Cambridge CB2 iRP Bentley House, 200 Euston Road, London NWi 2DB 32 East 57th Street, New York, NY 10022, USA 96 Beaconsfield Parade, Middle Park, Melbourne 3206, Australia © Cambridge University Press 1979 First published 1979 Printed in Great Britain at the University Press, Cambridge Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication Data Bilan, R. P. The literary criticism of F. R. Leavis. Bibliography: p. 320 Includes index. 1. Leavis, Frank Raymond, 1895-1978. 2. English literature - History and criticism. 3. Criticism - England - History. 4. Lawrence, David Herbert, 1885-1930 - Criticism and interpretation - History. 1. Title. PR29.L4B5 80 T. 95^924 78-18089 isbn o 521 22324 5 CONTENTS Acknowledgements vii PART ONE: SOCIETY, CULTURE, AND CRITICISM Introduction 3 I Leavis’s View Of Society: The Past And The Present 7 i. Literature and Seventeenth-Century English Society ~] ii. The Organic Community 14 Hi. Technologico-Benthamite Civilization 18 II Language, Literature, And Continuity 25 III The Educated Public 40 IV The Idea Of Criticism 61 PART TWO: LEAVIS’S CRITICISM OF POETRY AND THE NOVEL V From Poetry Criticism To Novel Criticism 85 i. Leavis and Eliot 85 ii. The Poetic-Creative Use of the English Language 94 iii. The Distinction Between Leavis's Criticism of the Novel and Poetry 1 °4 VI The Basic Concepts of Leavis’s Novel Criticism 115 i. The Novel and Morality 115 ii. The Novel as an Affirmation of Life 125 iii. The Idea of The Great Tradition 137 VII Judgments And Criteria 149 i. Leavis on the Novel: Problems in Evaluation 149 ii. Criteria 164 PART THREE: LEAVIS ON LAWRENCE VIII Leavis’s Early Writings On Lawrence ' 195 i. The Early Religious Concern 195 ii. Leavis's Developing Commitment to Lawrence, iggo-ytg 202 VI Contents IX ‘D. H. Lawrence: Novelist:’ The Grounds Of Praise I 214 i. Lawrence and Tradition 215 ii. Lawrence as Social Historian and Social Critic 221 Hi. The Religious Sense and Reverence 225 X ‘D. H. Lawrence: Novelist:’ The Grounds Of Praise II 231 i. The Question of Critical Bias 231 ii. Lawrence as Affirmative Writer 237 Hi. The Problem of the Normative 243 XI ‘D. H. Lawrence: Novelist:’ Leavis’s Evaluation Of Lawrence 256 i. The Lesser Novels 258 ii. The Tales 263 PART FOUR: THE LATER LEAVIS XII Leavis’s Revaluation Of T. S. Eliot 275 XIII The Religious Spirit 288 Notes 303 Bibliography 320 Index 333
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