Privileging Literary Criticism: the Legacy of F. R. Leavis’s The Great Tradition

American academics have often been puzzled by claims made by English colleagues for the importance of F. R. Leavis. Leavis’s position as a literary critic cannot be separated from his role as leader of an academic revolution in England which established literary criticism as a central activity in British culture. Leavis’s premise was, as he argues in Education and the University (1943), that literary criticism ‘trains, in a way no other discipline can, intelligence and sensibility together, cultivating a sensitiveness and precision of response and a delicate integrity of intelligence — intelligence that integrates as well as analyses and must have pertinacity and staying power as well as delicacy’. 1 For Leavis, literary criticism involves the complete engagement of mind and feeling while reading a text, and the subsequent ability to recreate or render that response in writing. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.