The Common Pursuit (Penguin Literary Criticism S.) - Softcover

Leavis, F. R.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0140179747 ISBN 13: 9780140179743

Publisher: Penguin, 1993

Synopsis

In "Revaluation", "The Great Tradition" and "New Bearings in English Poetry", F.R. Leavis revolutionized the way we think about central figures in English literature. This companion volume assembles many of his finest essays. Along with famous pieces on Swift and Shakespeare, Dr Johnson and Henry James, Hopkins, Forster and T.S. Eliot, it is here that Leavis offers some of his most considered reflections on how literature should - and should not - be approached. He shows how major works are "capable of ministering to life" and why criticism can help release their potential. Not everybody will agree with his objections to Auden and Milton or his unequivocal celebration of D.H. Lawrence, yet they provide the benchmark against which other readers can react.

About this title

About the Author:

F.R. Leavis was born in 1895 in Cambridge, where he would live and teach for most of the rest of his life. He volunteered as a stretcher-bearer in the First World War, and was badly gassed on the Western Front. Appointed Director of Studies in English at Downing College, Cambridge, in 1930, he remained there for the next thirty years, often at odds with the University establishment. In 1932 he and his wife Queenie Roth founded the hugely influential journal Scrutiny, which ran until 1953. He was one of the most important figures in the development of modern literary criticism, and in the elevation of English as a serious academic subject. He died in 1978.

About this edition

• Publisher: Penguin
• Publication date: 1993
• ISBN 10: 0140179747
• ISBN 13: 9780140179743
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 320