Page "F. R. Leavis" Paragraph 4

In 1929 Leavis married one of his students, Queenie Roth, and this union resulted in a productive collaboration which yielded many great critical works culminating with their annus mirabilis in 1932 when Leavis published New Bearings in English Poetry, his wife published Fiction and the Reading Public, and the quarterly periodical Scrutiny was founded ( Greenwood 9 ).

A small publishing house, The Minority Press, was founded by Gordon Fraser, another of Leavis ' students, in 1930, and served for several years as an additional outlet for the work of Leavis and some of his students.

Also in this year Leavis was appointed director of studies in English at Downing College where he was to teach for the next thirty years.

He soon founded Scrutiny, the critical quarterly that he edited until 1953, using it as a vehicle for the new Cambridge criticism, upholding rigorous intellectual standards and attacking the dilettante elitism he believed to characterise the Bloomsbury Group.

Scrutiny provided a forum for ( on occasion ) identifying important contemporary work and ( more commonly ) reviewing the traditional canon by serious criteria ( Bell 6 ).

This criticism was informed by a teacher ’ s concern to present the essential to students, taking into consideration time constraints and a limited range of experience.