Description

This is an auction for THE COMMON PURSUIT by F R Leavis .

From Wikipedia:

"Frank Raymond Leavis CH (1895-1978) was an influential British literary critic of the early-to-mid-20th century. He taught and studied for nearly his entire life at Downing College, Cambridge... In 1948, Leavis focused his attention on fiction and made his general statement about the English novel in The Great Tradition where he traced this tradition through Jane Austen, George Eliot, Henry James, and Joseph Conrad. Leavis purposely excluded major authors such as Laurence Sterne and Thomas Hardy, but eventually changed his position on Charles Dickens, publishing Dickens the Novelist in 1970...As a critic of the novel, Leavis's main tenet stated that great novelists show an intense moral interest in life, and that this moral interest determines the nature of their form in fiction. Authors within this tradition were characterised by a serious or responsible attitude to the moral complexity of life and included Jane Austen, George Eliot, Henry James, Joseph Conrad, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Charles Dickens, and D. H. Lawrence... Though his achievements as a critic of fiction were impressive, Leavis is often viewed as having been a better critic of poetry than of the novel. In New Bearings in English Poetry Leavis attacked the Victorian poetical ideal, suggesting that nineteenth-century poetry sought the consciously ‘poetical’ and showed a separation of thought and feeling and a divorce from the real world. The influence of T. S. Eliot is easily identifiable in his criticism of Victorian poetry, and Leavis acknowledged this, saying in The Common Pursuit that, ‘It was Mr. Eliot who made us fully conscious of the weakness of that tradition’..."