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This chapter examines the twentieth-century attempt to ‘dislodge’ Milton. Leavis deplored Milton’s verse for its alleged ‘monotony’ and ‘ritual’, while Eliot complained that the poem had to be read twice: once for the sound and again for the sense. This chapter makes the case that the Milton attacked by Leavis and Eliot (and defended by C. S. Lewis) is the Milton constructed by Matthew Arnold in the previous century. Lewis reaffirmed Arnold’s notion of ‘the grand style’ until Ricks recovered the eighteenth-century view that Milton achieves close co-operation between sound and sense. This chapter engages with the question of whether it is possible to match sound with sense, and asks whether Ricks’s defence is still valid now that postmodern theorists have discounted its premises as a ‘fallacy’. Attention is paid to misquotation, including a baleful misquotation by Eliot that was picked up by Leavis and has since been picked up by theorists disdainful of both Leavis and Ricks.

This chapter discusses the history of the literary magazine Scrunity: A Quarterly Review first published in Cambridge on 15 May 1932. Scrutiny was concerned with the systematic articulation and dissemination of critical idioms, forms, and priorities derived from the disparate currents of modernism, and it explored in detail the implications of the convulsive historical and cultural changes which had characterized the previous two decades. The chapter also examines the importance of F. R. Leavis to the Scrutiny project.

This chapter examines the range of F. R. Leavis’s historical thinking, from the early work of his Ph.D. through to his post-1945 dealings with the nineteenth century. The chapter argues that, rather than being largely derived from Eliot’s work, Leavis’s thinking drew on older and more conventional strains of historical writing whose framework he never entirely shook off. It emphasizes the extent to which Leavis believed that a proper cultural history would yield an evaluative assessment of the quality of human living in various periods and hence an overall judgement about progress or decline. It shows that the two key periods in Leavis’s scheme were the seventeenth century, understood as the beginnings of the modern world, and the nineteenth century, seen as the triumph of a broadly mechanical and economistic world view that he tended to equate with ‘Utilitarianism’.

This chapter argues that an English degree is closely tied to market and management philosophies. The continuity between the concepts of criticism and capitalist economics re-established that connection, and challenges the conventional view that the values of literature stand opposed to those of commerce. Criticism is speaking or writing about literature, but its idiom, tone, priorities, and direction connect with wider ideas about the individual and society. I. A. Richards pioneered the use of practical criticism. Based on what he said, it is clear that the difference between good and bad art is that the former arouses, organises, and fulfils many more impulses than the latter. F. R. Leavis and Frederic Winslow Taylor used the concept of the part and the whole to understand the literary work and the factory organisation, respectively. Blog, self-publishing, and a potentially worldwide audience democratises the acts of writing and commentary.

The Epilogue follows the book's account of the ways in which English literary modernism was formed in response to the Great War, by showing how various movements in the history of literary criticism were unable to identify or admit the historical content and implication of this fact. Beginning with F. R. Leavis's New Bearings in English Poetry, the misreading of modernism is often repeated and culminates in the New Critical movement in America in the 1930s, which witnesses a severe misapprehension of I. A. Richards's historically informed critical principle of pseudo-statement, while the critical understanding of Kenneth Burke, most notably in Permanence and Change: An Anatomy of Purpose, marks a signal exception to this rule.

This chapter introduces the father of media studies, Marshall McLuhan, as a modernist New Critic and argues for the understanding of how close reading serves his foundational writing. McLuhan studied at Cambridge under such eminent New Critics as I. A. Richards and F. R. Leavis. McLuhan adapted the New Critical practice of close reading and applied it to objects not traditionally considered literary. He built media studies from literary studies. Taking seriously McLuhan’s training in literature as well as his writerly prose, this chapter claims that close reading is crucial to understanding not only McLuhan’s theories of media but also the larger field of media studies that grew out of them.

This chapter argues that accounts of ‘the reading public’ are always fundamentally historical, usually involving stories of ‘growth’ or ‘decline’. It examines Q. D. Leavis’s Fiction and the Reading Public, which builds a relentlessly pessimistic critique of the debased standards of the present out of a highly selective account of literature and its publics since the Elizabethan period. It goes on to exhibit the complicated analysis of the role of previous publics in F. R. Leavis’s revisionist literary history, including his ambivalent admiration for the great Victorian periodicals. And it shows how Richard Hoggart’s The Uses of Literacy carries an almost buried interpretation of social change from the nineteenth century onwards, constantly contrasting the vibrant and healthy forms of entertainment built up in old working-class communities with the slick, commercialized reading matter introduced by post-1945 prosperity.

This chapter gives an account of the antidemocratic and anticapitalist origins of modern literary criticism. It focuses on T.S. Eliot, I.A. Richards and F.R. Leavis arguing that modern techniques of close reading emerged in their work and teaching in the 1920s as an effort to recapture and maintain regimes of experience that had been destroyed by enlightened democratic capitalism. It traces how the original practice and spirit of modern literary criticism was gradually transformed and then forgotten, and makes an elegiac case for its continuing relevance.

Empson and Leavis were perhaps the two most influential academic literary critics in Britain between the 1930s and the 1960s. Close criticism of the verbal texture of literary works enjoyed particularly high prestige in these decades, often being read as an informal brand of moral teaching. This chapter examines Empson’s unusual career and the ethical commitments evident in his work; it then explores the range of Leavis’s widely remarked, and fiercely contested, influence across several cultural domains and different parts of the world. The chapter examines the importance of English Literature as a subject in inter-war Cambridge, and the important role of American academic literary criticism in the years after 1945.

This chapter asks how, in the context of the medical humanities, we might productively think across disciplinary domains and boundaries. It draws on Ian McEwan’s Saturday as a focus for positioning the question of interdisciplinarity within a specifically British context. The first section, ‘The two cultures’, surveys the ‘two cultures’ debate and its legacy and discusses the appearance of Matthew Arnold’s poem ‘Dover Beach’ at a critical point of the novel. In the second section, ‘A third culture?’, the focus turns to McEwan’s engagement with popular science discourses and argues that it underpins a discernible conservatism in his work. The final section, ‘An unbounded view’, reads Saturday against the grain to argue that, in McEwan’s treatment of dementia a more positive, open-ended model for thinking across the arts and sciences might be seen to emerge.

In 1959, Snow delivered his famous lecture ‘Two Cultures’ in which he called for a civilized conversation between the sciences and the humanities. In response to Snow’s lecture, the well-known literary critic F.R. Leavis savagely attacked Snow not only for what he saw as simple-minded ideas but also for his lack of distinction as a novelist. Both Pamela and Snow began to feel increasingly under unfair attack—for their political support of Russian writers and for what some regarded as social climbing (for sending their son to Eton, for example). As always, Pamela continued writing and published a comic novel titled Cork Street, Next to the Hatter’s which featured a return of some characters from The Unspeakable Skipton and the beginnings of her controversial attack upon the rampant dissemination of pornography.

This chapter discusses the history of the The Calendar of Modern Letters (1925–7). The journal is known for its combativeness as an organ of informed criticism. Its regular ‘Scrutinies’, in which well-known authors and their work were submitted to often devastating critical enquiry, not only attracted the admiring attention of younger writers, but also led F. R. Leavis to adopt the name Scrutiny for his own journal in 1932. Thirty years later, Leavis remarked that this title was consciously chosen ‘as a salute and a gesture of acknowledgement — an assertion of a kind of continuity of life with The Calendar’. To understand this ‘life’ requires an account of the early career of Edgell Rickword, who was undoubtedly the journal's presiding genius.

What makes reconciliation between poetry and the speech act approach in analytic philosophy desirable is the fact that philosophy has tended to adopt a truth-orientated approach to poetic utterances. Debate has then organized itself on a spectrum. At one end, some claim that poetic utterances consist of statements which can be true. At the other end, some claim that such utterances consist of statements that tend to be (or systematically must be) false. Towards the middle, some claim that the statements of which poetry consists are neither true nor false. But this way of approaching poetry renders essential features of poetry invisible and distorts literary criticism.