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Frank Raymond "F. R." Leavis, CH (14 July 1895 – 14 April 1978) was an influential British literary critic of the early-to-mid-twentieth century. He taught for much of his career at Downing College, Cambridge and later at the University of York. ==Early life== Frank Raymond Leavis was born in Cambridge, in 1895, about a decade after T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence and Ezra Pound, literary figures whose reputations he would later contribute to enhancing. His father, Harry Leavis, a cultured man, ran a small shop in Cambridge which sold pianos and other musical instruments (Hayman 1), and his son was to retain a respect for him throughout his life. Leavis was educated at a fee-paying independent school (in English terms a minor Public School), The Perse School, whose headmaster at the time was Dr. W. H. D. Rouse. Rouse was a classicist and known for his "direct method," a practice which required teachers to carry on classroom conversations with their pupils in Latin and classical Greek. Though he had some fluency in foreign languages, Leavis felt that his native language was the only one on which he was able to speak with authority. His extensive reading in the classical languages is not therefore strongly evident in his critical publications (Bell 3). Leavis was nineteen when Britain declared war on Germany in 1914. In order to evade military service, he left Cambridge after his first year as an undergraduate and joined the Friends' Ambulance Unit at York in 1915. After the introduction of conscription in 1916 he benefited from the blanket recognition of the members of the Friends' Ambulance Unit as conscientious objectors. Leavis is quoted〔MacKillop, I D (1997) ''F R Leavis: a life in criticism'' (St Martin's Press, New York) page 19. ISBN 0312163576〕 as saying :''But after the Bloody Somme there could be no question for anyone who knew what modern war was like of joining the army.'' He worked in France behind the Western Front, carrying a copy of Milton's poems with him. His wartime experiences had a lasting effect on him, making him prone to insomnia. He maintained that exposure to poison gas retained in the clothes of soldiers who had been gassed damaged his physical health, particularly his digestion.〔MacKillop, I D (1997) ''F R Leavis: a life in criticism'' (St Martin's Press, New York) ISBN 0312163576〕 Leavis was slow to recover from the war, and he was later to refer to it as "the great hiatus." He said 〔MacKillop, I D (1997) ''F R Leavis: a life in criticism'' (St Martin's Press, New York) page 225 ISBN 0312163576〕 :''The war, to put it egotistically, was bad luck for us.'' Leavis had won a scholarship from the Perse School to Emmanuel College, Cambridge to read History, and on his return from the war in 1919 he changed his field of study to English and became a pupil at the newly founded English School at Cambridge. Despite graduating with first-class honours, Leavis was not seen as a strong candidate for a research fellowship and instead embarked on a PhD, then a lowly career move for an aspiring academic. In 1924, Leavis presented a thesis on ‘The Relationship of Journalism to Literature', which 'studied the rise and earlier development of the press in England’ (Bell 4). This work contributed to his lifelong concern with the way in which the ethos of a periodical can both reflect and mould the cultural aspirations of a wider public (Greenwood 8). In 1927, Leavis was appointed as a probationary lecturer for the university, and, when his first substantial publications began to appear a few years later, their style was very much influenced by the demands of teaching. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「F. R. Leavis」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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