ABSTRACT
Inglis is interested both in the kinds of arguments being made at the time by Virginia Woolf's own advocates, including those in France, and in the reluctance of the English critical establishment to take modernist writing seriously. Clearly the critical theory and practice of the group to which Mellers belonged could potentially have done ample justice to Virginia Woolf's style. More can be said later about the origin of their collective blindness. For the moment, let it suffice to have established that the particularly naive positivism of 'shorn of the "original" technique' is an isolated lapse, not a feature of Scrutiny critical method. The strongest counter-tradition to the shift in literary opinion was the Leavisite one; but F. R. Leavis's emphasis on major continuities with the past remained the mainspring of his visible and current activities, and his influence became more merely conservative, moralistic, and positivist as it was diluted downwards through the universities and schools.
