Had been meaning to re-read this for years and finally stole my parents’ copy from Bristol a few weeks ago.
Leavis, I am sure, was important and bullied—perhaps out of existence—a tradition of polite and genteel literary criticism, replacing it with a more intellectually rigorous and muscular approach that underpinned the academic study of literature at post war universities.
But he is also pompous and full of unreasoned assertion – a passage in George Eliot or Henry James is praised as ‘right’ or ‘telling’ (I cannot reproduce the Leavisite adjectives) purely because he finds it so.
The penultimate chapter on ‘Hard Times’ is an amazing volte face on Dickens. Derided as populist for much of the book, it is as if someone taps him on the shoulder and says ‘What about Hard Times?’ and this suddenly becomes the exception for a writer who otherwise couldn’t write.
He is also over impressed by DH Lawrence and in awe of TS Eliot.
Comments