Dr Leavis's Seventeenth Century

Abstract

WHY, IT MIGHT REASONABLY BE ASKED, hark back, in the second decade of the twenty-first century, to a body of writing some of which is now over eighty years old, and might, on the face of it, seem remote from our current concerns?1 There are two related reasons. The first is that, though Leavis regularly portrayed himself as an embattled outsider, a prophetic voice in vehement and profound opposition to the dominant academic and educational orthodoxies of his day, he was in fact a figure at least in some respects far more (to use one of his own favourite terms) ‘representative’ of his times than he was prepared to admit. The insistent moral tone and charismatic personality which, along with his other considerable gifts, made Leavis so potent an influence on criticism and literary education in his own time tend to disguise the extent to which some of what he had to say was, in fact, common currency in his day. In many respects, ‘Dr Leavis's Seventeenth Century’ might more aptly be described as ‘The 1930s’ Seventeenth Century'.