English literature has not always been regarded as a suitable subject for academic study. For a long time, Classics ruled the roost. During some late-nineteenth-century discussions about the desirability of offering English at Oxford University, it was suggested that it would help if English could be made to look like a dead language. By the middle of the twentieth century, however, English was the most popular subject at many universities. One of the most important figures in bringing about this change was the Cambridge University literary critic F. R. Leavis (1895–1978).
Leavis certainly excited strong feelings, both for and against his critical views. One of his most influential works was The Great Tradition (1948), and this text offers a useful introduction to his critical thinking. It opens with his famous and uncompromising assertion that ‘The great English novelists are Jane Austen, George Eliot, Henry James and Joseph Conrad.’ These novelists, we are told, are ‘significant in terms of the human awareness they promote; awareness of the possibilities of life’ (Ch. 1). Key phrases here are ‘human awareness’ and ‘life’. Moral seriousness is at the heart of Leavisite criticism, along with the celebration of writers who demonstrate what he sees as a deep interest in human life: the ‘great English novelists […] are all distinguished by a vital capacity for experience, a kind of reverent openness before life, and a marked moral intensity’ (Ch. 1).
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