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The Great Tradition: George Eliot, Henry James, Joseph Conrad
The great English novelists are Jane Austen, George Eliot, Henry James and Joseph Conrad...' So begins what is arguably F. R. Leavis's most controversial book, The Great Tradition, an uncompromising critical and polemical survey of English fiction that was first published in 1948. He puts a powerful case for moral seriousness as the necessary criterion for inclusion in any list of the finest novelists. In the course of his argument he adds D. H. Lawrence to the pantheon, and singles out Charles Dickens's Hard Times as the one work of his that has the strength of 'a completely serious work of art'. The Great Tradition is full of Leavis's characteristically austere rejections of styles of fiction that he found lacking in moral intensity. He dismissed Lawrence Sterne for his 'irresponsible (and nasty) trifling'. Of Henry Fielding he wrote that he is important 'not because he leads to Mr J. B. Priestley but because he leads to Jane Austen, to appreciate whose distinction is to feel that life isn't long enough to permit of one's giving much time to Fielding or any to Mr Priestley.' Joyce's Ulysses, he said, was less a new start for fiction than 'a dead end'. Fiercely serious, pugnacious and stimulating, The Great Tradition is an unforgettable defence of 'those creative geniuses whose distinction is manifested in their being peculiarly alive in their time'.
304 pages, Paperback
First published December 5, 1948
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About the author
F.R. Leavis
95 books38 followersFrank Raymond "F.R." Leavis, CH was an English literary critic of the early-to-mid-twentieth century. He taught for much of his career at Downing College, Cambridge but often latterly at the University of York.
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Displaying 1 - 19 of 19 reviews
June 28, 2020
What strikes the contemporary reader about immediately about The Great Tradition—and about Leavis generally—is that for all the plaudits one can find for it scattered about popular publications, he is fairly consistently ignored in contemporary literary studies. Understanding this fact requires a bit of historical research, but what’s easy enough to figure out is this: Leavis’ star burned brightly and its sign, by all accounts, was one of terror. Perhaps owing to this, he no longer appears in the constellation of literary studies today. As someone trained in the United States, I’m tempted to blame the irrelevance of Leavis on national matters. His project appears, after all, to be decidedly English in nature. This temptation is all the stronger when I reflect that I was, after all, taught something of the similarly historically-timed New Critics. I would like this easy explanation to be true, but I can’t help but feel that it’s inadequate. The New Critics differ from Leavis and his ilk not only nationally, but also in terms of the former’s willingness to promulgate concepts in addition to readings. So, is it a matter of Leavis being useless to literary studies post-French invasion? Perhaps, but it’s not as if the critical writings of his erstwhile friend T.S. Eliot is not still assigned in classrooms, though of course Eliot is buoyed by his writerly fame. At any rate, whether it be for reasons of nation, personal focus, or simply historical chance, I had not encounter Leavis prior to this except as a character in Eagleton’s Literary Theory.
Irrelevance and being underread is not a crime, nor is it always a sign of lack of quality. Yet with Leavis, I can’t help but feel that his status as an underread critic is justified. That contrast I mentioned with the New Critics is informative. Leavis, if The Great Tradition is an accurate representation of his thought, seems to have had a distaste for the use of concepts, preferring instead the promulgation of belle-lettrist expositions. Throughout this book, Leavis praises his favorite novelists (they are few), attacks critics he found wrongheaded (they are more numerous), and spends most of his time drawing unclear, presumptive parallels between the former while excoriating the latter for not seeing such lineages. The lineages that he believes exists between these novelists, in addition to their occasionally ability to meet his circuitously described aesthetic categories, appear to be the essence of titular “great tradition.” The vagueness, the assumption that the reader should be able to understand his undefined intents and characterizations: this is, ironically, what Leavis chastises Henry James’s latter-day novels for. They are, however, the sins of his critical book.
There are positives though. Leavis was clearly passionate about his texts, and his expositions of the lives and work of these three (almost four, barely five) novelists do make you want to run and grab their books off your shelf. He is clearly a man of great faith in literature despite his lack of enjoyment in most of it. While he believed in gender, nationality, and personal life as strongly determining factors for novelists, he does not come across as overly sexist, nationalistic (despite an anti-francophone bias), or disbelieving in the reality of creativity. His idea of Henry James’ wayward utopianism is interesting, but woefully underdeveloped (and the fact that he contrasts his readings to the far more compelling readings of Edmund Wilson make the reader smugly smile). There’s also something to be said for the historical value of the lay of the landscape of taste the book gives. There are novels, now seldom read, that Leavis seems to assume the reader would have been familiar with—it’s nothing if not fertile ground for future reading projects.
I have suggested that the reason for the relative durability of the also-out-of-fashion New Critics is attributable to their willingness to promulgate concepts. How can we account for the lack of concepts in Leavis? Contemporary criticism—at least the academic kind, as opposed to the book review kind—seems prioritize “interesting” as the first-order aesthetic category par excellence. This is, perhaps, one of the reasons why the nearly extinct conservative literary critics constantly bemoan the post-canon groupings studied in academia. The interesting novel overflows, it substitutes complexity and social problematics in place of neat demonstrations of moral quagmires. Leavis’ obsession with neatness, with books being measured according to stingy readers, leads him to absurd appraisals, such as his unwillingness to concede that Joyce may have written even one great novel. This, again, is not necessarily a mark against Leavis. Criticism does not necessarily have to harp on ambiguity or politics to be worthwhile. So, what is Leavis concerned with?
Well, it’s hard to say, and easier to say what he is not concerned with. Leavis is not concerned with the text as social object nor as hermeneutical mystery. Novel are, for him, a concrete, and the job of the critic is to explicate why a given novel is good or bad, and then as a secondary practice try to contextualize them with the rarefied tradition. Sociality matters, Eliot, James, and Conrad are all writers expressing their own milieu, concerns with the world, and points of view. Nevertheless, Leavis seems to believe that writers were artists not by virtues of their grasping and groping for glimpsed truths or the advancement of some dialectic; rather, writers were artists because their craftwork was serious in representing moral scenes. Thus, it is a flaw in Conrad that he “isn’t satisfied” with the solid construction of Heart of Darkness. Conrad errs when he begins to feel “that there is, or ought to be, some horror, some significance he has yet to bring out” (206). Conrad, like James, has overstretched himself, and for that he must be censured. It should be said, however, that the practice of outlining tradition is relatively neglected once we get to the actual overview of Conrad. At that point, it mainly becomes a critical review of Conrad's good and bad qualities as a writer, such that the reader is left to merely assume that Conrad is of the great tradition simply because his good qualities and novels outweigh the bad in Leavis’ eyes.
After the section on Conrad, there is a rather glowing review of Hard Times, and then the book terminates. If this review of Leavis’ book feels insubstantial, it is because The Great Tradition is itself insubstantial. There’s no tying-together, no grand reveal. Leavis rambles, and then he stops. He’s satisfied with that, even if we are not. And so, behold Leavis: a vague belle-lettrist torn between biography, criticism, and lower-case “t” theory. Already out of fashion. Probably for good reasons. Still, the fossils we see outside of museums are usually the most compelling.
Irrelevance and being underread is not a crime, nor is it always a sign of lack of quality. Yet with Leavis, I can’t help but feel that his status as an underread critic is justified. That contrast I mentioned with the New Critics is informative. Leavis, if The Great Tradition is an accurate representation of his thought, seems to have had a distaste for the use of concepts, preferring instead the promulgation of belle-lettrist expositions. Throughout this book, Leavis praises his favorite novelists (they are few), attacks critics he found wrongheaded (they are more numerous), and spends most of his time drawing unclear, presumptive parallels between the former while excoriating the latter for not seeing such lineages. The lineages that he believes exists between these novelists, in addition to their occasionally ability to meet his circuitously described aesthetic categories, appear to be the essence of titular “great tradition.” The vagueness, the assumption that the reader should be able to understand his undefined intents and characterizations: this is, ironically, what Leavis chastises Henry James’s latter-day novels for. They are, however, the sins of his critical book.
There are positives though. Leavis was clearly passionate about his texts, and his expositions of the lives and work of these three (almost four, barely five) novelists do make you want to run and grab their books off your shelf. He is clearly a man of great faith in literature despite his lack of enjoyment in most of it. While he believed in gender, nationality, and personal life as strongly determining factors for novelists, he does not come across as overly sexist, nationalistic (despite an anti-francophone bias), or disbelieving in the reality of creativity. His idea of Henry James’ wayward utopianism is interesting, but woefully underdeveloped (and the fact that he contrasts his readings to the far more compelling readings of Edmund Wilson make the reader smugly smile). There’s also something to be said for the historical value of the lay of the landscape of taste the book gives. There are novels, now seldom read, that Leavis seems to assume the reader would have been familiar with—it’s nothing if not fertile ground for future reading projects.
I have suggested that the reason for the relative durability of the also-out-of-fashion New Critics is attributable to their willingness to promulgate concepts. How can we account for the lack of concepts in Leavis? Contemporary criticism—at least the academic kind, as opposed to the book review kind—seems prioritize “interesting” as the first-order aesthetic category par excellence. This is, perhaps, one of the reasons why the nearly extinct conservative literary critics constantly bemoan the post-canon groupings studied in academia. The interesting novel overflows, it substitutes complexity and social problematics in place of neat demonstrations of moral quagmires. Leavis’ obsession with neatness, with books being measured according to stingy readers, leads him to absurd appraisals, such as his unwillingness to concede that Joyce may have written even one great novel. This, again, is not necessarily a mark against Leavis. Criticism does not necessarily have to harp on ambiguity or politics to be worthwhile. So, what is Leavis concerned with?
Well, it’s hard to say, and easier to say what he is not concerned with. Leavis is not concerned with the text as social object nor as hermeneutical mystery. Novel are, for him, a concrete, and the job of the critic is to explicate why a given novel is good or bad, and then as a secondary practice try to contextualize them with the rarefied tradition. Sociality matters, Eliot, James, and Conrad are all writers expressing their own milieu, concerns with the world, and points of view. Nevertheless, Leavis seems to believe that writers were artists not by virtues of their grasping and groping for glimpsed truths or the advancement of some dialectic; rather, writers were artists because their craftwork was serious in representing moral scenes. Thus, it is a flaw in Conrad that he “isn’t satisfied” with the solid construction of Heart of Darkness. Conrad errs when he begins to feel “that there is, or ought to be, some horror, some significance he has yet to bring out” (206). Conrad, like James, has overstretched himself, and for that he must be censured. It should be said, however, that the practice of outlining tradition is relatively neglected once we get to the actual overview of Conrad. At that point, it mainly becomes a critical review of Conrad's good and bad qualities as a writer, such that the reader is left to merely assume that Conrad is of the great tradition simply because his good qualities and novels outweigh the bad in Leavis’ eyes.
After the section on Conrad, there is a rather glowing review of Hard Times, and then the book terminates. If this review of Leavis’ book feels insubstantial, it is because The Great Tradition is itself insubstantial. There’s no tying-together, no grand reveal. Leavis rambles, and then he stops. He’s satisfied with that, even if we are not. And so, behold Leavis: a vague belle-lettrist torn between biography, criticism, and lower-case “t” theory. Already out of fashion. Probably for good reasons. Still, the fossils we see outside of museums are usually the most compelling.
December 4, 2013
The Leavises, esp. F.R., were always fun to read and to rail at, and they were capable of wonderful analyses; but they were idiots nonetheless. These are the people who thought Hard Times was Dickens's one novel in the great tradition and Hardy scarcely worth considering. Still, he recognized that Shelley was a ninny, and for that I honor him.
May 16, 2017
I read this book because Leavis' name was coming up a lot in research about non/inherent heroism. This book was not about that. Imma be honest, I seriously skimmed the last quarter of the book, because I have other stuff on my research pile that I need to get through that is more focused on what I need. However, I did rather enjoy this book. Leavis oscillates between throwing shade on other critics and authors, seriously studying his chosen authors, and something akin to fanboying. It was nothing if not entertaining.
I will say, though, massive amounts of this book were given over to plot summary and quotes. There were whole pages of text that were just quotes out of the novels he was discussing. He seems to think the novels speak for themselves, and all he has to do is show us a few pages and we'll totally agree with what he's saying. "It's obvious, here look!"
Unfortunately, it's been a really long time since I read any of the books he was discussing (the most recent being about six years ago), and many of them I have never read at all. I'm not sure if I agree with his conclusions, because his descriptions of Middlemarch are not how I remember that book. I think he's missing a fundamental truth of what it was like to be a woman in that time and in that position. However, he often displays a serious... almost awe, really, of some of the female characters he discusses. I just wish I knew the characters so I could get a full picture of what he was looking at.
He's super into the gender divide too, but he really leans into the whole "different, but no less capable" thing, which I'm pretty okay with. He's often "missing something," but I think the dude tries.
Anyway, super interesting, not terribly dense, often entertaining, but not what I was looking for so I didn't pay as close attention as I could have.
I will say, though, massive amounts of this book were given over to plot summary and quotes. There were whole pages of text that were just quotes out of the novels he was discussing. He seems to think the novels speak for themselves, and all he has to do is show us a few pages and we'll totally agree with what he's saying. "It's obvious, here look!"
Unfortunately, it's been a really long time since I read any of the books he was discussing (the most recent being about six years ago), and many of them I have never read at all. I'm not sure if I agree with his conclusions, because his descriptions of Middlemarch are not how I remember that book. I think he's missing a fundamental truth of what it was like to be a woman in that time and in that position. However, he often displays a serious... almost awe, really, of some of the female characters he discusses. I just wish I knew the characters so I could get a full picture of what he was looking at.
He's super into the gender divide too, but he really leans into the whole "different, but no less capable" thing, which I'm pretty okay with. He's often "missing something," but I think the dude tries.
Anyway, super interesting, not terribly dense, often entertaining, but not what I was looking for so I didn't pay as close attention as I could have.
November 30, 2019
I mean, it's bloody absurd from start to finish, but Leavis' great passion should be how we all feel about literature. Strong opinions aren't bad, no matter what some would have us believe in the modern era, and we can at least walk away with that moral. And perhaps a willingness to reread Hard Times in case Leavis was right all along...?
December 18, 2010
http://nwhyte.livejournal.com/1557214...
Back in my Cambridge undergraduate days, we Natural Scientists had a joke about the guy studying English who did not want to look out of the window in the morning, because then he would have had nothing to do in the afternoon. But as I have got more interested in sf criticism, I have felt that maybe I did miss something by not sampling what was on offer in terms of literature studies in the department which was still resting on its laurels from the glory days of Leavis (or rather the Leavises). So I picked up this volume to get a sense of what, if anything, I have been missing.
Well, it's as I expected in one way: Leavis is very judgmental and allows little room for argument. The first half-sentence affirms that "[t]he great English novelists are Jane Austen, George Eliot, Henry James and Joseph Conrad", and the rest of the book is an elaboration of the greatness of the latter three (Jane Austen having received a separate book of her own). Not having read much of the authors in question, let alone of those who Leavis dismisses as less than great, I can only really react by assessing whether or not Leavis gives me a fresh understanding of those books that I have in fact read, and also by taking his recommendations of books I haven't read as potential future reading.
Leavis does not really satisfy me on the first count. His concept of "greatness" is nowhere clearly enough defined for me to feel whether or not I agree with it, let alone whether or not it's a useful criterion for assessing the quality of a novel. We all know that there are good books and bad books, and most of us will agree that, say, Pride and Prejudice is good, Jonathan Livingston Seagull is bad, and American Gods is good but flawed. Not everyone will do so: there are plenty of people who find Austen's prose impenetrable, Bach deep and meaningful, or Gaiman either indigestible or worthy of uncritical admiration. It is sometimes nice to imagine that there are vaguely objective criteria out there which one can appeal to, and I had sort of hoped that Leavis would fairly clearly signpost what those criteria might be. But he doesn't.
However, if I take Leavis' analysis as an expression of taste, his taste is sufficiently close to mine (we diverge on Wuthering Heights, where I know that I am in the minority who find the book pretty unappealing, but are agreed on Middlemarch and Heart of Darkness) that I did find his recommendations of other novels worth reading, including several by writers outside his chosen few, very interesting.
Back in my Cambridge undergraduate days, we Natural Scientists had a joke about the guy studying English who did not want to look out of the window in the morning, because then he would have had nothing to do in the afternoon. But as I have got more interested in sf criticism, I have felt that maybe I did miss something by not sampling what was on offer in terms of literature studies in the department which was still resting on its laurels from the glory days of Leavis (or rather the Leavises). So I picked up this volume to get a sense of what, if anything, I have been missing.
Well, it's as I expected in one way: Leavis is very judgmental and allows little room for argument. The first half-sentence affirms that "[t]he great English novelists are Jane Austen, George Eliot, Henry James and Joseph Conrad", and the rest of the book is an elaboration of the greatness of the latter three (Jane Austen having received a separate book of her own). Not having read much of the authors in question, let alone of those who Leavis dismisses as less than great, I can only really react by assessing whether or not Leavis gives me a fresh understanding of those books that I have in fact read, and also by taking his recommendations of books I haven't read as potential future reading.
Leavis does not really satisfy me on the first count. His concept of "greatness" is nowhere clearly enough defined for me to feel whether or not I agree with it, let alone whether or not it's a useful criterion for assessing the quality of a novel. We all know that there are good books and bad books, and most of us will agree that, say, Pride and Prejudice is good, Jonathan Livingston Seagull is bad, and American Gods is good but flawed. Not everyone will do so: there are plenty of people who find Austen's prose impenetrable, Bach deep and meaningful, or Gaiman either indigestible or worthy of uncritical admiration. It is sometimes nice to imagine that there are vaguely objective criteria out there which one can appeal to, and I had sort of hoped that Leavis would fairly clearly signpost what those criteria might be. But he doesn't.
However, if I take Leavis' analysis as an expression of taste, his taste is sufficiently close to mine (we diverge on Wuthering Heights, where I know that I am in the minority who find the book pretty unappealing, but are agreed on Middlemarch and Heart of Darkness) that I did find his recommendations of other novels worth reading, including several by writers outside his chosen few, very interesting.
Want to read
June 4, 2018Mentioned in Leland Ryken's forward to Karen Swallow Prior's On Reading Well.
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October 11, 2025Mr. Leavis really said 🗣️if your name is not George Eliot, Henry James or Joseph Conrad SIT YOUR BUTT DOWN🗣️
A star rating doesn’t really jibe with a work of literary criticism; suffice to say it feels good to use my brain and engage critically with the opinions presented here. Mr. Leavis certainly has a lot of opinions and you know what bless him for that because nobody wants to even have opinions or taste anymore you all have let people enjoy things until your minds have atrophied.
A star rating doesn’t really jibe with a work of literary criticism; suffice to say it feels good to use my brain and engage critically with the opinions presented here. Mr. Leavis certainly has a lot of opinions and you know what bless him for that because nobody wants to even have opinions or taste anymore you all have let people enjoy things until your minds have atrophied.
December 6, 2018
A work which very much stands as a landmark in the New Criticism/Practical Criticism school of thought, F.R. Leavis offers in a clear style his controversial opinions.
He claims that there are four major novelists in the English language: George Eliot, Henry James, Joseph Conrad, and Jane Austen (who is too special and varied, and for Leavis merits her own book). This is not to say, as many caricatures of Leavis would have you think, that he doesn't think that there are any other authors worth reading in the language (he provides an extensive list) but he sees these four (and later D.H. Lawrence as the fifth, and Dickens's 'Hard Times' as the sixth) as the true 'novelists' of the English language. He also treats playfully many other authors, not quite admitting them into his 'pantheon' but at the same time hinting that they might also be of equal value. Emily Bronte falls into this category, as interestingly does Disraeli.
It is clear that Leavis has a great passion for the texts he writes about, and like many New Critics he very much appreciates the text as an 'autonomous work of art' which deserves to be treated in its own right and with consideration with the words on the page rather than 'unnecessary' details such as context, or ideology, for example. Of course, Leavis often slips out of that and directly praises the authors themselves (this sets him in contrast to I.A. Richards for example) and it is clear for Leavis that the character of 'genius' is very important in forming works of art.
Of course, Leavis's method is far from perfect. Structuralists have rightly emphasised the position of a text within the 'genre' it occupies, the expectations that readers of that genre have, etc; as well as the ways in which plot and allusion are of course deeply embedded within a writers broader nexus. Culler has, for example, rightly emphasised the development of 'literary competence' which we gain through reading texts and understanding what he calls 'second-order semiotic systems' (that is texts as structures of words which are of a second-order according to their form). Formalists, like Bakhtin, have also been right to emphasise the ways in which 'dialogic' (the existence of competing worldviews and the influence of other texts) influences this 'autonomous' text and actually suspends it within a context. C.S. Lewis is also right to emphasise, for example, the way in which many concepts and phrases have altered in meaning over time and in approaching, say, Renaissance poetry we must be careful to closely analyse in a way which is totally alienated from the way in which audiences of the time would have understood certain words (of course this is not entirely possible to recapture and, to a certain extent, the way texts impact readers today separate from this task is also important).
Much of his approach, however, and his respect for the text in itself as something which the critic is very much in conversation with are highly valuable, in particular compared to certain ideological forms of criticism (which were very pervasive in the '70s-'80s and still exist to a certain extent today) which often devolve into being exegesis's of the ideology rather than of the text in question. The influence of Leavis and other New Critics around him at Cambridge is well documented and it seems indispensable to actually interact with Leavis if one wants to understand what he was actually saying, as well as situating the reactions against him and others of a similar school of thought. An indispensable text for anyone looking to understand the broader currents of literary criticism in the 20th century and to try and broaden their own sense of how texts function, what we derive from them, and how we ought to approach them.
He claims that there are four major novelists in the English language: George Eliot, Henry James, Joseph Conrad, and Jane Austen (who is too special and varied, and for Leavis merits her own book). This is not to say, as many caricatures of Leavis would have you think, that he doesn't think that there are any other authors worth reading in the language (he provides an extensive list) but he sees these four (and later D.H. Lawrence as the fifth, and Dickens's 'Hard Times' as the sixth) as the true 'novelists' of the English language. He also treats playfully many other authors, not quite admitting them into his 'pantheon' but at the same time hinting that they might also be of equal value. Emily Bronte falls into this category, as interestingly does Disraeli.
It is clear that Leavis has a great passion for the texts he writes about, and like many New Critics he very much appreciates the text as an 'autonomous work of art' which deserves to be treated in its own right and with consideration with the words on the page rather than 'unnecessary' details such as context, or ideology, for example. Of course, Leavis often slips out of that and directly praises the authors themselves (this sets him in contrast to I.A. Richards for example) and it is clear for Leavis that the character of 'genius' is very important in forming works of art.
Of course, Leavis's method is far from perfect. Structuralists have rightly emphasised the position of a text within the 'genre' it occupies, the expectations that readers of that genre have, etc; as well as the ways in which plot and allusion are of course deeply embedded within a writers broader nexus. Culler has, for example, rightly emphasised the development of 'literary competence' which we gain through reading texts and understanding what he calls 'second-order semiotic systems' (that is texts as structures of words which are of a second-order according to their form). Formalists, like Bakhtin, have also been right to emphasise the ways in which 'dialogic' (the existence of competing worldviews and the influence of other texts) influences this 'autonomous' text and actually suspends it within a context. C.S. Lewis is also right to emphasise, for example, the way in which many concepts and phrases have altered in meaning over time and in approaching, say, Renaissance poetry we must be careful to closely analyse in a way which is totally alienated from the way in which audiences of the time would have understood certain words (of course this is not entirely possible to recapture and, to a certain extent, the way texts impact readers today separate from this task is also important).
Much of his approach, however, and his respect for the text in itself as something which the critic is very much in conversation with are highly valuable, in particular compared to certain ideological forms of criticism (which were very pervasive in the '70s-'80s and still exist to a certain extent today) which often devolve into being exegesis's of the ideology rather than of the text in question. The influence of Leavis and other New Critics around him at Cambridge is well documented and it seems indispensable to actually interact with Leavis if one wants to understand what he was actually saying, as well as situating the reactions against him and others of a similar school of thought. An indispensable text for anyone looking to understand the broader currents of literary criticism in the 20th century and to try and broaden their own sense of how texts function, what we derive from them, and how we ought to approach them.
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March 21, 2014My opinion on this seminal text is totally split. Of course, I don't agree with large chunks of it; but that goes without saying as we approach literature from two completely different perspectives.
What I cannot make my mind up about The Great Tradition is its impact. On the one hand, this is arguably the most important text in the 'creation' of English Literature as a subject in its own right (let us remember that it only established itself in the 1930s), on the other hand, it does so by laying the foundations of the English Canon, and in so doing, it clashes with my own belief that an exclusive canon may have (or shall I say has had) serious consequences on our ideology, belief and, of course, education and mind set. Yet if a canon need exist, then it will by nature be exclusive. This said, I would not know how, within its context, it could have been so significant to the study of Literature if it had not set out a... well, canon. It's a circle I have not been able to break, and that is why just looking at it brings up in me a billow of frustration, intellectual, moral and ideological, like no other text, and made more poignant by the realisation that if it did not do that, as it has to many readers, we would not now be questioning the canon itself.
What I cannot make my mind up about The Great Tradition is its impact. On the one hand, this is arguably the most important text in the 'creation' of English Literature as a subject in its own right (let us remember that it only established itself in the 1930s), on the other hand, it does so by laying the foundations of the English Canon, and in so doing, it clashes with my own belief that an exclusive canon may have (or shall I say has had) serious consequences on our ideology, belief and, of course, education and mind set. Yet if a canon need exist, then it will by nature be exclusive. This said, I would not know how, within its context, it could have been so significant to the study of Literature if it had not set out a... well, canon. It's a circle I have not been able to break, and that is why just looking at it brings up in me a billow of frustration, intellectual, moral and ideological, like no other text, and made more poignant by the realisation that if it did not do that, as it has to many readers, we would not now be questioning the canon itself.
July 17, 2018
Really enjoyed reading this. Thanks to the Guardian list for recommending it and loved the print on demand copy from Faber and Faber direct.
This book will influence my reading going forward.
This book will influence my reading going forward.
March 18, 2021
An obsession with moral clarity muddies any aesthetic radiance.
Mortal sin of failing to like Joyce, of failing to like the late James.
Mortal sin of failing to like Joyce, of failing to like the late James.
October 10, 2021
"Jane Austen, George Eliot, Henry James, Conrad, and D. H. Lawrence: the great tradition of the English novel is there." He focuses on Eliot, James, and Conrad here. In a kind of second tier for Leavis are Emily Bronte (W.H. is "sport"), Hardy (too "clumsy"), Joyce (U.'s structure too analogical, inorganic), Flaubert (more committed to style than "life," French), Dickens (the genius of a great entertainer), among others. Richardson is great, but too "narrow," will never be "revived." People like Burney are important for the way they lead up to a great novelist like Austen. There is a lot that is idiosyncratic, fussy, Anglocentric, etc. about this book, but Leavis's "hostages" are absolutely inescapable and central to the novel tradition.
February 12, 2020
One of the greats
December 25, 2022
Full disclosure; I hadn't read most of the novels criticized by Leavis here. But his style is very old-fashioned and didactic, convoluted and slow to come to a point.
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November 4, 2023A strange one
July 24, 2018
It's hard to admit that I don't agree with everything this great critic has to say - but he draws attention to lesser known titles that deserve it (and explains why, very convincingly), and it's hard to argue with what I don't agree with, because he makes so much sense. The chapters on James and Conrad are, of course, to me the most fascinating, and his insights on The Secret Agent, Nostromo, and fin de siécle James (certain of my favorites that go neglected for the most part). A brilliant mind.
December 20, 2025
What a very long time ago it was when I first came across this most impressive book. Impressive because I was so young and because I’d never read such authoritative comment before. As far as I could judge, Leavis had it all knocked into a cocked hat and no arguing. I think he liked no arguing.
Re-reading Leavis’s work now, I am still impressed and all in all think he did much to guide my understanding and foster a lifelong love of English Lit.
These days though I prefer to get straight into a book and let it make its own case. The preface or introduction, I always leave to the end – a revolutionary approach that will no doubt have the old curmudgeon turning somersaults in his grave.
Re-reading Leavis’s work now, I am still impressed and all in all think he did much to guide my understanding and foster a lifelong love of English Lit.
These days though I prefer to get straight into a book and let it make its own case. The preface or introduction, I always leave to the end – a revolutionary approach that will no doubt have the old curmudgeon turning somersaults in his grave.
March 10, 2012
"The great English novelists are Jane Austen, George Eliot, Henry James, and Joseph Conrad... Since Jane Austen, for special reasons, needs to be studied at considerable length, I confine myself in this book to the last three."
Except, then he never wrote his book about Austen! F.R. Leavis, I needed you to write about Austen. You let me down.
Also, 1940s literary criticism always seems to come from a slightly different planet than the more modern stuff... which I suppose it does, in a way.
Except, then he never wrote his book about Austen! F.R. Leavis, I needed you to write about Austen. You let me down.
Also, 1940s literary criticism always seems to come from a slightly different planet than the more modern stuff... which I suppose it does, in a way.
June 28, 2011
Necessary to read if you want to understand the history of literary criticism in English from Johnson to Michel Foucault. Still, Leavis' canonizing impulses make one suspect his local insights--yet he does have local insights, and a point of view worthy of consideration.
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