ABSTRACT
Lionel Charles Knights (b. 1906) has been closely associated with the Cambridge school of criticism led by Dr F. R. Leavis, and was co-editor of the journal Scrutiny which, founded by Dr Leavis and his wife Q. D. Leavis, exercised very great influence on the teaching and criticism of English literature both during and after its life-span (1932-53). The Scrutiny group of critics endorsed the revolution in literary taste and critical method initiated by T. S. Eliot and I. A. Richards, but added to it a particularly rigorous concern with 'standards'. In their perspective, literary criticism should be concerned above all with evaluation, with discriminating the truly great from the ephemeral, the minor, the secondrate; and traditional literary scholarship, with it!; tolerance and relativism in judgment, was the great enemy. Hence the characteristic Scrutiny essay was concerned with 'revaluation' (the title of one of Dr Leavis's books). Underlying this often combative concern with standards was the belief that literature and the study of it preserved certain life-enhancing values once located in the 'organic community' of pre-industrial England, but now almost wholly submerged by mass culture.
