Born in Cambridge in 1895, Frank Raymond Leavis became a leading critic who approached English literature with an academic rigour not seen before, though he has since been regarded as unduly judgemental. Attending Cambridge University he lectured at Emmanuel College and was elected into a fellowship in 1936. With his wife Queenie, he founded Scrutiny in 1932, an acclaimed journal of criticism, which sought to inculcate in readers a mature and morally serious response to culture and specifically literature, and thus avert the deadening effects of industrial society and a vulgar mass media. Retiring in 1962, he was a visiting professor at various English universities, delivered the Clark Lectures at Trinity College before dying in Cambridge in 1978.
Despite being somewhat discredited, Leavis's influence in the establishment of canons and the study of literature has been immense through the creation of a literary value system. Influenced by T.S.Eliot, he attacked late Victorian poetry and celebrated the work of modern poets such as T.S.Eliot, Ezra Pound and Gerard Manley Hopkins in New Bearings in English Poetry (1932) and looked at C17th Century poetry in Revaluation: Tradition and Development in English Poetry (1936). Later Leavis examined the novel, and established it as a serious topic of academic study and critique. The Great Tradition (1948) argues that Jane Austen, George Eliot, Henry James, and Joseph Conrad were the greatest novelists and that D.H.Lawrence was the only contemporary heir to this tradition, whilst dismissing Thomas Hardy. Though he looked to other authors in Anna Karenina and Other Essays (1967) and Dickens the Novelist (1970). His collection of essays The Common Pursuit (1952) reveal the breadth of his work.
Developing the earlier ideas of Matthew Arnold and Henry James, whose arguments mixed culture with morality, Leavis expressed his opinions with a moral severity, asserting that literature represented life and texts were to be assessed according to the content and the author's moral position. This was to be done through ‘close reading' without any knowledge of social or historical context, the structure of ideas or attending to stylistic and semiotic considerations as later advocated by Roland Barthes. This approach was developed by I. A. Richards in America, who insisted students come to a ‘true judgement' of a text by studying it in complete isolation without knowledge of even author or date it was written. This became known as 'practical criticism' or 'New Criticism'. While lauding intuition and attacking theory, Queenie and F.R.Leavis's approach relied on an the construction of a tradition, based on the nostalgic belief in a ‘healthy' and ‘vital' form of ‘essential Englishness' now lost and to be once again found in good literature.