Abstract

Returning from the Great War to Cambridge in 1919, F. R. Leavis switched from studying history to studying English. It’s not hard to see why. The academic study of history must have seemed monstrously unreal to him after what he had been through, and the fledgling English School offered, as he later said, “a creative response to change—change in society and civilization that had been made unignorable by the war,”1 in contrast to the Oxford course, which reflected “the habit instilled by a classical training”, with its compulsory Old English and its refusal to include contemporary literature on the syllabus. Leavis’s reticence about his wartime experiences—exemplified in his well-known suppression of...