Rethinking Leavis

This essay seeks to establish the case for reading Leavis as a thinker and as one of the most impressive figures of modern intellectual history. Its aim is to shift the emphasis from the idea of Leavis as a “practical critic” or as a proponent of “minority culture” (although he was both) and place it on him as a conceptual reformer. The author suggests that Leavis’s work as a literary critic and teacher is inseparable from his thinking about the nature of language.