English literary critic whose insistence that great literature is a form of serious moral and civilisational knowledge — and whose willingness to defend that claim with granitic intransigence against academic colleagues, newspaper reviewers, and the commercial mass culture of the twentieth century — shaped the study of English at Cambridge and, through his students, across the British and Commonwealth universities from the 1930s into the 1970s. Born in Cambridge, wounded serving with the Friends' Ambulance Unit in the First World War (he never lost the sense of that war as a civilisational breakage), and permanently estranged from the official Cambridge English faculty even while teaching at Downing College, he ran, with his wife and equal collaborator Q.D. Leavis, the journal Scrutiny (1932–1953), the single most influential English literary-critical enterprise of the mid-century.
Leavis's central book, The Great Tradition (1948), notoriously narrowed the canon of the English novel to a small band of moral seriousness: Jane Austen, George Eliot, Henry James, Joseph Conrad, D.H. Lawrence, with Dickens admitted only late and Tolstoy as touchstone. The selection was polemical — against what he regarded as the Bloomsbury aestheticism and metropolitan journalism that had captured English letters — and it rested on a conviction that the novel at its best was a form of "felt life," a concrete enactment of moral discrimination. Revaluation (1936) and New Bearings in English Poetry (1932) did similar work on the poetic canon, placing Eliot, Hopkins, and Pound at the centre.
Around the purely literary work sat a second project, shared with Richard Hoggart's generation and bitterly opposed by later theorists: the argument, laid out in Culture and Environment (1933) with Denys Thompson, that modern commercial culture — advertising, the mass press, Hollywood — constituted a genuine civilisational disaster against which the "minority" culture of serious reading was a necessary defence. His two famous public eruptions — the 1948 "Cambridge English" battles and, above all, his 1962 Richmond Lecture responding to C.P. Snow's "Two Cultures" thesis — were fought from that premise. To the Left of the 1970s (Raymond Williams above all) Leavis was both formative and obstructive: formative because he took literature seriously as moral and political knowledge; obstructive because his insistence that only a minority could carry that knowledge sat awkwardly with a democratic politics of culture. Williams's Culture and Society can be read as a five-hundred-page respectful argument with him; Terry Eagleton's early books are a more impatient one.