Leavis, Frank Raymond (1895—1978) English literary critic, leading exponent of Practical Criticism. It is impossible to overestimate Leavis’s influence as a literary critic. In ‘The Rise of English’ (chapter one of Literary Theory: An Introduction, 1983), Eagleton, Terry goes so far as to say we are all Leavisites, in the same way as we are all Copernicans, because we all operate in the wake of the revolution in how literature is viewed that he inaugurated. Leavis was born and educated in Cambridge, where his father ran a music shop, selling pianos and other instruments. World War I broke out when Leavis was 19, but unlike millions of his countryman he objected to the war. So rather than enlist in the infantry to fight he joined the Friends Ambulance Unit, which was anything but a ‘soft’ option. Indeed, he was gassed during the war and suffered permanent effects. He commenced his university studies in 1919, initially in history, but switching to English Literature in his second year. He completed a doctorate on ‘The Relationship of Journalism to Literature’ in 1924 and was given his first full-time teaching appointment in 1927. In 1929 he married his former student Queenie Dorothy Roth, thus forming one of the most formidable partnerships in literary criticism. It is as the uncompromisingly stern editor of the journal Scrutiny which he and his wife founded in 1932 that Leavis is best known. He remained at the helm for over 20 years, using the journal as a vehicle both to defend the new method of analysing literature he advocated, namely Practical Criticism, and to attack the lack of rigour he perceived in other approaches to literary criticism, particularly in that of the so-called Bloomsbury Group, whose middle-class elitism irritated him. Practical Criticism, or ‘close reading’ as it is also known, which Leavis adopted (with due modification) from his former teacher Richards, Ivor Armstrong, became his means of assessing (assaying might be a better word) the relative ‘greatness’ of a piece of work. Leavis insisted that the work had to stand on its own, which meant setting aside such ponderous notions as authorial intention, but also ignoring weightier issues like historical context. For Leavis a ‘great’ work was one which contained ‘life’, which he never defined, but seemingly meant immediacy of experience and a grasp of the unconscious forces underpinning quotidian existence. By this measure, it is easy to see why he was a great champion of D. H. Lawrence. Concerned with greatness as he was, it is perhaps not surprising that Leavis spent so much time on questions of canonicity. His best-known collection of essays, The Great Tradition (1948), is a powerful exercise in canon formation, tracing a line from Austen, through Eliot and James to Conrad and of course Lawrence (but famously overlooking Hardy, whom he detested). Leavis is generally viewed now as a reactionary, anti-theoretical critic, and though there is a certain truth in this, Eagleton’s insight that his real achievement was the creation of a discipline means that no history of literary studies (including histories of literary theory) can ignore him. Moreover, it is very far from the case that his legacy has been completely negated, there are still a great many Leavisite critics writing today. Leavis created an assessable pedagogy for literary studies that was readily comprehensible to high school students and as a consequence it became the standard methodology throughout the Anglophone world in the 1950s. Further Reading: M. Bell F. R. Leavis (1988). I. MacKillop F. R. Leavis: A Life in Criticism (1995). F. Mulhern The Moment of Scrutiny (1979).