ABSTRACT
We are inevitably concerned, in approaching the question of ‘value’, with the relations between literature and ideology. The difficulties in comprehending this relationship are now commonly appreciated, but generally seen to reside in the effective elaboration of a theory of ideology. Both terms, however, are difficult, and the problems with the concept ‘literature’ are our more immediate point of entry into the discussion. The fact that ‘literature’ has been and still is used as a supposedly neutral descriptive category to designate types of printed work ought in itself to alert us to its radical lack of innocence. Through its long association with the criteria of ‘taste’, ‘sensibility’ and ‘intelligence’, its refined application to ‘serious, imaginative’ works, joined latterly in a ‘tradition’, which is presented as evincing a morally committed, but vaguely open and comprehensive attitude towards ‘life’, the concept ‘literature’ has evidently performed a heavily ideological function: nowhere so actively and extensively in this century in England as in the work of F.R. and Queenie Leavis. 1
