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CHAPTER 1

New Criticism, moral

formalism and F. R. Leavis

Origins: Eliot, Richards, Empson

T he origins of the dominant Anglo-American traditions of

criticism in the mid-twentieth century (roughly from the
1920s to the 1970s) are of course complex and often apparently contradictory
– as are their theoretical and critical positions and practices. But we may
crudely say that the influence of the British nineteenth-century poet and
literary and cultural critic Matthew Arnold is strongly perceptible in them
– especially the Arnold who proposed that philosophy and religion would
be ‘replaced by poetry’ in modern society and who held that ‘Culture’ –
representing ‘the best that has been known and thought in the world’
– could mount a humanistic defence against the destructive ‘Anarchy’
(Arnold’s word) of what F. R. Leavis was later to call the ‘technologico-
Benthamite’ civilization of urban, industrialized societies. The principal
twentieth-century mediator of Arnold into the new critical movements, and
himself the single most influential common figure behind them – British
or American – was the American (and then naturalized English) poet,
dramatist and critic, T. S. Eliot (see below).
To over-simplify, what is central to all the diverse inflections of the Anglo-
American tradition – and itself derived from the two sources mentioned above
– is a profound, almost reverential regard for literary works themselves. This
may manifest itself as an obsessive concern with ‘the text itself’, ‘the words
on the page’, nothing more nor less; with literary works as icons of human
value deployed against twentieth-century cultural barbarism; or as an
‘objective’, ‘scientific’, ‘disinterested’ (Arnold’s word) criticism of the text –
but at heart it represents the same aesthetico-humanist idealization of works
of Literature. We capitalize ‘Literature’ because one of the most influential
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16 A READER’S GUIDE TO CONTEMPORARY LITERARY THEORY

– and later most crucially deconstructed – effects of this critical tradition

was the elevation of some literary works over others by way of close and
‘disinterested’ textual analysis (‘scrutiny’ leading to ‘discrimination’, both
key Leavisite terms). Only some literary writing, in other words, was
‘Literature’ (the best that has been thought and written), and could become
part of the ‘tradition’ (Eliot’s key term and then Leavis’s, as in The Great
Tradition) or, more recognizably these days, of the canon. By its nature,
the canon is exclusive and hierarchical, and would clearly be seen to be
artificially constructed by choices and selections made by human agency
(critics) were it not for its endemic tendency to naturalize itself as, precisely,
natural: self-evidently, unarguably given, there, and not created by critical
‘discrimination’, by taste, preference, partiality, etc. This is its great danger;
and of course it disenfranchises huge tracts of literary writing from serious
study and status. It is why, in the post-1960s critical revolution, it had
to be demystified and dismantled, so that all the writing which had been
‘hidden from criticism’ – ‘gothic’ and ‘popular’ fiction, working-class and
women’s writing, for example – could be put back on the agenda in an envir-
onment relatively free from pre-emptive evaluation.
T. S. Eliot was central to many of the tendencies sketched in so far, and
his early essay ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ (1919) has been per-
haps the single most influential work in Anglo-American criticism. In it,
Eliot does two things in particular: he emphasizes that writers must have
‘the historical sense’ – that is, a sense of the tradition of writing in which
they must situate themselves; and that this process reinforces the necessary
‘depersonalization’ of the artist if his or her art is to attain the ‘imperson-
ality’ it must have if it is ‘to approach the condition of science’. Famously,
he wrote: ‘Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emo-
tion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personal-
ity’, while characteristically adding that, ‘of course, only those who have
personality or emotions know what it means to want to escape from those
things’. The poet (and we may note Eliot’s privileging of poetry as the dom-
inant genre, for this was to become the main focus of much New Criticism
– and an instance therefore of the way particular theories relate most closely
to particular kinds of writing: see Introduction, p. 11) becomes a kind of
impersonal ‘catalyst’ of experience, a ‘medium’ not of his or her ‘conscious-
ness’ or ‘personality’ but of that which in the end makes up the ‘medium’
itself – the poem – and our sole object of interest. In another famous phrase
from his essay on ‘Hamlet’ (1919), Eliot describes the work of art as an ‘object-
ive correlative’ for the experience which may have engendered it: an imper-
sonal re-creation which is the autonomous object of attention. (It is closely
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NEW CRITICISM, MORAL FORMALISM AND F. R. LEAVIS 17

related to the notion of the ‘image’ which is central to the poetics of Ezra Pound,
Imagism and Eliot’s own poetic practice.) What emerges from all this in the
context of the diverse developments of New Criticism is the (seemingly)
anti-romantic thrust of Eliot’s thinking (a new ‘classicism’); the emphasis
on ‘science’, ‘objectivity’, ‘impersonality’, and the ‘medium’ as the focal object
of analysis; and the notion of a ‘tradition’ of works which most success-
fully hold an ‘essence’ of human experience in their constituent ‘medium’.
In the immediate post-First World War period when Eliot was develop-
ing these ideas, ‘English’ was emerging (most particularly at Cambridge
University) as a (some would say the) central subject in the Arts higher-
education syllabus, and with it a new, younger generation of academics
determined to transcend the older ‘bellettrist’ critical tradition which had
dominated English hitherto. In a sense, they can be regarded as the first
proponents of a ‘professional’ criticism working from within the academy,
and it was to them that Eliot’s critical precepts appealed most strongly. It
is worth registering – both in the present context and in the later one of
contemporary critical theory’s assault on the earlier tradition, and of its con-
sonance with postmodernism – that this new criticism had a thoroughly
symbiotic relationship with literary modernism, finding its premises borne
out in such works and using these as its model texts for analysis. To put it
over simply, perhaps: this new critical movement was ‘modernist’ criticism.
I. A. Richards, William Empson and, slightly later, F. R. Leavis (see below)
were the main proponents of the new English at Cambridge. Richards, whose
background was in philosophy (aesthetics, psychology and semantics), pro-
duced his widely influential Principles of Literary Criticism in 1924. In it he
innovatively attempted to lay down an explicit theoretical base for literary
study. Arguing that criticism should emulate the precision of science, he
attempted to articulate the special character of literary language, differen-
tiating the ‘emotive’ language of poetry from the ‘referential’ language of
non-literary discourse (his Science and Poetry was to follow in 1926). Even
more influential – certainly in terms of its title and the praxis it enunciates
– was Practical Criticism (1929), in which Richards included examples of his
students’ attempts to analyse short, unidentified poems, showed how slack
their reading equipment was, and attempted to establish basic tenets for
the close reading of poetry. Practical Criticism became, in both the United
States and England, the central compulsory critical and pedagogic tool of
the higher-education (and then secondary) English syllabus – rapidly and
damagingly becoming untheorized, and thus naturalized, as the funda-
mental critical practice. Its virtues were, however – and we may yet come
to regret its obloquy in the demystifying theoretical initiatives of the past
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18 A READER’S GUIDE TO CONTEMPORARY LITERARY THEORY

thirty years – that it encouraged attentive close reading of texts and, in its
intellectual and historical abstraction, a kind of democratization of literary
study in the classroom, in which nearly everyone was placed on an equal
footing in the face of a ‘blind’ text – a point we will re-emphasize in the
context of American New Criticism. Indeed Richards left Cambridge in 1929,
later settling at Harvard University, and his influence, particularly through
Practical Criticism, substantially underpinned native developments in the States
which were moving in similar directions.
William Empson, who transferred from mathematics to English as an
undergraduate and became Richards’s pupil, is most important in our con-
text here for his first, famously precocious and astoundingly quickly pro-
duced work (written when he was Richards’s student), Seven Types of
Ambiguity (1930). It would be inaccurate to characterize Empson as purely
a New Critic (his later work and career constantly refused easy labelling
or placing) but that first book, with its emphasis on ‘ambiguity’ as the
defining characteristic of poetic language, its virtuoso feats of close, creative
‘practical criticism’ in action, and its apparent tendency to detach literary
texts from their contexts in the process of ‘reading’ their ambiguities was
particularly influential on New Criticism.

The American New Critics

American New Criticism, emerging in the 1920s and especially dominant
in the 1940s and 1950s, is equivalent to the establishing of the new pro-
fessional criticism in the emerging discipline of ‘English’ in British higher
education during the inter-war period. As always, origins and explanations
for its rise – in its heyday to almost hegemonic proportions – are complex
and finally indefinite, but some suggestions may be sketched in. First, a
number of the key figures were also part of a group called the Southern
Agrarians, or ‘Fugitives’, a traditional, conservative, Southern-oriented
movement which was hostile to the hard-nosed industrialism and materi-
alism of a United States dominated by ‘the North’. Without stretching the
point too far, a consanguinity with Arnold, Eliot and, later, Leavis in his
opposition to modern ‘inorganic’ civilization may be discerned here.
Second, New Criticism’s high point of influence was during the Second World
War and the Cold War succeeding it, and we may see that its privileging
of literary texts (their ‘order’, ‘harmony’ and ‘transcendence’ of the histor-
ically and ideologically determinate) and of the ‘impersonal’ analysis of what
makes them great works of art (their innate value lying in their superiority
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NEW CRITICISM, MORAL FORMALISM AND F. R. LEAVIS 19

to material history: see below Cleanth Brooks’s essay about Keats’s ‘Ode on
a Grecian Urn’) might represent a haven for alienated intellectuals and,
indeed, for whole generations of quietistic students. Third, with the huge
expansion of the student population in the States in this period, catering
for second-generation products of the American ‘melting pot’, New
Criticism with its ‘practical criticism’ basis was at once pedagogically eco-
nomical (copies of short texts could be distributed equally to everyone) and
also a way of coping with masses of individuals who had no ‘history’ in
common. In other words, its ahistorical, ‘neutral’ nature – the study only
of ‘the words on the page’ – was an apparently equalizing, democratic activ-
ity appropriate to the new American experience.
But whatever the socio-cultural explanations for its provenance, New
Criticism is clearly characterized in premise and practice: it is not concerned
with context – historical, biographical, intellectual and so on; it is not inter-
ested in the ‘fallacies’ of ‘intention’ or ‘affect’; it is concerned solely with
the ‘text in itself’, with its language and organization; it does not seek a
text’s ‘meaning’, but how it ‘speaks itself’ (see Archibald MacLeish’s poem
‘Ars Poetica’, itself a synoptic New Critical document, which opens: ‘A poem
must not mean/But be’); it is concerned to trace how the parts of the text
relate, how it achieves its ‘order’ and ‘harmony’, how it contains and resolves
‘irony’, ‘paradox’, ‘tension’, ‘ambivalence’ and ‘ambiguity’; and it is con-
cerned essentially with articulating the very ‘poem-ness’ – the formal
quintessence – of the poem itself (and it usually is a poem – but see Mark
Schorer and Wayne Booth, below).
An early, founding essay in the self-identification of New Criticism is
John Crowe Ransom’s ‘Criticism, Inc.’ (1937). (His book on Eliot, Richards
and others, entitled The New Criticism, 1941, gave the movement its name.)
Ransom, one of the ‘Fugitives’ and editor of the Kenyon Review 1939–59,
here lays down the ground rules: ‘Criticism, Inc.’ is the ‘business’ of pro-
fessionals – professors of literature in the universities in particular; criticism
should become ‘more scientific, or precise and systematic’; students should
‘study literature, and not merely about literature’; Eliot was right to
denounce romantic literature as ‘imperfect in objectivity, or “aesthetic dis-
tance”’; criticism is not ethical, linguistic or historical studies, which are merely
‘aids’; the critic should be able to exhibit not the ‘prose core’ to which a
poem may be reduced but ‘the differentia, residue, or tissue, which keeps
the object poetical or entire. The character of the poem resides for the good
critic in its way of exhibiting the residuary quality.’
Many of these precepts are given practical application in the work of
Cleanth Brooks, himself also a ‘Fugitive’, professional academic, editor of
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20 A READER’S GUIDE TO CONTEMPORARY LITERARY THEORY

the Southern Review (with Robert Penn Warren) 1935–42, and one of the
most skilled and exemplary practitioners of the New Criticism. His and
Warren’s textbook anthologies, Understanding Poetry (1938) and Understand-
ing Fiction (1943), are often regarded as having spread the New Critical
doctrine throughout generations of American university literature students,
but his most characteristic book of close readings is the significantly titled
The Well-Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry (1947), in which the
essay on the eponymous urn of Keats’s Ode, ‘Keats’s Sylvan Historian: History
Without Footnotes’ (1942), is in our view the best exemplification, expli-
citly and implicitly, of New Critical practice one could hope to find. Brooks
at once quotes the opening of MacLeish’s ‘Ars Poetica’ (see above); refers
to Eliot and his notion of the ‘objective correlative’; rejects the relevance
of biography; reiterates throughout the terms ‘dramatic propriety’, ‘irony’,
‘paradox’ (repeatedly) and ‘organic context’; performs a bravura reading
of the poem which leaves its ‘sententious’ final dictum as a dramatically
organic element of the whole; constantly admires the poem’s ‘history’
above the ‘actual’ histories of ‘war and peace’, of ‘our time-ridden minds’,
of ‘meaningless’ ‘accumulations of facts’, of ‘the scientific and philosoph-
ical generalisations which dominate our world’; explicitly praises the
poem’s ‘insight into essential truth’; and confirms the poem’s value to us
(in 1942, in the midst of the nightmare of wartime history) precisely
because, like Keats’s urn, it is ‘All breathing human passion far above’ – thus
stressing ‘the ironic fact that all human passion does leave one cloyed; hence
the superiority of art’ (our italics).
As New Criticism is, by definition, a praxis, much of its ‘theory’ occurs
along the way in more specifically practical essays (as with Brooks above)
and not as theoretical writing (see below, also, for Leavis’s refusal to theor-
ize his position or engage in ‘philosophical’ extrapolation). But there are
two New Critical essays in particular which are overtly theoretical and which
have become influential texts more generally in modern critical discourse:
‘The Intentional Fallacy’ (1946) and ‘The Affective Fallacy’ (1949), written
by W. K. Wimsatt – a professor of English at Yale University and author of
the symptomatically titled book, The Verbal Icon: Studies in the Meaning of
Poetry (1954) – in collaboration with Monroe C. Beardsley, a philosopher
of aesthetics. Both essays, influenced by Eliot and Richards, engage with the
‘addresser’ (writer) –‘message’ (text) –‘addressee’ (reader) nexus outlined in
the Introduction, in the pursuit of an ‘objective’ criticism which abjures both
the personal input of the writer (‘intention’) and the emotional effect on
the reader (‘affect’) in order purely to study the ‘words on the page’ and
how the artefact ‘works’. The first essay argues that ‘the design or intention
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of the author is neither available nor desirable as a standard for judging the
success of a work of literary art’; that a poem ‘goes about the world beyond
[the author’s] power to intend about it or control it’ – it ‘belongs to the
public’; that it should be understood in terms of the ‘dramatic speaker’ of
the text, not the author; and be judged only by whether it ‘works’ or not.
Much critical debate has since raged about the place of intention in criti-
cism, and continues to do so: Wimsatt and Beardsley’s position strikes a
chord, for example, with poststructuralist notions of the ‘death of the author’
(see below, pp. 149–50) and with deconstruction’s freeing of the text from
‘presence’ and ‘meaning’. But there the resemblance ends, for the New Critics
still basically insist that there is a determinate, ontologically stable ‘poem
itself ’, which is the ultimate arbiter of its own ‘statement’, and that an ‘object-
ive’ criticism is possible. This runs quite counter to deconstruction’s notion
of the ‘iterability’ of a text in its multiplex ‘positioned’ rereadings.
This difference becomes very much clearer in the second essay, which
argues that the ‘affective fallacy’ represents ‘a confusion between the poem
and its results’: ‘trying to derive the standard of criticism from the psycho-
logical effects of the poem . . . ends in impressionism and relativism’.
Opposing the ‘classical objectivity’ of New Criticism to ‘romantic reader
psychology’, it asserts that the outcome of both fallacies is that ‘the poem
itself, as an object of specifically critical judgement, tends to disappear’. And
the importance of a poem in classic New Critical terms is that by ‘fixing
emotions and making them more permanently perceptible’, by the ‘survival’
of ‘its clear and nicely interrelated meanings, its completeness, balance,
and tension’, it represents ‘the most precise emotive report on customs’: ‘In
short, though cultures have changed, poems remain and explain.’ Poems,
in other words, are our cultural heritage, permanent and valuable artefacts;
and therein lies the crucial difference from more contemporary theoretical
positions.
As we have noted, New Criticism focused principally on poetry, but
two essays by Mark Schorer, ‘Technique as Discovery’ (1948) and ‘Fiction
and the Analogical Matrix’ (1949), mark the attempt to deploy New Critical
practice in relation to prose fiction. In the first of these, Schorer notes:
‘Modern criticism has shown us that to speak of content as such is not to
speak of art at all, but of experience; and that it is only when we speak
of the achieved content, the form, the work of art as a work of art, that
we speak as critics. The difference between content, or experience, and
achieved content, or art, is technique.’ This, he adds, has not been followed
through in regard to the novel, whose own ‘technique’ is language, and
whose own ‘achieved content’ – or ‘discovery’ of what it is saying – can
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22 A READER’S GUIDE TO CONTEMPORARY LITERARY THEORY

only, as with a poem, be analysed in terms of that ‘technique’. In the

second essay, Schorer extends his analysis of the language of fiction by reveal-
ing the unconscious patterns of imagery and symbolism (way beyond the
author’s ‘intention’) present in all forms of fiction and not just those which
foreground a ‘poetic’ discourse. He shows how the author’s ‘meaning’, often
contradicting the surface sense, is embedded in the matrix of linguistic
analogues which constitute the text. In this we may see connections with
later poststructuralist theories’ concern with the sub-texts, ‘silences’, ‘rup-
tures’, ‘raptures’ and ‘play’ inherent in all texts, however seemingly stable
– although Schorer himself, as a good New Critic, does not deconstruct
modern novels, but reiterates the coherence of their ‘technique’ in seeking
to capture ‘the whole of the modern consciousness . . . the complexity of
the modern spirit’. Perhaps it is, rather, that we should sense an affinity
between the American New Critic, Schorer, and the English moral formal-
ist, F. R. Leavis (see below), some of whose most famous criticism of fiction
in the 1930s and beyond presents ‘the Novel as Dramatic Poem’.
Finally, we should notice another American ‘movement’ of the mid-
twentieth century which was especially influential in the study of fiction:
the so-called ‘Chicago School’ of ‘Neo-Aristotelians’. Theoretically offering
a challenge to the New Critics but in fact often seen as only a New Critical
‘heresy’ in their analysis of formal structure and in their belief, with
T. S. Eliot, that criticism should study ‘poetry as poetry and not another
thing’, the Neo-Aristotelians were centred, from the later 1930s through the
1940s and 1950s, on R. S. Crane at the University of Chicago. Establishing
a theoretical basis derived principally from Aristotle’s Rhetoric and Poetics,
Crane and his group sought to emulate the logic, lucidity and scrupulous
concern with evidence found there; were worried by the limitations of New
Critical practice (its rejection of historical analysis, its tendency to present
subjective judgements as though they were objective, its concern primarily
with poetry); and attempted therefore to develop a more inclusive and catholic
criticism which would cover all genres and draw for its techniques, on
a ‘pluralistic and instrumentalist’ basis, from whatever method seemed
appropriate to a particular case. The anthology Critics and Criticism:
Ancient and Modern (1952; abridged edition with Preface by Crane, 1957)
contains many examples of their approach, including Crane’s own
exemplary reading of Fielding’s Tom Jones, ‘The Concept of Plot and the
Plot of Tom Jones’.
In effect, the Neo-Aristotelians were most influential in the study of nar-
rative structure in the novel, and most particularly by way of the work of
a slightly later critic, Wayne C. Booth, who nevertheless acknowledged that
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he was a Chicago Aristotelian. His book The Rhetoric of Fiction (1961) has
been widely read and highly regarded, although latterly contemporary crit-
ical theory has demonstrated its limitations and inadequacies (by Fredric
Jameson, see Chapter 5, p. 105, and implicitly by much ‘reader-oriented’
theory, see Chapter 3). Booth’s project was to examine ‘the art of commun-
icating with readers – the rhetorical resources available to the writer of epic,
novel or short story as he tries, consciously or unconsciously, to impose his
fictional world upon the reader’. Although accepting in New Critical terms
that a novel is an ‘autonomous’ text, Booth develops a key concept with
the notion that it nevertheless contains an authorial ‘voice’ – the ‘implied
author’ (his or her ‘official scribe’ or ‘second self’) – whom the reader invents
by deduction from the attitudes articulated in the fiction. Once this dis-
tinction between author and the ‘authorial voice’ is made, the way is open
to analyse, in and for themselves, the many and various forms of narration
which construct the text. A major legacy of Booth’s is his separating out of
‘reliable’ and ‘unreliable’ narrators – the former, usually in the third per-
son, coming close to the values of the ‘implied author’; the latter, often
a character within the story, a deviant from them. What Booth did was
at once to enhance the formal equipment available for analysis of the
‘rhetoric of fiction’ and, paradoxically perhaps, to promote the belief that
authors do mean to ‘impose’ their values on the reader and that ‘reliabil-
ity’ is therefore a good thing. We may see here a consonance with the ‘moral
formalism’ of Leavis, and the reason why poststructuralist narratology has
gone beyond Booth.

Moral formalism: F. R. Leavis

Despite, or rather because of, the fact that F. R. Leavis (and ‘Leavisite crit-
icism’ more generally, flowing from the journal Scrutiny (1932–53)) became
the major single target for the new critical theory of the 1970s and beyond
in the British context at least, both Raymond Williams in Politics and Letters
(1979) and Terry Eagleton in Literary Theory: An Introduction (1983) bear
witness to his enormous, ubiquitous influence in English Studies from the
1930s onwards. Apropos of Leavis’s The Great Tradition (1948), Williams
remarks that by the early 1970s, in relation to the English novel, Leavis
‘had completely won. I mean if you talked to anyone about [it], including
people who were hostile to Leavis, they were in fact reproducing his sense
of the shape of its history.’ And more generally, Eagleton writes: ‘What-
ever the “failure” or “success” of Scrutiny . . . the fact remains that English
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students in England today [1983] are “Leavisites” whether they know it or

not, irremediably altered by that historic intervention.’
Leavis, profoundly influenced by Matthew Arnold and by T. S. Eliot
(Leavis’s New Bearings in English Poetry (1932) in effect first taught the English
how to ‘read’ The Waste Land), was, like Richards and Empson above, one
of the new academics in Cambridge in the late 1920s and early 1930s
who turned the English syllabus away from the bellettrism of Sir Arthur
Quiller-Couch and others, and put it at the centre of arts education in the
university. His Education and the University (1943) – in part made up of essays
published earlier, including the widely influential ‘A Sketch for an “English
School”’ and ‘Mass Civilization and Minority Culture’ – bears witness to
the fact that Leavis was an educator as much as he was a critic, and to the
practical, empirical, strategically anti-theoretical nature of his work (as also
do later works like English Literature in Our Time and the University, 1969,
The Living Principle: English as a Discipline of Thought, 1975, and Thought,
Words and Creativity, 1976). In a famous exchange with the American critic
René Wellek, for example (see Leavis’s essay ‘Literary Criticism and
Philosophy’, 1937, in The Common Pursuit, 1952), he defends his refusal to
theorize his work by saying that criticism and philosophy are quite separ-
ate activities and that the business of the critic is to ‘attain a peculiar com-
pleteness of response [in order] to enter into possession of the given poem
. . . in its concrete fullness’.
In addition to editing Scrutiny, Leavis taught generations of students –
many of whom themselves became teachers and writers; was the inform-
ing presence behind, for example, the widely selling, ostensibly neutral but
evidently Leavisite Pelican Guide to English Literature (1954–61) edited by
Boris Ford in seven volumes; and produced many volumes of criticism and
cultural commentary. All of these are indelibly imbued with his ‘theory’
– although resolutely untheorized in abstract terms – a theory which is
dispersed throughout his work, therefore, and has to be extrapolated from
it along the way.
Following Richards, Leavis is a kind of ‘practical critic’, but also, in his
concern with the concrete specificity of the ‘text itself ’, the ‘words on the
page’, a kind of New Critic too: ‘[the critic] is concerned with the work in
front of him as something that should contain within itself the reason why
it is so and not otherwise’ (‘The Function of Criticism’ in The Common Pursuit,
1952 – note the sideways reference to both Arnold and Eliot in the essay’s
title). But to regard Leavis simply in this way, with its implication of
inherent formalism and ahistoricism, is a mistake; for his close address to
the text is only ever to establish the vitality of its ‘felt life’, its closeness to
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NEW CRITICISM, MORAL FORMALISM AND F. R. LEAVIS 25

‘experience’, to prove its moral force, and to demonstrate (by close scrutiny)
its excellence. The passage from Eliot which gave Leavis his title for The
Common Pursuit speaks of the critic’s task as engaging in ‘the common pur-
suit of true judgement’, and Revaluation (1936) is an Eliot-like sorting-out
of the ‘true’ tradition of English poetry, just as The Great Tradition (1948)
itself opens with the classic Leavisian ‘discrimination’ that ‘The great
English novelists are’ Jane Austen, George Eliot, Henry James and Joseph
Conrad – a dogmatic and exclusive list which immediately suggests just how
tendentious Leavis’s ‘true judgement’ may, in fact, be. A major plank in Leavis’s
platform, in other words, is to identify the ‘great works’ of literature, to sift
out the dross (‘mass’ or ‘popular’ fiction, for example), and to establish the
Arnoldian and Eliotian ‘tradition’ or ‘canon’. This is necessary because these
are the works which should be taught in a university English course as part
of the process of cultural filtering, refining and revitalizing which such courses
undertake on behalf of the nation’s cultural health. In particular, such works
will promote the values of ‘Life’ (the crucial Leavisian word, never defined:
‘the major novelists . . . are significant in terms of that human awareness
they promote; awareness of the possibilities of life’) against the forces
of materialism, barbarism and industrialism in a ‘technologico-Benthamite’
society: they represent a ‘minority culture’, in other words, embattled with
a ‘mass civilisation’.
Just as Leavis’s moral fervour distinguishes him from the more abstract
or aesthetic formalism of the New Critics, so too does his emphatically soci-
ological and historical sense. Literature is a weapon in the battle of cultural
politics, and much of the ‘great’ literature of the past (especially but not
exclusively, from before Eliot’s ‘dissociation of sensibility’ in the seventeenth
century) bears witness to the ‘organic’ strength of pre-industrial cultures.
The past and past literature, as for Arnold and Eliot once more, act as a
measure of the ‘wasteland’ of the present age – although the work of the
‘great’ moderns (Eliot and D. H. Lawrence, for example), in its ‘necessary’
difficulty, complexity and commitment to cultural values, is also mobilized
on ‘Life’s’ behalf in the inimical world of the twentieth century. As for the
New Critics, too, great works of literature are vessels in which humane val-
ues survive; but for Leavis they are also to be actively deployed in an ethico-
sociological cultural politics. Paradoxically then, and precisely because of
this, Leavis’s project is both elitist and culturally pessimistic. It is perhaps
not surprising, therefore, that in the twentieth century it became so pro-
foundly popular and influential; had indeed until quite recently become
naturalized as ‘Literary Studies’. (In this context, see Perry Anderson’s
critique of Leavisism in ‘Components of the National Culture’, 1968, in which
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26 A READER’S GUIDE TO CONTEMPORARY LITERARY THEORY

he asserts that Leavisian literary criticism, in mid-century Britain, filled the

vacuum left by the failure to develop a British Marxism or sociology.) Hence
the absence of theory. Not being a theory, but merely ‘true judgement’ and
common sense based on lived experience (‘“This – doesn’t it? – bears such
a relation to that; this kind of thing – don’t you find it so? – wears better
than that”’, for the essay ‘Literary Criticism and Philosophy’ see above
p. 24), Leavisian criticism had no need of theory – could not in fact be the-
orized. Paradoxically, and for many years, that was its greatest strength.

Selected reading
Key texts
Arnold, Matthew, Culture and Anarchy [1869], ed. J. Dover Wilson
(Cambridge University Press, Cambridge [1932], 1971).
Arnold, Matthew, Essays in Criticism, Second Series, 1888.
Booth, Wayne C., The Rhetoric of Fiction (University of Chicago Press,
Chicago, 1961).
Brooks, Cleanth, The Well-Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry
[1947] (Methuen, London, 1968).
Brooks, Cleanth and Warren, Robert Penn (eds), Understanding Poetry:
An Anthology for College Students (Henry Holt, New York, 1938).
Brooks, Cleanth and Warren, Robert Penn (eds), Understanding Fiction
(Appleton-Century-Crofts, New York, 1943).
Crane, R. S. (ed.), Critics and Criticism: Ancient and Modern (Chicago
University Press, Chicago, 1952; abridged, with Crane’s Preface,
1957).
Eliot, T. S., Notes Towards the Definition of Culture (Faber, London, 1948).
Eliot, T. S., Selected Essays [1932] (Faber, London, 1965).
Empson, William, Seven Types of Ambiguity [1930] (Penguin,
Harmondsworth, 1961).
Empson, William, Some Versions of Pastoral [1935] (Penguin,
Harmondsworth, 1966).
Leavis, F. R., New Bearings in English Poetry [1932] (Penguin,
Harmondsworth, 1963).
Leavis, F. R., Revaluation [1936] (Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1978).
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NEW CRITICISM, MORAL FORMALISM AND F. R. LEAVIS 27

Leavis, F. R., Education and the University [1943] (Cambridge University

Press, Cambridge, 1962).
Leavis, F. R., The Common Pursuit [1952] (Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1978).
Leavis, F. R., D. H. Lawrence: Novelist [1955] (Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1964).
Ransom, John Crowe, The New Criticism (New Directions, Norfolk, Conn.,
1941).
Ransom, John Crowe, ‘Criticism, Inc.’ [1937] in The World’s Body [1938]
(Kennikat Press, New York, 1964).
Richards, I. A., Principles of Literary Criticism [1924] (Routledge, London,
2001).
Richards, I. A., Practical Criticism [1929] (Routledge, London, 1964).
Richards, I. A., I. A. Richards: Selected Writings 1919–1938, 10 vols, ed.
with intro. by John Constable (Routledge, London, 2001).
Schorer, Mark, ‘Technique as Discovery’, The Hudson Review (1948).
Schorer, Mark, ‘Fiction and the Analogical Matrix’, Kenyon Review (1949).
Williams, R., Politics and Letters (Verso, London, 1979).
Wimsatt, W. K., Jr and Beardsley, Monroe C., ‘The Intentional Fallacy’
[1946], reprinted in Wimsatt, The Verbal Icon: Studies in the Meaning
of Poetry [1954] (Methuen, London, 1970).
Wimsatt, W. K., Jr and Beardsley, Monroe C., ‘The Affective Fallacy’
[1949], reprinted in Wimsatt, The Verbal Icon: Studies in the Meaning
of Poetry [1954] (Methuen, London, 1970).

Further reading
Baldick, Chris, The Social Mission of English Criticism (reprint edn, Oxford
University Press, Oxford, 1988).
Doyle, Brian, English and Englishness (Routledge, London, 1989).
Eagleton, Terry, Literary Theory: An Introduction (1983) (2nd edn,
Blackwell, Oxford, 1996).
Fekete, John, The Critical Twilight: Explorations in the Ideology of Anglo-
American Literary Theory from Eliot to McLuhan (Routledge, London,
1977).
Graff, Gerald, Professing Literature: An Institutional History (Chicago
University Press, Chicago, 1987).
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28 A READER’S GUIDE TO CONTEMPORARY LITERARY THEORY

Lentricchia, Frank, After the New Criticism [1980] (Methuen, London,

1983).
MacCullum, Patricia, Literature and Method: Towards a Critique of
I. A. Richards, T. S. Eliot and F. R. Leavis (Gill & Macmillan,
Dublin, 1983).
MacKillop, I. D., F. R. Leavis: A Life in Criticism (Allen Lane, The Penguin
Press, Harmondsworth, 1995).
Mulhern, Francis, The Moment of ‘Scrutiny’ (Verso, London, 1979).
Newton, K. M., Interpreting the Text: A Critical Introduction to the Theory
and Practice of Literary Interpretation (Harvester Wheatsheaf, Hemel
Hempstead, 1990).
Norris, Christopher, William Empson and the Philosophy of Literary
Criticism (Athlone Press, London, 1978).
Parrinder, Patrick, Authors and Authority: English and American Criticism,
1750–1990 (2nd edn, Macmillan, Basingstoke, 1991).
Rylance, Rick, ‘The New Criticism’, in Encyclopaedia of Literature and
Criticism, Martin Coyle, Peter Garside, Malcolm Kelsall and John
Peck (eds) (Routledge, London, 1990).
Samson, Anne, F. R. Leavis (Harvester Wheatsheaf, Hemel Hempstead,
1992).