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10.2 | 2013
Kay Boyle / Rachel Cusk: (Neo)Modernist Voices
Articles hors thème

Culture and Literary Criticism in the

1930s and '40s.
The Case of F.R. and Q.D. Leavis
Jean-Christophe MURAT
https://doi.org/10.4000/erea.3033

Résumés
Français English
Cet article se propose de réévaluer la place qu'occupent les deux célèbres critiques de
Cambridge F.R. et Q.D. Leavis dans les études littéraires du vingtième siècle, notamment au
cours des décennies 1930 et 1940. Nous examinerons en premier lieu la nature des rapports
institutionnels et intellectuels qu'entretenaient entre eux F.R. et Q.D. Leavis, ainsi qu'avec leurs
aînés ou contemporains éminents du Cambridge des années 1920 et 1930. Nous nous
interrogerons ensuite sur les relations qui lièrent le couple Leavis à l'univers de la presse écrite;
relations complexes, souvent conflictuelles mais jamais rompues, au point qu'il est possible de
se demander si leur programme universitaire ne constitue pas une forme de journalisme
"haut de gamme". L'idée directrice de cette étude reposera sur la distinction, implicite ou
explicite, entre deux formes d'enseignement de la littérature: simple transmission d'un
ensemble de faits, de noms de grands auteurs canoniques et de jugements consensuels d'un
côté; de l'autre, la conviction que cet enseignement devrait transformer notre perception de
l'histoire et de la culture humaines, et déboucher sur une socialité participative. Pour conclure,
cet article s'interrogera sur les raisons pour lesquelles F.R. et Q.D. Leavis ne sont pas parvenus,
loin s'en faut, à réaliser toutes leurs ambitions initiales.

This article offers a revaluation of the position of the two famous Cambridge critics F.R. and
Q.D. Leavis in twentieth-century literary studies, with particular reference to the 1930s and
'40s. It will look first to F.R. and Q.D.'s relations with each other and with other major
Cambridge academics of the 1920s and '30s, before analysing the Leavises' vexed but constant
relationships with the world of the print media, and asking whether they should be regarded as
proper critics, or as mere representatives of a higher form of journalism. All along the
argument will be guided by the implicit - or sometimes explicit - distinction between two
conceptions of culture and criticism: one that simply views the teaching of literature as the
 handing down of a set of dates, canonical names and consensual judgments; the other that
considers that this teaching should exert a decisive influence on one's perception of human
culture and history, and induce a collaborative form of social life. Finally this study will try to
analyse why, in some respects, F.R. and Q.D. Leavis's academic achievements fell short of their
initial ambitions.

Entrées d’index
Mo t s-clés : F.R. Leavis, Q.D. Leavis, Arthur Quiller-Couch, I.A. Richards, T.S. Eliot, Virginia
Woolf, années 1930, années 1940, critique littéraire, littérature anglaise, Cambridge,
middlebrow, tournant anthropologique
Keywo rds: F.R. Leavis, Q.D. Leavis, Arthur Quiller-Couch, I.A. Richards, T.S. Eliot, Virginia
Woolf, 1930s, 1940s, criticism, English literature, Cambridge middlebrow, anthropological
turn

Texte intégral
1 Although most academics and scholars would readily agree that there is no such
thing as a stable literary canon, and that the fame of individual authors and texts may
be subject to considerable reappraisal according to the prevailing tastes of a given
period, the assessment of literary criticism is perhaps a more sensitive field. There is
indeed some irony in the fact that this article should propose to revaluate F.R. and Q.D.
Leavis, i.e. two academic figures who devoted so much time in their lives to the
revaluation of literature and culture - or, to put it like Michael Bell, figures "best
known for [their] radical revaluation of the canon of English literature" (Bell 389).
Although they are both extremely well-known English critics and academics, their
contribution to the redefinition of "culture" in the 1930s, '40s and early '50s needs close
scrutiny – a term that takes of course pride of place in Leavisite studies. Several blind
spots remain about the Leavises, either because, with the benefit of hindsight, it is
tempting to dismiss many of their views as preposterous, or because some of their
methods were never fully defined in their lifetime.
2 My project, therefore, is a revaluation of the Leavises' position in twentieth-century
literary studies that will look first to their relations with each other and with other
major Cambridge academics of the 1920s and '30s, with particular reference to Arthur
Quiller-Couch and I.A. Richards. This will give me the opportunity to analyse the
Leavises' vexed but constant relationships with the world of the print media, and to
ask whether they should be regarded as proper critics, or as mere representatives of a
higher form of journalism. All along my argument will be guided by Terry Eagleton's
Aristotelian distinction between "phronesis" and "theoria", when he wrote in 1998: "For
[F.R. Leavis], literary judgements were a matter of phronesis rather than theoria
because they sprang from what he idealised as a collaborative form of social life."
(Eagleton 50)
3 The purpose of this paper is not to provide an extensive survey of the career and
critical output of the Leavises – they span too many decades and cover too many
fields. I will limit myself instead to the period between 1932 and 1945. 1932 is the year
when Scrutiny was launched, and with it a whole cultural and literary scheme. 1945 is
also a significant date for the Cambridge academy, with the return from the war of
many former students whose initial enthusiasm over the Leavises' educational project
had been somewhat dampened by the realities of the conflict and of post-war
England. Lastly a short development on The Great Tradition (1948) is required, since
the crucial question of Leavis's "morality" is discussed at great length in and through
that book.
4 Frank Raymond (1895-1978) and Queenie Dorothy (1906-1981) Leavis have long
been household names of English literary criticism. Yet the exact nature of their
individual contribution to literary studies is diffi cult to define. I will begin with a few
down-to-earth but hopefully useful biographical remarks. On some occasions
publishing houses make it clear that this essay was written by F.R., and that essay by his
wife.1More often than not however authorship is blurred. F.R. Leavis's biographer Ian
MacKillop shows the profound indebtedness of The Great Tradition to Q.D. Leavis,
whom he believes to have written parts of the book (MacKillop 254-255). Why, then,
despite her husband's offi cial acknowledgements in the paratext,2 doesn't her name
appear on the cover? Similarly Q.D. Leavis contributed quite a few articles and
reviews to Scrutiny, and was largely responsible for the editing, but her name is
nowhere to be found on the journal's masthead.3 Q.D.'s relative invisibility in texts
where her role seems to have been essential, so that one may even wonder whether
Scrutiny and The Great Tradition would have existed at all without her constant
presence, begs the question of the link between women and the Cambridge academy
in the 1930s and '40s. Because she was a woman, Q.D. Leavis could not, like her
husband, become a Cambridge lecturer, use a Cambridge library, or publish an
affi liated journal.4 This distinction between F.R. and Q.D. is fundamental, insofar as the
question as to whether these two critics should be studied together or separately needs
to be posed on an institutional level before anything else. One may suspect at this early
stage of the article that Q.D.'s role is doomed to be marginal, or at least unoffi cially
acknowledged.
5 It has been claimed often enough that F.R. and Q.D. Leavis's views on literature in
general, and on the function of literary criticism in particular, were reactionary and
narrowly elitist. This dismissal is disingenuous if one fails to place their conception of
literature within the broader context of the relationship between academia and the
print media on the one hand, and of the English "anthropological turn" in both
cultural doctrine and literary style in the early decades of the twentieth century on the
other hand.
6 My contention as a starting point is that no one seriously interested in the critical
method of F.R. and Q.D. Leavis can hope to understand its fundamentals if they do not
realise how much it owes to the views and method of two equally famous Cambridge
academics, their senior Arthur Quiller-Couch (1863-1944), and their contemporary I.A.
Richards (1893-1979). In 1919 Quiller-Couch, who was then Fellow of Jesus College and
King Edward VII Professor of English Literature at the U niversity of Cambridge,
published a set of lectures entitled Studies in Literature. Some of those essays turn out
to be relevant to an analysis of the Leavises' approach to criticism. In the opening
essay, "The Commerce of Thought", some of the future characteristic features of F.R.
Leavis's writing may be identified: the outspoken statement about the "absurdities" (3)
of "Professor So-and-So" (1) due to a conception of human history that disregards
plain facts and material realities; the fearless assertion that "in the commerce and
transmission of thought the true carrier is neither the linotype machine, nor the
telegraph [...] but the old, subtle, winding, caressing, omnipresent wind of man's
aspiration." (23) This is exactly the mixture of commonsensical straightforwardness
and idealistic, disinterested praise of human virtues one will find in many of Leavis's
reviews and articles.
7 I.A. Richards, who was only two years Leavis’s senior, was himself educated at
Cambridge, where he became a lecturer as of 1925. His direct influence on the
Leavises may be felt in several ways. In the first place, he was Q.D. Leavis’s Ph.D
director, and it is a fact that, to a large extent, her ground-breaking (if controversial)
Fiction and the Reading Public, the published version of her 1930 thesis, largely
 reflects Richards’s wistful views on the disappearance of small communities and “the
Decline in Speech”. Here is Richards’s text:

For a decline can be noticed in perhaps every department of literature, from the
Epic to the ephemeral Magazine. The most probable reasons for this are the
increased size of our ‘communities’ (if they can still be so called, when there
remains so little in common), and the mixtures of culture that the printed word
has caused. Our everyday reading and speech now handles scraps from a score
of different cultures. [...] More troubling still, our handling of these materials
varies from column to column of the newspaper, descending from the scholar’s
level to the kitchen-maid’s. (Richards 339)

8 Feminists and Marxist sympathisers probably won't relish the fact that Richards
views the handling of the materials across genders and classes as a form of
debasement rather of expansion. Here is how, two years later, Q.D. Leavis puts the
contemporary situation in her own words:

The substitution for village and small-town community of cities composed of

units whose main contact with each other outside the home is in the dance-hall,
the cinema, the theatre, social but not co-operative amusements, has left only
fiction to fill the gap. (Q.D. Leavis 57-58)

9 Taking stock of the situation of the book market in the early decades of the twentieth
century, Q.D. Leavis exposes the radical shortcomings of the two prevailing
approaches to literary studies so far: literary criticism on the one hand (involving for
instance a discussion of Henry James’s and Marcel Proust’s poetics along strictly
literary lines), the scholarly method on the other (as it is reflected by most literary
anthologies and offi cial histories of literature). Highlighting that "there is no indication
that they ever had readers, much less that they played any part in shaping the human
spirit and were shaped by it," she advocates an "anthropological" method of
investigation (Q.D. Leavis xiv; italics mine), which considers shifts in taste and changes
in the socio-cultural background as proper yardsticks for an assessment of the
contemporary world. Q.D. Leavis's so-called "anthropological" method for the
evaluation of literature, of the literary field and of the reading public, both heralds
and differs from the thought-provoking thesis of the American critic Jed Esty in 2004.
In his study entitled A Shrinking Island: Modernism and National Culture in England,
Esty coins the phrase "anthropological turn" in order to describe the discursive
process by which mid-twentieth-century English intellectuals, in particular the late
modernists, translated the end of the British Empire into a resurgent concept of
national culture:

Defined against the assumptions of traditional English literary criticism, the

anthropological turn more or less corresponds to the rise of "culturalism", that is
to an ethnographic and anti-elitist approach to symbolic practices whose classic
institutional form is Birmingham-school Cultural Studies. By tracing the turn
back to the thirties, we can see how canonical English writing of the pre-war
period established key tropes and concepts for the reclamation of England's
cultural integrity and authenticity. (Esty 2)

10 Q.D.'s awareness of the "anthropological turn" is evidenced by the way she situates
the state of the English book market and reading public within a context that facilitates
its ethnographic scrutiny. U nlike Esty though, who considers that the end of
imperialism led to the repair of the social divides that had conditioned high
modernism's aesthetics of failure and fragmentation, Q.D. merely displaces the
fragmentation from the imperial metropolis to a shrinking, but equally alienated
nation of "cities". Her "anthropological" method, which is certainly not "anti-elitist" -
 but the word "elite" is yet to be defined - is therefore applied within a context where
division still prevails, although in different forms:

The purely literary periodicals alone can be divided on internal evidence into
three classes, serving three different levels of reading public, and each would be
of little use to the other’s readers. [...] It will be convenient to call these levels
“highbrow”, “middlebrow” and “lowbrow”. [...] A novel received with
unqualified enthusiasm in a lowbrow paper will be coolly treated by the
middlebrow and contemptuously dismissed if mentioned at all by the highbrow
Press; and the kind of book that the middlebrow Press will admire
wholeheartedly the highbrow reviewer will diagnose as pernicious; each has a
following that forms a different level of public. (Q.D. Leavis 20-21).

11 This division reflects the growth of the print industries in the early twentieth
century, and the parallel creation of high-, low-, and middlebrow niches, each
designed for exclusive readership groups.5The chief problem Q.D. Leavis points out
is the fact that, while the level of literacy is comparatively high in 1930s Britain, most of
the people who subscribe to a circulating library “are prepared to have their
reading determined for them.” (ibid., 6) Her investigation soon leads her to find out
that within a market of forty-three million book buyers and borrowers, “it needs as
vast an organisation as the modern Press to serve as middleman between author and
reader, with its book-reviews, -advertisements and literary articles.” (ibid., 19; italics
mine) In the second issue of Scrutiny, Q.D.’s husband expounds the predicament of
literary criticism in the same characteristically uncomprising terms, saying apropos of
Desmond MacCarthy,6 that he is “not an original critic; he is the journalist-middleman
of cultivated talk” (F.R. Leavis, “What’s Wrong With Criticism?” Scrutiny (Vol. I, n° 2,
Sept. 1932): 134). For both F.R. and Q.D. then, the increasing level of literacy has not
coincided with an improvement in taste. This failure is to be put down to the fact that
the unprecedented expansion of the print media - to be understood here as the
popular press, even if in actual fact middle-class papers like the Times and the
Observer tended to be conservative in their tastes - in 1920s and '30s Britain
"encouraged a mindset in which sales and circulation became essential markers of
value" (Bingham 65).
12 In a recent scholarly article, Adrian Bingham has convincingly shown how the
development of the print media in the early decades of the twentieth century entirely
reshaped book culture in four major ways. First, newspapers acted as guides for the
public by reviewing new books and plays; secondly, they claimed the role of moral
guardian by seeking to protect readers from "indecent" forms of cultural expression;
thirdly, they offered a platform for leading authors to offer contributions on key
issues of the day; lastly, they operated as suppliers of fiction by serialising books
believed to be suitable for their audience (Bingham 56). Bingham's well-documented
article demonstrates to what extent the conservatism of the popular press - The Sunday
Express and The Evening Standard in particular - enforced standards of decency and
decorum, threatening some publishers into withdrawing controversial novels on
charges of obscenity.7 In this light then, Q.D. Leavis's assessment of the print media's
negative influence on serious prose fiction is hardly to be contradicted:

One must be aware that when an editor writes "Nothing heavy, morbid or
neurotic," he is condemning by implication (for the terms are accepted counters
and used for the sake of delicacy) the living tradition of the novel. [...] What it
really means is that the young writer who is potentially a serious novelist and is
obliged to earn part or all of his living by his pen is in a far worse position than
Trollope, Dickens, Thackeray; if he submits and trains himself to produce
acceptable short stories and serials, then he is spoilt for literature. (Q.D. Leavis
27-28)
13 But Adrian Bingham clearly, and explicitly, parts company with Q.D. Leavis in his
global evaluation of the role of the print media, emphasising how Q.D.'s presumption
of cultural decline is mistaken:

One is struck not by [the newspapers'] philistinism but by their commitment to

the world of books. Many lower-middle- and working-class readers with little
knowledge of literature were exposed to reviews of the latest works, the opinions
of leading authors and serializations of notable novels. By paying well for
articles and reviews, moreover, the press enabled many young and upcoming
writers to sustain themselves. (Bingham 65)

14 One could also argue that, symptomatically, neither Q.D. nor F.R. Leavis seemed to
pay any attention to the fact that the serialisation of fiction in the British press did not
necessarily imply that the literature serialised in such a way was inferior in quality to
the one published by prestigious reviews. For example, in 1949 the Evening Standard -
hardly a highbrow newspaper - undertook the serialisation of Tennessee Williams's A
Streetcar Named Desire. This move, no doubt motivated by gain, boosted the sales. Yet
can the commercial aspect of the serialisation of a major work of American drama be
said to detract from its literary quality?
15 The title of F.R. Leavis’s own Ph.D. dissertation was The Relationship of Journalism to
Literature: Studies in the Rise and Earlier Development of the Press in England, which
means that he also had an unflagging interest in the complex connections between
journalism and literature, especially from a sociological angle. But F.R. Leavis was
clearly more interested than his wife in the cultural role of poetry, which also explains
the specific influence of I.A. Richards on his approach to criticism. As of 1925,
Richards, then a Fellow of Magdalene College, brought into the English curriculum an
experimental course which was to provide the basic material for his well-known 1929
book Practical Criticism. In that course, which Leavis himself attended, the students
were required to express their genuine opinions on a seemingly random selection of
poems, whose authorship was not revealed. Richards noticed that, without the help of
authoritative guidelines (authorship, historical context, artistic movement and so on),
the vast majority of his students were totally unable not only to correctly interpret the
interdependence of tone, feeling and intention, but even to understand the literal
meaning of the poems. Richards’s answer to all the stock responses he read shows the
extent, as well as the limits, of Leavis’s indebtedness to him:

This construing [of the meaning of poetry] is not nearly so easy and “natural” a
performance as we tend to assume. It is a craft, in the sense that mathematics,
cooking, and shoemaking are crafts. It can be taught. [...] At present, [...] no
attempt at imparting a reasoned general technique for construing has yet been
made. If we wish for a population easy to control by suggestion we shall decide
what repertory of suggestions it shall be susceptible to and encourage this
tendency except in the few. But if we wish for a high and diffused civilisation,
with its attendant risks, we shall combat this form of mental inertia. (Richards
312-314; italics mine)

16 The two men believe in the teaching of literature rather than in a dilettante
conception that they both despise. Yet Richards was a precursor of the New Criticism,
and his wish to teach criticism like a "craft" announces Cleanth Brooks's famous
definition of poetry - and of its interpretation - as a "well-wrought urn".8 The
difference between Leavis and Richards lies in the fact that, while Richards judges
context and "background" to be detrimental to a formal analysis whereby the poetic
object is to reveal its full coherence and artistry, F.R. Leavis - like his wife - claims that
the study of literature is not separable from a global "anthropological" method.
17 Even though he never failed to pay tribute to his other mentor T.S. Eliot, whose
theories largely inform the critical framework of Scrutiny,9 Leavis waited until the
 winter of 1943 before expounding at great length his Eliotic views on literature in an
essay entitled “Literature and Society”. This essay, largely made up of the
reconstructed notes of an address to the Students’ U nion of the London School of
Economics, defines the position of Scrutiny in relation to the Romantic tradition of the
individual genius, which it rejects, and to Eliot’s idea of tradition, whose tenets it
appears to support and revive:

Something like the idea of Tradition so incisively and provocatively formulated

by him plays, I think, an essential part in the thinking of everyone to-day who is
seriously interested in literature. [...] A literature, that is, must be thought of as
essentially something more than an accumulation of separate works: it has an
organic form, or constitutes an organic order, in relation to which the
individual writer has his significance and being. (F.R. Leavis, "Literature and
Society", Scrutiny (Winter 1943, Vol. XII, n° 1): 3)

18 This is, almost word for word, the argument of Eliot’s famous piece "Tradition and
the Individual Talent", in which he claims:

Tradition [...] involves, in the first place, the historical sense, which we may call
nearly indispensable to anyone who would continue to be a poet beyond his
twenty-fifth year; and the historical sense involves a perception, not only of the
pastness of the past, but of its presence; the historical sense compels a man to
write not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling that
the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer and within it the whole of the
literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence and composes a
simultaneous order. (T.S. Eliot 38)

19 On closer examination however, the resemblance between Leavis and Eliot turns out
to be more superficial than real. Although both men perceive the development of
English studies as a response to a cultural crisis, and probably too as a "rearguard
action against 'mass civilisation'" (Gervais 133), Eliot and Leavis part company on
major points: Eliot is a right-wing modernist, cosmopolitan and Europe-oriented,
whereas Leavis's allegiance is to English provincial life. In "East Coker", Eliot seems to
ignore the mundane drudgery of peasant life; only the voice of his sixteenth-century
ancestor Sir Thomas Elyot is to be heard. Eliot's aristocratic Anglo-Catholicism holds
little appeal for Leavis, whose sympathies are clearly for another, non-middle-class
England.10
20 The organicism of Leavis's "tradition" is not depicted as a seamless, consensual
whole. In order to grasp the historical premise and the pedagogical purpose of his
definition of culture, one should bear in mind that the English seventeenth century
occupies centre stage in his "anthropology". In "Literature and Society", Leavis
analyses the fundamental difference between the seventeenth and the eighteenth
century to the effect that, while the age of Bunyan exemplifies "a real culture of the
people", the Augustan age involves "a separation, new and abrupt, between
sophisticated culture and popular." ("Literature and Society", 6-7) The Pilgrim’s
Progress may therefore be read as a masterpiece whose style "concentrates and
intensifies the life of popular idiom." (ibid., 8) Behind the book, the palpable presence
of a genuine social culture and art of living may be felt. On the contrary, through "the
exclusive, or insulating, effi cacy of the politeness of Augustan verse," of which
Alexander Pope is a typical exemplar, "sophisticated culture cuts itself off from the
traditional culture of the people." (ibid., 10) By the end of the eighteenth century,
culture has taken a wrong turn and forked into rival paths which might as well be
called dead-ends: William Blake, whose poetry has nothing Augustan about it but has
no readers, and William Wordsworth, whose much-proclaimed interest in humble
and rustic life is in fact "external to the world to which he himself belongs, and very
remote from it." (ibid., 10)
 The reaction that Wordsworth represents against the Augustan century doesn’t
mean any movement towards re-establishing the old organic relations between
literary culture and the sources of vitality in the general life. By Wordsworth’s
death, the Industrial Revolution had done its work, and the traditional culture of
the people was no longer there, except vestigially. (ibid., 10)

21 U nder the circumstances, the substitution of a Book Club culture and of a cultural
industry controlled by Big Business - to take up Q.D.'s own words - requires that the
university should have a new role: that of reversing this predicament.

What one has to suggest in general by way of urging on students of politics and
society the claims of literary studies [...] to be regarded as relevant and
important is that thinking about political and social matters ought to be done by
minds of some real literary education, and done in an intellectual climate
informed by a vital literary culture. (ibid., 11)

22 This task began in fact with the creation of Scrutiny in the spring of 1932.
Throughout its existence (1932-1953), this journal11 always had diffi cult relationships
with institutions in general, and the Cambridge world in particular. The first issue
published a manifesto in order to explain the function of the journal, and to underline
the close connection between Scrutiny’s contents and the kind of training the new
Cambridge students would ideally receive.

The reader will have gathered by now that Scrutiny is not to be a purely literary
review. But what exactly, he may wonder, is meant by that hint of a generous
interest in “modern affairs” at large? There are politics, for instance. Well, a
devotion to them at the party level is, no doubt, somewhere necessary. But
something else is necessary – and prior: a play of the free intelligence upon the
underlying issues. This is to desiderate a cultivated historical sense, a familiarity
with the ‘anthropological’ approach to contemporary civilization [...], and a
catholic apprehension of the humane values. (F.R. Leavis, "Scrutiny: A
Manifesto", Scrutiny (May 1932, Vol. 1, N° 1): 3)

23 This passage contains certain terms which, transparent or self-evident as they may
seem, are problematic: "the free intelligence" (or elsewhere, and repeatedly,
"sensibility"), "the humane values", as well as the uncapitalised adjective "catholic",
meaning universal and versatile. The other point to make concerns the status of
Scrutiny as a cultural medium. Leavis is of course careful to reject an openly elitist
conception whereby his review might be perceived as the mouthpiece of a clique of
snooty highbrows. He emphasises its educational function instead.

The first duty is to publish good criticism judiciously directed. And inseparable
from this is a conscious critical policy, if anything is to be effected in the present
state of culture. For to-day there are anti-highbrow publics and "modernist"
publics, but there is no public of Common Readers with whom the critic can
rejoice to concur. (ibid., 4)

24 To what extent can the desire to address "Common Readers" be taken for granted,
and what does this notion mean exactly? As Michael Bell points out, "[Scrutiny's] ideal
Cambridge became increasingly isolated from the actual university" (Bell 390). In his
first-rate biography of F.R Leavis, Ian MacKillop rather mischievously points out that
Scrutiny fell short of its ambition to match the audiences of such journals as Eliot’s
Criterion in Britain or the Symposium in America, and had to fall back on an average
readership of rather "practical" intellectuals, for example schoolteachers in need of
concrete pedagogical advice (MacKillop 207-208). The profile of Leavis’s "Common
Reader", at any rate, is a far cry from the average reader "responding to the demand
for culture in organized, manageable parcels" (Shelley Rubin xii). But a major irony is
to be found here: while Leavis has in mind an enlightened readership endowed with
 enough energy to revive the function of literary culture, he is also taking up the title of
a 1925 collection of essays by Virginia Woolf – Woolf, the Leavises’ lifelong enemy,
whose perception of reality as "moments of being" runs counter to their view that
literature is first and foremost a social structure. Woolf’s common reader, as she
understands Dr Johnson’s definition, "reads for his own pleasure rather than to impart
knowledge or correct the opinions of others" (Virginia Woolf, "The Common Reader",
1). Leavis despises what he regards as the belletrism of Bloomsbury. Woolf’s position
on the relationship between high-, low- and middlebrow culture is of course easier to
attack than that of the Leavises. The main flaw in her argument is that, although she was
a fierce opponent of middlebrow culture, she was, contrary to them, a defender of
popular fiction and of lowbrow entertainements. Her essay "Middlebrow" (1920)
idealises Britain’s working class in a most ambiguous way:

These lowbrows are waiting, after the day’s work, in the rain, sometimes for
hours, to get into the cheap seats and sit in hot theatres in order to see what their
lives look like. Since they are lowbrows, engaged magnificently and
adventurously in riding full tilt from one end of life to the other in pursuit of a
living, they cannot see themselves doing it… It is one of the prime necessities of
life to them—to be shown what life looks like. And the highbrows, of course, are
the only people who can show them. (Woolf, "Middlebrow", in The Death of the
Moth and Other Essays, 1942)

25 The tone is rather patronising here, Woolf being convinced that it is the highbrows'
responsibility to accomplish their "educational mission" with the lower classes; on the
other hand, she savagely exposes the thinly disguised commercial purposes of the
middlebrow industry, whose chief representatives she perceives to be the Book Clubs
of course, but also the BBC – derisively dubbed the "Betwixt and Between Company".
Yet her contempt for the BBC doesn’t stop her from using this media when it suits her.
In a July 1927 radio debate with her husband Leonard, Virginia famously supported
omnivorous reading even of the most light and frivolous fiction, believing that an
impetus for knowledge may start at the most basic level. To her disgruntled husband,
lamenting the quick disappearance of hand-made books, she retorted:

Books ought to be so cheap that we can throw them away if we do not like them,
or give them away if we do. Moreover, it is absurd to print every book as if it
were fated to last a hundred years. The life of the average book is perhaps three
months. Why not face this fact? Why not print the first edition on some
perishable material which would crumble to a little heap of perfectly clean dust
in about six months time? If a second edition were needed, this could be printed
on good paper and well bound. Thus by far the greater number of books would
die a natural death in three months or so. No space would be wasted and no dirt
would be collected.
(Woolf, BBC Radio Debate, 15 July 1927)

26 Judging from these two quotations, one might be tempted to conclude that while
Woolf's views are patronising and quirky, the Leavises are far more consistent and
their own views are poles apart from hers. Far from condoning the lowbrows' need
for light fiction and innocuous movies on the grounds that even the cheapest forms of
entertainment can foster critical thinking, they both adamantly maintain that in mass
civilisation only minority culture is possible.12 This said, the gap between Virginia
Woolf's and the Leavises' lines of thought is not as wide as one might believe. Woolf's
description of the "lowbrows" patiently waiting in the rain to get into theatres may be
patronising, as is her call for the "highbrows" to show these poor benighted creatures
the right way; but so is Q.D.'s claim about minority culture. Even more disturbingly, so
does F.R.'s obsessive idealisation of the seventeenth-century "organic community"
seem to be, as we shall now see.
27 The educational blueprint that F.R. Leavis had in mind for his "English School" may
be analysed through the study of three articles published in Scrutiny between
September 1940 and March 1941, all under the title "Education and the U niversity",
but each addressing the issue from a certain angle: "Sketch for an English School",
"Criticism and Comment", "Literary Studies". Interestingly, these articles bear the fruit
of the long campaign for educational reform that led to the Education Act of 1944. As
Michael Bell aptly suggests, Leavis's proposals were to be embodied in the new
generation of red-brick universities in the 1950s and '60s (Bell 392). Article number
one offers a long critical survey of the unsatisfactory state of English studies in British
universities, with special reference to Cambridge, explaining in what way the
"educational possibilities of the literary-critical discipline" should be reformed. The
chief diffi culty of Leavis’s argument has to do with the fact that, while he describes the
introduction of external subjects like linguistics, philology and semiology into the
curriculum as "Ersatz" subjects (F.R. Leavis, "Sketch for and English School", Scrutiny
(Vol. IX, n° 3, Dec. 1940): 98), he nevertheless supports a "comprehensive" course of
study, one that "would be a study in concrete terms of the relations between the
economic, the political, the moral, the spiritual, religion, art and literature" (ibid., 107).
The other ambiguity has to do with the type of audience13 the reformed English school
would address: "For the reformed Part II [of the English Tripos at Cambridge14] – this
would be a condition of its influence and importance – would be essentially designed
for an élite" (ibid., 103). Concretely, Leavis explains that part I of the Tripos would
undergo no changes – a vast survey course of English literature from Chaucer to the
present day. Part II, on the contrary, would bring all the advanced undergraduate
students' capacities into play, and its principles would be largely indebted to I.A.
Richards’ Practical Criticism, on at least two scores: the focus on the close reading of
texts from one particular period, rather than an extensive reading course which
ultimately leaves most students unprepared for proper critical judgement; the firm
belief – and this is perhaps Leavis and Richards’s greatest joint contribution to the
transmission of culture in the 1930s and '40s– that culture, despite appearances to the
contrary, is not the preserve of a natural-born élite. More precisely, an élite of some
kind should finally emerge, but it would be the outcome of a demanding training
scheme. The themes students would be allowed to choose for their extended pieces of
writing are not strictly literary, but range from "the rise of Capitalism" through "the
causes of the Civil War" to "the changing relations between sophisticated and popular
culture". Review-writing would be a further requirement. As a matter of fact, the work
of the students of Downing College, where Leavis taught, often flowed into Scrutiny.
Boris Ford for example, who was to become editor of the Pelican Guide to English
Literature (1957), wrote an essay on Wuthering Heights as an undergraduate student
in 1935; that essay was published in Scrutiny in March 1939.
28 One can easily understand now what Terry Eagleton had in mind when he wrote in
1998 that "literary judgements were a matter of phronesis rather than theoria" for F.R.
Leavis (Eagleton 50). This passing reference to Aristotle's Nichomachean Ethics is
fundamental, because "phronesis" has mostly to do with how to bring about change in
the world, whereas "sophia" is synonymous with theoretical wisdom. In other words
the study of literature may be "catholic" (emphasis mine) and "disinterested", but its
function is redemptive. Its proper understanding should save one from the alienating
effects of mass culture. One strong objection to the Leavises' educational blueprint is
that "their radical vision was hard to institutionalise" (Bell 391). The Leavises'
"anthropological" method is apparently aware of the "anthropological turn", yet - as
Jed Esty himself underlines - the redemptive task of the study of literature implicitly
appears as a losing battle:
 Leavis and his house journal Scrutiny stood for the redemption of a corrupt
world by heroic literary individuals. [...] It is hard to overestimate Leavis's
importance to the literary culture of midcentury England, especially since he
was both a champion of native English writing and a liberal defender of what
he called "minority culture": an antagonist, then, of both cosmopolitan
modernism and a degraded "mass civilization." Leavis's defense of great
literature takes place in the context of a belief in England's more or less
irreversible (and more or less generically modern) decline. (Esty 184 & 222)

29 Logically enough, Leavis and his wife did not become instantly famous, and their
ideas, far from meeting with the approval of the whole academic community, earned
them the antagonism of a good many of their well-established colleagues. That Leavis
was not appointed full-time lecturer before the age of fifty-two and never became a
professor, despite publishing a dozen books and over one hundred articles, is proof
that the response to his educational project from those who pulled the strings was one
of hostility. In point of fact, Leavis never shied away from criticism. Article number
two on "Education and the U niversity", published in Scrutiny in December 1940, is
entitled "Criticism and Comment", because Leavis quotes at great length adverse
reactions from those who read his “Sketch for an English School”. One of those
readers blames Leavis for ignoring the realities of the war and concentrating instead
on the long-range effects of an education in which the people whose business it is to
run society on a day-to-day basis – Cabinet ministers, business magnates, higher civil
servants and so on – cannot take part. Leavis does not deny the charge that, when the
Blitzkrieg rages and Britain’s future is at stake, his own preoccupations with an English
School may seem "irrelevant" (F.R. Leavis, "Criticism and Comment", Scrutiny (Vol. IX,
n° 3, Dec. 1940): 263). Yet he maintains that a course of "humane studies", which he
promotes, is not designed to deal with emergencies of that kind. Coming back to the
English Tripos, which in their current form merely promote a middlebrow
conception of culture, he declares:

The English Tripos as things are tend to foster a glib superficiality, a "literary
culture" too like that of those milieux in which literary fashions are the social
currency – milieux of which the frequenters cultivate quickness in the uptake,
knowingness about the latest market-quotations and an impressive range of
reference, all at the expense of real intelligence and disinterested understanding
(or interest in anything but kudos). (ibid., 263)

30 Leavis is brave enough to face the charges, but somewhat at pains to dispel
suspicions that the course of studies he advertises is not meant for a natural élite. In my
own case I must confess that it was the reading of I.A. Richards’s Practical Criticism,
rather than of Leavis’s own books and articles, that made me understand what Leavis
really had in mind.
31 The third article on "Education and the U niversity", entitled "Literary Studies"
(Scrutiny, March 1941), is a long and stunning illustration of what Leavis means by "the
training of perception, judgment and analytic skill" (F.R. Leavis, "Literary Studies",
Scrutiny (Vol. IX, n° 4, March 1941): 308). Leavis convincingly demolishes "To
Shakespeare", a contrived, rhetorical sonnet by Matthew Arnold, and pits it against an
excerpt from Macbeth, Act I, scene 7.
32 The concept of "morality" has always taken centre stage in Leavisite studies, so that
this rather hazy word has come to cling to their definition of criticism. The
responsibility for a misleading use of "morality" is chiefly Leavis’s own. His concern
for a "moral" conception of literature and culture is a constant preoccupation of the
book that was to become his best-known critical achievement, The Great Tradition,
published in 1948 but some chapters of which had been written as early as 1937. The
 arch-famous opening paragraph apparently sets the tone for the whole study, but only
makes sense if quoted at length:

It passes as fact (in spite of the printed evidence) that I pronounce Milton
negligible, dismiss "the Romantics", and hold that, since Donne, there is no poet
we need bother about except Hopkins and Eliot. The view, I suppose, will be as
confidently attributed to me that, except Jane Austen, George Eliot, James, and
Conrad, there are no novelists in English worth reading. (F.R. Leavis, The Great
Tradition, 1948. Harmondsworth, 1986, 9)

33 The segments that really matter in these two sentences are "It passes as fact [...] that",
and "The view [...] will be as confidently attributed to me that..." Although these lines
were written in 1948, to this day, Leavis is often perceived as an overbearing,
castrating literary figure whose sole enjoyment in life was to eliminate dozens of poets
and novelists from the canon according to criteria that remain partly arbitrary. It
would be fairly easy for example to come to his rescue by objecting that Milton was
never "negligible" to him, and that in 1938 he published a review in Scrutiny entitled
"In Defence of Milton". The force Milton had to be defended against was "the
academic mind" and the spirit of barren scholarship embodied by Leavis’s old enemy
E.M.W. Tillyard (Scrutiny Vol. VII, n° 1, 1938, "In Defence of Milton" 32, repr. The
Common Pursuit). What Leavis did blame Milton for was this: "Milton invented a
medium the distinction of which is to have denied itself the life of the living language,"
in contrast to such poets and dramatists as Shakespeare, Donne, Ben Jonson and
Marvell, who all have "a vital relation to speech, to the living language of the time."
(ibid., 42) This remark is now leading us to the heart of the matter: "morality", for
Leavis, has nothing to do with decorum or decency (if that were so why should he
have spent thirty years of his life defending D.H. Lawrence’s banned Lady Chatterley’s
Lover?); it has to do with a notion which informs The Great Tradition and yet,
ironically enough, is never fully explicated: "a vital capacity for experience, a kind of
reverent openness before life, and a marked moral intensity." (Leavis, The Great
Tradition, 18) This life-force, which inhabits the spirit of Jane Austen’s and George
Eliot’s novels, is first and foremost a "preoccupation with form", one that runs counter
to the formal and stylistic concerns of Flaubert for instance (ibid., 17-18). While in
Austen and Eliot the form of their novels stems from their moral, social and –in George
Eliot’s case – religious preoccupations, a novel like Madame Bovary strikes us for "the
discrepancy between the technical ('aesthetic') intensity, with the implied attribution
of interest to the subject, and the actual moral and human paucity of this subject on any
mature valuation." (ibid., 22)
34 The form of a novel (or poem) is deemed to be organic every time it is the
expression of a voice that stands up for life within a community. Such a voice need not
be consensual. As a matter of fact it is often confrontational and rebellious;15 D.H.
Lawrence’s novels are proof of that. But it loses its organicity whenever it cuts itself off
from all forms of collaborative action and takes refuge in futile disenchantment, as in
the case of Flaubert.
35 More than sixty years after The Great Tradition, and sixty years after the demise of
Scrutiny, what is left of the Leavises’ cultural legacy? F.R. Leavis himself did not wait so
long to offer an assessment of his own contribution to the redefinition of culture. In
October 1966 he gave a lecture at Cornell and Harvard U niversity,16 within the
context of the huge controversy roused by his ferocious attack17 on C.P. Snow’s essay
entitled The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution (1959). His purpose was to
demolish Snow’s argument once and for all by driving home the idea that the binary
opposition between "scientific culture" and "literary culture" is harmful to both:
 What Snow proposes to condemn the scientist to when he points to the really
educated man as combining the "two cultures", what he condemns the scientist
to for his cultural needs [...] is the culture of the New Statesman and the Sunday
papers, which is what Snow’s "literary intellectual" actually represents. (F.R.
Leavis, "Luddites? Or There is Only One Culture", in Lectures in America, 14-15)

36 In a sense one can say that the loop is looped, or that the intellectual and ideological
continuity between F.R. and Q.D. – the author of Fiction and the Reading Public thirty-
four years earlier – is now almost seamless. Each has their favourite field of study,
despite crossovers and cross-border incursions, but the chief common denominators
are: a deep-seated contempt for middlebrow culture and the commodification of
literary culture – it will be obvious by now, as I hope, that their views on
"middlebrow" were biased and reductive, and failed to embrace its more socially
inclusive and ethically positive revaluation by some of their own contemporaries18 -
and their belief that, even in its most uncompromisingly highbrow form, literature
"must speak for life and growth, amid all this mass of destruction and disintegration",
instead of "'doing dirt' on life" (The Great Tradition, 38); and lastly:

If literature [...] matters, [...] there should be a public intelligently responsive and
decisively influential. It is through such a public, and through the conditions of
general education implied in the existence of such a public, that literature, as the
critic is concerned with it, can reasonably be thought of as influencing
contemporary affairs and telling in realms in which literary critics are not
commonly supposed to count for much. (F.R. Leavis, "The Responsible Critic, or
the Function of Criticism at Any Time", Scrutiny (Vol. XIX, n° 3, Spring 1953):
178-179; italics mine)

37 The implicit - or possibly unconscious? - reference to Nichomachean Ethics, and to

Aristotle's distinction between "phronesis" (the stress on the "influential" role of
literary studies) and "sophia", is one that has already been pointed out in this study. But
one may try to explain in different terms why the redemptive - "phronetic" - function
of literary criticism was doomed to fail for the Leavises' English School. In 1963 the
poet Stephen Spender savaged the "great tradition" advocated by F.R. Leavis in the
following terms: "It is vulgar and wrong, though perhaps high-minded, to think that
the tradition can be encarcased in the Hundred Best Books, a six-foot shelf, or the
approved works of the Great Tradition" (Spender 232). Spender's major charge was
that since the 1920s and the great works of high modernism, the meaning and scope of
tradition had been narrowing to the point of becoming synonymous with a form of
conservative and ultimately stultifying Englishness. That Spender is targeting the
Leavises is unmistakable in the following passage:

The revolutionary traditionalists were eclectic, drawing on the whole European

Hellenic and biblical culture, and sometimes going still further afield to the art
and literature of China and other parts of Asia, to Buddhism and well as
Christianity. The neo-traditionalists narrowed down their interest in the past to
the channels of tradition they regarded as available for conversion into critical
dogma, determining the tastes of students of English literature (Spender 225-
226; italics mine).

38 I wish to conclude this open-ended debate on the Leavises with a double question:
should their approach to literature be dismissed as a case study in universalism,
essentialism and middle-class individualism, as a good many of their successors in the
late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries have done? Shouldn't one keep in mind
that their views on the function of literary criticism were also "in its day of course a
full-blooded revolutionary doctrine, at the sound of whose now-modishly discarded
beliefs [...] the ancien [sic.] régimes looked nervously to their armies" (Eagleton 50)?
My contention is that, despite its long-lasting influence, the "English School" F.R. Leavis
tried to establish never was in a secure position - it never won over the Cambridge
academics who really mattered in the academy; as a Cambridge institution prior to
the 1980s it could not admit the one person - his wife - who would have prevented F.R.
from sounding like a lonely voice raving in the wilderness; last but not least, one of the
chief reasons why the Leavises are often remembered as cultural snobs is because
"middlebrow" culture (or what they took it to be) was the one culture they consistently
but unfairly wouldn't transmit. Here is a lesson they - and their contemporary I.A.
Richards for that matter - could learn posthumously: the middlebrow, like highbrow
literature, can be taught.19

Bibliographie
Bell, Michael. "F.R. Leavis". Walton Litz, Arthur, L. Menand & L. Rainey (eds). The Cambridge
History of Literary Criticism. Vol. VII (Modernism and the New Criticism). Cambridge: C.U.P.,
2000, 389-422.
Bingham, Adrian. "Cultural Hierarchies and the Interwar British Press." Erica Brown & Mary
Grover (eds). Middlebrow Literary Cultures: the Battle of the Brows, 1920-1960. London:
Palgrave, 2012, 55-68.
Brooks, Cleanth. The Well-Wrought Urn. Studies in the Structure of Poetry. 1947. New York:
Harcourt Brace, 1970.
Brown, Erica & Mary Grover (eds). Middlebrow Literary Cultures: the Battle of the Brows,
1920-1960. London: Palgrave, 2012.
Eagleton, Terry. "Revaluations: F.R. Leavis", The European English Messenger (VII / 2, 1998):
49-51.
Eliot, T.S. "Tradition and the Individual Talent". 1919. Selected Prose (ed. F. Kermode).
London: Faber & Faber, 1975, 37-44.
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Galligani Casey, Janet. "Middlebrow Reading and Undergraduate Teaching: The Place of the
Middlebrow in the Academy". E. Brown & M. Grover (eds). Middlebrow Literary Cultures, 25-
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——. "A Manifesto", Scrutiny (Vol. I, N° 1, May 1932): 3-620.
——. "What’s Wrong With Criticism?" Scrutiny (Vol. I, N° 2, Sept. 1932): 132-146.
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VII, N° 1, 1938): 104-114.
——. "Education and the University: Sketch for an English School", Scrutiny (Vol. IX, n° 2, Sept.
1940): 98-119.
——. "Education and the University (II): Criticism and Comment", Scrutiny (Vol. IX, n° 3, Dec.
1940): 259-269.
——. "Education and the University (III): Literary Studies", Scrutiny (Vol. IX, n° 4, March
1941): 306-322.
——. "Literature and Society", Scrutiny (Vol. XII, N° 1, Winter 1943): 2-11.
——. The Great Tradition. 1948. Harmondsworth: Peregrine Books, 1986.
——. The Common Pursuit. 1952. Harmondsworth: Peregrine Books, 1962.
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——. "Luddites? Or There is Only One Culture". 1966. F.R. & Q.D. Leavis. Lectures in America.
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Kegan Paul, 1956.
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Fort Washington, Pa: Harvest Book, 1984.

Notes
1 A late instance of this is to be found in their joint collection Lectures in America (1969), in
which three of the four essays are signed by F.R. Leavis and one by Q.D. Leavis.
2 "My sense of my immeasurable indebtedness, in every page of this book, to my wife cannot
be adequately expressed..."
3 The names on Scrutiny's masthead were: D.W. Harding, L.C. Knights, F.R. Leavis, Denys
Thompson, then D.W. Harding, L.C. Knights, F.R. Leavis, and finally L.C. Knights, F.R. Leavis,
H.A. Mason.
4 Downing College, where F.R. Leavis spent his whole career, did not admit women until 1978.
Magdalene College, where I.A. Richards taught, was the last Oxbridge College to admit women
in 1988.
5 See Ian MacKillop, F.R. Leavis: a Life in Criticism, 70-71.
6 Desmond MacCarthy became reviewer for the Sunday Times after the death of Sir Edmund
Gosse in 1928.
7 Bingham gives the example of James Douglas's denunciation of Radclyffe Hall's novel The
Well of Loneliness in the Sunday Express of 19 August 1928. Douglas's charges against the
novel were "sexual inversion and perversion". His review caused the publisher Jonathan Cape
to withdraw the book three days later (Bingham 59-60).
8 Cleanth Brooks. The Well-Wrought Urn. Studies in the Structure of Poetry. 1947.
9 The twofold indebtedness of Scrutiny to Richards and Eliot is explicitly acknowledged in
"What’s Wrong With Criticism?" published by Leavis in the Scrutiny issue of September 1932
(Leavis 132).
10 For this development on Eliot and Leavis I have relied heavily on David Gervais's chapter
"Contending Englands: F.R. Leavis and T.S. Eliot" in Literary Englands. Versions of
"Englishness" in Modern Writing.
11 Is Scrutiny a journal, a review or a magazine? While the first term seems to address a
readership of handpicked specialists, "magazine" involves a definitely middlebrow conception
of literary culture. That it probably why, in the Manifesto of 1932, the editors referred to
Scrutiny as a "review", even though its function does not limit itself to book-reviewing.
12 F.R. Leavis for instance stated wistfully that Arnold Bennett, who wrote reviews for the
Evening Standard from 1926 to 1931, was "the most powerful maker of literary reputations in
England." (Mass Civilisation and Minority Culture 14). For Q.D., see Fiction and the Reading
Public: "The critical minority to whole sole charge modern literature has now fallen is isolated,
disowned by the general public and threatened with extinction." (35)
13 Once again, one must keep in mind that women were by no means allowed to study at
Cambridge in the 1930s, and that F.R. Leavis addresses an all-male audience.
14 A Tripos is divided into two parts: Part I, which is broadly based, and Part II, which allows
specialization within the student's chosen field. Since a bachelor's degree usually takes three
years to complete, either Part I or Part II lasts two years, and the other one year.
15 The view that Jane Austen is everything except a gentle, consensual novelist catering for a
harmless audience of cultivated ladies was famously maintained by D.W. Harding, one of
Scrutiny’s original three editors, in his "Regulated Hatred: An Aspect of the Work of Jane
Austen", published in Scrutiny (Vol. VIII, N° 4, 1940): 346-362.
16 F.R. Leavis, "Luddites? There is Only One Culture", F.R. & Q.D. Leavis, Lectures in America
(1969).
17 F.R. Leavis, Two Cultures? The Significance of C.P. Snow (1962).
18 See J.B. Priestley's famous article "High, Low, Broad", published in the Saturday Review of
February 1926. In that article, Priestley, instead of looking down on middlebrow people,
praises an ideal "broadbrow" (Priestley's way of naming the middlebrow) citizen who,
removed from the sectarian, fashion-dependent highbrows and lowbrows, is praised as a
thinking individual capable of using his own democratic judgment (Priestley 165).
19 For a convincing argument on the legitimate place of the middlebrow in academic
curricula, see Janet Galligani Casey's article "Middlebrow Reading and Undergraduate
Teaching: The Place of the Middlebrow in the Academy". E. Brown & M. Grover (eds),
Middlebrow Literary Cultures, 25-36.
20 My university library owns the entire Scrutiny collection, which means that I have been
lucky enough to have first-hand access to the volumes.

Pour citer cet article

Référence électronique
Jean-Christophe MURAT, « Culture and Literary Criticism in the 1930s and '40s.
T he Case of F.R. and Q.D. Leavis », e-Rea [En ligne], 10.2 | 2013, mis en ligne le 18 juin 2013,
consulté le 23 avril 2024. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/erea/3033 ; DOI :
https://doi.org/10.4000/erea.3033

Auteur
Jean-Christ o phe MURAT
Aix-Marseille Université, LERMA
Agrégé d'Anglais et ancien élève de l'Ecole normale supérieure de Fontenay Saint-Cloud, Jean-
Christophe Murat est Maître de Conférences à l'Université d'Aix-Marseille, où il enseigne la
littérature britannique et la traduction. Il est l'auteur de nombreux articles sur la fiction britannique
du vingtième siècle, ainsi que sur la littérature et l'histoire culturelle des années 1940. Il prépare
actuellement une monographie sur le romancier Angus Wilson.

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intégral]
Paru dans e-Rea, 6.1 | 2008
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