Talk:F. R. Leavis
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The article may be improved by following the WikiProject Biography 11 easy steps to producing at least a B article. --KenWalker | Talk 04:28, 6 July 2007 (UTC)
This entry needs rewriting from a NPOV. In places it reads more like a hagiography than an objective treatment of its subject. Leavis set himself up as a cultural enforcer, a sorter of the sheep from the goats, a Witchfinder General of lit. crit. Unfortunately for him, his grasp did not match his reach and, except to a cadre of disciples (known as Leavisites), he became to the greater literary world little more than a figure of fun. Leavis (as Simon Lacerous) and "Scrutiny" (as "Thumbscrew") were satirized by Frederick C. Crews in the chapter "Another Book to Cross off your List" of his amusing lampoon of lit. crit. theory "The Pooh Perplex A Student Casebook" (Barker, London, 1963, ISBN 0213171988).
The following comment contributed by Gina L. Serman Reid: A.S. Byatt lampooned F.R. Leavis in her novel "Possession": "Leavis did to Blackadder [a fictional character of Byatt's] what he did to serious students: he showed him the terrible, the magnificent importance and urgency of English literature and simultaneously deprived him of any confidence in his own capacity to contribute to or change it." ("Possession", First International Vintage Edition, October 1991, Copyright 1990 by A.S. Byatt, pg. 32, 2nd para.)
