Memoirs of a Leavisite
The Decline and Fall of Cambridge English
Distributed for Liverpool University Press
151 pages
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6 x 9
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© 2013
Few have influenced the teaching of English literature as much as F. R. Leavis and his wife, Q. D. Leavis. Iconic figures of modernist criticism, they levied impassioned and often provocative readings, invigorating English criticism with a sense of literature as alive and of crucial importance to shaping contemporary sensibility. Here David Ellis looks back through his own long career as an English professor—to his days as a student of F. R. Leavis—balancing the history of criticism with personal accounts of the Leavis style, exploring its lasting impact on him and why, ultimately, it was doomed to fail. In doing so he offers a fascinating exploration of just what English literature is and what it can be.
Laura Marcus, University of Oxford
“A beautifully written, engaging and informative work. . . . It gives vivid and witty accounts of both F. R. and Q. D. Leavis’s fraught and often fractious relationships with colleagues and contemporaries, but the tone is never malicious or one-sided. Above all, it is a book about the role that literature might play in a life.”
Contents
Preface
1. Holloway
2. First Impressions
3. Sanctimonious prick?
4. Close reading
5. Time out
6. QDL
7. Class
8. Politics
9. France
10. The Richmond lecture
11. Loose end
12. Research
13. Theory
14. Australia
15. Shakespeare, Stendhal and James Smith
16. Teaching in the UK
17. Lawrence
18. . . . and Eliot
19. Epilogue
Acknowledgements
Index
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Literature and Literary Criticism: British and Irish Literature
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