ABSTRACT
The purpose of this book is to look into the Leavis-Eliot relationship, connecting it with the broader discourse of English Studies as a university subject that developed in the first half of the twentieth century. It surveys the many writings of Leavis on Eliot, to see how Eliot is formative for the theory and practice of Leavis’s literary criticism in both positive and negative ways. It conducts a detailed investigation of D. H. Lawrence’s significance in relation to Leavis’s changing attitude to Eliot, and examines how profound differences in social, cultural, religious and national thinking strengthened Leavis’s alliance with Lawrence to the detriment of his relationship with Eliot. These differences are presented as dichotomies between nationalism and Europeanism or internationalism, ruralism or organicism and industrialisation or metropolitanism, and relate to the differences between the two men’s views about literary education, the subject of English and the position of the classics in the curriculum. Leavis’s increasingly conflicted feelings towards a figure to whom he owed an enormous critical debt and inspiration, but whose various beliefs and literary affiliations caused him much misgiving, result in a deep sense of division in Leavis himself which he sought to transfer onto Eliot.
