A Critical Education - F. R. Leavis and the Modern English Novel

The study of English literature has been subject to increasing scrutiny since the perceived crisis in the discipline in the 1970s. For John Guillory, the existential challenges currently facing literary scholars have amounted to a 'crisis of legitimation', characterized by 'the perennial churn in literary study, the constant revolutionizing of its methods and objects, the agon of its professional identification' ix. Because this sense of disciplinary crisis has been most keenly felt in the decades since the heyday of Cambridge English, it is to that period, and specifically to the legacy of F. R. Leavis and the 'moment of Scrutiny,' as Francis Mulhern calls it, that Guillory, Joseph North and Terry Eagleton, among others, have recently turned to unravel a history that would culminate in the present state of affairs. My research seeks to extend these studies by offering the first account of the reception and diffusion of a revised Leavisian critical paradigm in the pedagogy of new university English schools founded in the 1960s and in the work of contemporary British novelists including Ian McEwan, Kazuo Ishiguro and A. S. Byatt.The questions my project seeks to answer are: if Leavisian critical principles were not overturned by the contextualist-historicist models of literary studies that supervened upon them in the 1970s, and elements of Leavis's program were in fact tacitly assimilated into new forms of literary pedagogy, what are the implications of such long-term continuity for our present sense(s) of profession? How may Leavisian conceptualizations of literary value have contributed to the self-styling of some of the highest-profile British novelists of the past fifty years? And finally: how can uncovering these concealed lines of force in the historical development of twentieth-century English studies help us better address the 'crisis' in the discipline at the present time?Like many scholars working in English departments today, British novelists who were also students of literature after mid-century -such as McEwan, Ishiguro and Byatt - are beneficiaries of a twentieth-century theorization of the value of the literary text that developed out of the critical principles and practices of Richards and Leavis, and that would be an enabling condition for the explosion of 'theory' that occurred in the latter decades of the century. Taking my cue from a new wave of critical retrospectives on twentieth-century English studies, I want to seize this moment to scrutinize the activity of novelists who engaged that critical practice, resisted and spoke back to it in the public sphere.