'The great English novelists are Jane Austen, George Eliot, Henry James and Joseph Conrad. . .'

So begins what is arguably F. R. Leavis's most controversial book, The Great Tradition, an uncompromising critical and polemical survey of English fiction that was first published in 1948. He puts a powerful case for "moral seriousness" as the necessary criterion for inclusion in any list of the finest novelists. In the course of his argument he adds D. H. Lawrence to the pantheon, and singles out Charles Dickens's Hard Times as the one work of his that has the strength of 'a completely serious work of art'.

The Great Tradition is full of Leavis's characteristically austere rejections of styles of fiction that he found lacking in moral intensity. He dismissed Lawrence Sterne for his 'irresponsible (and nasty) trifling'. Of Henry Fielding he wrote that he is important 'not because he leads to Mr J. B. Priestley but because he leads to Jane Austen, to appreciate whose distinction is to feel that life isn't long enough to permit of one's giving much time to Fielding or any to Mr Priestley.' Joyce's Ulysses, he said, was less a new start for fiction than 'a dead end'.

Fiercely serious, pugnacious and stimulating, The Great Tradition is an unforgettable defence of 'those creative geniuses whose distinction is manifested in their being peculiarly alive in their time'.

Many of the earliest books, particularly those dating back to the 1900s and before, are now extremely scarce and increasingly expensive. Hesperides Press are republishing these classic works in affordable, high quality, modern editions, using the original text and artwork.

It is difficult now to imagine the shock that this book caused when it was first published in 1932. The author was a teacher at a Cambridge college, an intensely serious man who had been seriously wounded by poison gas on the Western Front, and he was not disposed to suffer foolishness gladly. His opening sentences were arresting: 'Poetry matters little to the modern world. That is, very little of contemporary intelligence concerns itself with poetry'. What followed was nothing less than the welcoming of a revolution in English verse, set against the moral and social crisis that followed the trauma of the First World War. It was this situation, this feeling of breakdown and disorder, that gave such force to Leavis's dismissal of most late Romantic poetry and his welcoming of the modernists T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, and of the writer who Leavis regarded as their forebear, Gerard Manley Hopkins. The tone of high moral urgency, and the message that the experience of literature could become an engagement with life that was almost a secular equivalent to religion, seemed new and abrasively refreshing. Leavis despised the reigning dilettantism in both poetry and criticism, and in this book he threw down the gauntlet to the establishment as he understood it. In the same year he founded the journal Scrutiny, and began his long career as the most formidably serious literary critic of his time.

In The Great Tradition, published in 1948, F. R. Leavis seemed to rate the work of Charles Dickens - with the exception of Hard Times - as lacking the seriousness and formal control of the true masters of English fiction.

By 1970, when Dickens the Novelist was published on the first centenary of the writer's death, Leavis and his lifelong collaborator Q. D. (Queenie) Leavis, had changed their minds. 'Our purpose', they wrote, 'is to enforce as unanswerably as possible the conviction that Dickens was one of the greatest of creative writers . . .'

In seven typically robust and uncompromising chapters, the Leavises grapple with the evaluation of a writer who was then still open to dismissal as a mere entertainer, a caricaturist not worthy of discussion in the same breath as Henry James. Q. D. Leavis shows, for example, how deeply influential David Copperfield was on the work of Tolstoy, and explores the symbolic richness of the nightmare world of Bleak House. F. R. Leavis reprints his famous essay on Hard Times, with its moral critique of utilitarianism, and reveals the imaginative influence of Blake on Little Dorrit. Q. D. Leavis contributes a pathbreaking chapter on the importance of Dickens's illustrators to the effect of his work.

F. R. Leavis was the chief editor of "Scrutiny," which between 1932 and 1953 had some claim on being the most influential literary journal in the English-speaking world.

The Common Pursuit is a selection of Leavis's essays from "Scrutiny," including his robust defence of Milton against T. S. Eliot, his deeply-felt engagement with Shakespeare, and his severe strictures on attempts to import sociology and political activism into the study of literature.

The title of the book comes from a passage in Eliot's 'The Function of Criticism', in which the poet argues that the critic must engage in 'the common pursuit of true judgment'. For Leavis, this meant a strenuous insistence on discriminatory criticism - clear statements about what is good and morally mature and admirable, and equally clear condemnation of what is trivial. The Common Pursuit, with its controversial judgments of Bunyan and Auden, Swift and Forster, remains as challenging now as it did in 1952, and it is easy to see why Leavis - who was never offered a professorship by Cambridge University - held such sway over the study of English literature in his time.

Scrutiny was first issued quarterly from Cambridge between 1932 and 1953, the principal editor throughout being Dr Leavis. It is now recognized as a formative influence on English intellectual and cultural life worthy to rank with the great reviews of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This 2008 reissue is of the 1963 combined set, including a final volume containing an important Retrospect by Dr Leavis and a substantial analytical index. Scrutiny offers an almost complete critical history of English literature from Chaucer to the mid-twentieth century. Medieval literature, Shakespeare, the seventeenth-century poets, Pope, Dryden, Johnson, the great romantics, the Victorians, and nearly all the important modern writers are seriously examined. Many of the articles have become classics, and resulted in revisions of previously accepted views. An important feature of Scrutiny, still of great interest, is the book review section, where many of the important books of the time, and some of the pretentious ones too, were reviewed as they appeared.

Scrutiny was first issued quarterly from Cambridge between 1932 and 1953, the principal editor throughout being Dr Leavis. It is now recognized as a formative influence on English intellectual and cultural life worthy to rank with the great reviews of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This 2008 reissue is of the 1963 combined set, including a final volume containing an important Retrospect by Dr Leavis and a substantial analytical index. Scrutiny offers an almost complete critical history of English literature from Chaucer to the mid-twentieth century. Medieval literature, Shakespeare, the seventeenth-century poets, Pope, Dryden, Johnson, the great romantics, the Victorians, and nearly all the important modern writers are seriously examined. Many of the articles have become classics, and resulted in revisions of previously accepted views. An important feature of Scrutiny, still of great interest, is the book review section, where many of the important books of the time, and some of the pretentious ones too, were reviewed as they appeared.

Scrutiny was first issued quarterly from Cambridge between 1932 and 1953, the principal editor throughout being Dr Leavis. It is now recognized as a formative influence on English intellectual and cultural life worthy to rank with the great reviews of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This 2008 reissue is of the 1963 combined set, including a final volume containing an important Retrospect by Dr Leavis and a substantial analytical index. Scrutiny offers an almost complete critical history of English literature from Chaucer to the mid-twentieth century. Medieval literature, Shakespeare, the seventeenth-century poets, Pope, Dryden, Johnson, the great romantics, the Victorians, and nearly all the important modern writers are seriously examined. Many of the articles have become classics, and resulted in revisions of previously accepted views. An important feature of Scrutiny, still of great interest, is the book review section, where many of the important books of the time, and some of the pretentious ones too, were reviewed as they appeared.

Scrutiny was first issued quarterly from Cambridge between 1932 and 1953, the principal editor throughout being Dr Leavis. It is now recognized as a formative influence on English intellectual and cultural life worthy to rank with the great reviews of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This 2008 reissue is of the 1963 combined set, including a final volume containing an important Retrospect by Dr Leavis and a substantial analytical index. Scrutiny offers an almost complete critical history of English literature from Chaucer to the mid-twentieth century. Medieval literature, Shakespeare, the seventeenth-century poets, Pope, Dryden, Johnson, the great romantics, the Victorians, and nearly all the important modern writers are seriously examined. Many of the articles have become classics, and resulted in revisions of previously accepted views. An important feature of Scrutiny, still of great interest, is the book review section, where many of the important books of the time, and some of the pretentious ones too, were reviewed as they appeared.

Scrutiny was first issued quarterly from Cambridge between 1932 and 1953, the principal editor throughout being Dr Leavis. It is now recognized as a formative influence on English intellectual and cultural life worthy to rank with the great reviews of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This 2008 reissue is of the 1963 combined set, including a final volume containing an important Retrospect by Dr Leavis and a substantial analytical index. Scrutiny offers an almost complete critical history of English literature from Chaucer to the mid-twentieth century. Medieval literature, Shakespeare, the seventeenth-century poets, Pope, Dryden, Johnson, the great romantics, the Victorians, and nearly all the important modern writers are seriously examined. Many of the articles have become classics, and resulted in revisions of previously accepted views. An important feature of Scrutiny, still of great interest, is the book review section, where many of the important books of the time, and some of the pretentious ones too, were reviewed as they appeared.

Scrutiny was first issued quarterly from Cambridge between 1932 and 1953, the principal editor throughout being Dr Leavis. It is now recognized as a formative influence on English intellectual and cultural life worthy to rank with the great reviews of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This 2008 reissue is of the 1963 combined set, including a final volume containing an important Retrospect by Dr Leavis and a substantial analytical index. Scrutiny offers an almost complete critical history of English literature from Chaucer to the mid-twentieth century. Medieval literature, Shakespeare, the seventeenth-century poets, Pope, Dryden, Johnson, the great romantics, the Victorians, and nearly all the important modern writers are seriously examined. Many of the articles have become classics, and resulted in revisions of previously accepted views. An important feature of Scrutiny, still of great interest, is the book review section, where many of the important books of the time, and some of the pretentious ones too, were reviewed as they appeared.

Scrutiny was first issued quarterly from Cambridge between 1932 and 1953, the principal editor throughout being Dr Leavis. It is now recognized as a formative influence on English intellectual and cultural life worthy to rank with the great reviews of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This 2008 reissue is of the 1963 combined set, including a final volume containing an important Retrospect by Dr Leavis and a substantial analytical index. Scrutiny offers an almost complete critical history of English literature from Chaucer to the mid-twentieth century. Medieval literature, Shakespeare, the seventeenth-century poets, Pope, Dryden, Johnson, the great romantics, the Victorians, and nearly all the important modern writers are seriously examined. Many of the articles have become classics, and resulted in revisions of previously accepted views. An important feature of Scrutiny, still of great interest, is the book review section, where many of the important books of the time, and some of the pretentious ones too, were reviewed as they appeared.

Scrutiny was first issued quarterly from Cambridge between 1932 and 1953, the principal editor throughout being Dr Leavis. It is now recognized as a formative influence on English intellectual and cultural life worthy to rank with the great reviews of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This 2008 reissue is of the 1963 combined set, including a final volume containing an important Retrospect by Dr Leavis and a substantial analytical index. Scrutiny offers an almost complete critical history of English literature from Chaucer to the mid-twentieth century. Medieval literature, Shakespeare, the seventeenth-century poets, Pope, Dryden, Johnson, the great romantics, the Victorians, and nearly all the important modern writers are seriously examined. Many of the articles have become classics, and resulted in revisions of previously accepted views. An important feature of Scrutiny, still of great interest, is the book review section, where many of the important books of the time, and some of the pretentious ones too, were reviewed as they appeared.

Scrutiny was first issued quarterly from Cambridge between 1932 and 1953, the principal editor throughout being Dr Leavis. It is now recognized as a formative influence on English intellectual and cultural life worthy to rank with the great reviews of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This 2008 reissue is of the 1963 combined set, including a final volume containing an important Retrospect by Dr Leavis and a substantial analytical index. Scrutiny offers an almost complete critical history of English literature from Chaucer to the mid-twentieth century. Medieval literature, Shakespeare, the seventeenth-century poets, Pope, Dryden, Johnson, the great romantics, the Victorians, and nearly all the important modern writers are seriously examined. Many of the articles have become classics, and resulted in revisions of previously accepted views. An important feature of Scrutiny, still of great interest, is the book review section, where many of the important books of the time, and some of the pretentious ones too, were reviewed as they appeared.

Scrutiny was first issued quarterly from Cambridge between 1932 and 1953, the principal editor throughout being Dr Leavis. It is now recognized as a formative influence on English intellectual and cultural life worthy to rank with the great reviews of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This 2008 reissue is of the 1963 combined set, including a final volume containing an important Retrospect by Dr Leavis and a substantial analytical index. Scrutiny offers an almost complete critical history of English literature from Chaucer to the mid-twentieth century. Medieval literature, Shakespeare, the seventeenth-century poets, Pope, Dryden, Johnson, the great romantics, the Victorians, and nearly all the important modern writers are seriously examined. Many of the articles have become classics, and resulted in revisions of previously accepted views. An important feature of Scrutiny, still of great interest, is the book review section, where many of the important books of the time, and some of the pretentious ones too, were reviewed as they appeared.

Scrutiny was first issued quarterly from Cambridge between 1932 and 1953, the principal editor throughout being Dr Leavis. It is now recognized as a formative influence on English intellectual and cultural life worthy to rank with the great reviews of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This 2008 reissue is of the 1963 combined set, including a final volume containing an important Retrospect by Dr Leavis and a substantial analytical index. Scrutiny offers an almost complete critical history of English literature from Chaucer to the mid-twentieth century. Medieval literature, Shakespeare, the seventeenth-century poets, Pope, Dryden, Johnson, the great romantics, the Victorians, and nearly all the important modern writers are seriously examined. Many of the articles have become classics, and resulted in revisions of previously accepted views. An important feature of Scrutiny, still of great interest, is the book review section, where many of the important books of the time, and some of the pretentious ones too, were reviewed as they appeared.

Scrutiny was first issued quarterly from Cambridge between 1932 and 1953, the principal editor throughout being Dr Leavis. It is now recognized as a formative influence on English intellectual and cultural life worthy to rank with the great reviews of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This 2008 reissue is of the 1963 combined set, including a final volume containing an important Retrospect by Dr Leavis and a substantial analytical index. Scrutiny offers an almost complete critical history of English literature from Chaucer to the mid-twentieth century. Medieval literature, Shakespeare, the seventeenth-century poets, Pope, Dryden, Johnson, the great romantics, the Victorians, and nearly all the important modern writers are seriously examined. Many of the articles have become classics, and resulted in revisions of previously accepted views. An important feature of Scrutiny, still of great interest, is the book review section, where many of the important books of the time, and some of the pretentious ones too, were reviewed as they appeared.

Scrutiny was first issued quarterly from Cambridge between 1932 and 1953, the principal editor throughout being Dr Leavis. It is now recognized as a formative influence on English intellectual and cultural life worthy to rank with the great reviews of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This 2008 reissue is of the 1963 combined set, including a final volume containing an important Retrospect by Dr Leavis and a substantial analytical index. Scrutiny offers an almost complete critical history of English literature from Chaucer to the mid-twentieth century. Medieval literature, Shakespeare, the seventeenth-century poets, Pope, Dryden, Johnson, the great romantics, the Victorians, and nearly all the important modern writers are seriously examined. Many of the articles have become classics, and resulted in revisions of previously accepted views. An important feature of Scrutiny, still of great interest, is the book review section, where many of the important books of the time, and some of the pretentious ones too, were reviewed as they appeared.

Scrutiny was first issued quarterly from Cambridge between 1932 and 1953, the principal editor throughout being Dr Leavis. It is now recognized as a formative influence on English intellectual and cultural life worthy to rank with the great reviews of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This 2008 reissue is of the 1963 combined set, including a final volume containing an important Retrospect by Dr Leavis and a substantial analytical index. Scrutiny offers an almost complete critical history of English literature from Chaucer to the mid-twentieth century. Medieval literature, Shakespeare, the seventeenth-century poets, Pope, Dryden, Johnson, the great romantics, the Victorians, and nearly all the important modern writers are seriously examined. Many of the articles have become classics, and resulted in revisions of previously accepted views. An important feature of Scrutiny, still of great interest, is the book review section, where many of the important books of the time, and some of the pretentious ones too, were reviewed as they appeared.

Scrutiny was first issued quarterly from Cambridge between 1932 and 1953, the principal editor throughout being Dr Leavis. It is now recognized as a formative influence on English intellectual and cultural life worthy to rank with the great reviews of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This 2008 reissue is of the 1963 combined set, including a final volume containing an important Retrospect by Dr Leavis and a substantial analytical index. Scrutiny offers an almost complete critical history of English literature from Chaucer to the mid-twentieth century. Medieval literature, Shakespeare, the seventeenth-century poets, Pope, Dryden, Johnson, the great romantics, the Victorians, and nearly all the important modern writers are seriously examined. Many of the articles have become classics, and resulted in revisions of previously accepted views. An important feature of Scrutiny, still of great interest, is the book review section, where many of the important books of the time, and some of the pretentious ones too, were reviewed as they appeared.

Scrutiny was first issued quarterly from Cambridge between 1932 and 1953, the principal editor throughout being Dr Leavis. It is now recognized as a formative influence on English intellectual and cultural life worthy to rank with the great reviews of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This 2008 reissue is of the 1963 combined set, including a final volume containing an important Retrospect by Dr Leavis and a substantial analytical index. Scrutiny offers an almost complete critical history of English literature from Chaucer to the mid-twentieth century. Medieval literature, Shakespeare, the seventeenth-century poets, Pope, Dryden, Johnson, the great romantics, the Victorians, and nearly all the important modern writers are seriously examined. Many of the articles have become classics, and resulted in revisions of previously accepted views. An important feature of Scrutiny, still of great interest, is the book review section, where many of the important books of the time, and some of the pretentious ones too, were reviewed as they appeared.

Scrutiny was first issued quarterly from Cambridge between 1932 and 1953, the principal editor throughout being Dr Leavis. It is now recognized as a formative influence on English intellectual and cultural life worthy to rank with the great reviews of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This 2008 reissue is of the 1963 combined set, including a final volume containing an important Retrospect by Dr Leavis and a substantial analytical index. Scrutiny offers an almost complete critical history of English literature from Chaucer to the mid-twentieth century. Medieval literature, Shakespeare, the seventeenth-century poets, Pope, Dryden, Johnson, the great romantics, the Victorians, and nearly all the important modern writers are seriously examined. Many of the articles have become classics, and resulted in revisions of previously accepted views. An important feature of Scrutiny, still of great interest, is the book review section, where many of the important books of the time, and some of the pretentious ones too, were reviewed as they appeared.

Scrutiny was first issued quarterly from Cambridge between 1932 and 1953, the principal editor throughout being Dr Leavis. It is now recognized as a formative influence on English intellectual and cultural life worthy to rank with the great reviews of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This 2008 reissue is of the 1963 combined set, including a final volume containing an important Retrospect by Dr Leavis and a substantial analytical index. Scrutiny offers an almost complete critical history of English literature from Chaucer to the mid-twentieth century. Medieval literature, Shakespeare, the seventeenth-century poets, Pope, Dryden, Johnson, the great romantics, the Victorians, and nearly all the important modern writers are seriously examined. Many of the articles have become classics, and resulted in revisions of previously accepted views. An important feature of Scrutiny, still of great interest, is the book review section, where many of the important books of the time, and some of the pretentious ones too, were reviewed as they appeared.

Scrutiny was first issued quarterly from Cambridge between 1932 and 1953, the principal editor throughout being Dr Leavis. It is now recognized as a formative influence on English intellectual and cultural life worthy to rank with the great reviews of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This 2008 reissue is of the 1963 combined set, including a final volume containing an important Retrospect by Dr Leavis and a substantial analytical index. Scrutiny offers an almost complete critical history of English literature from Chaucer to the mid-twentieth century. Medieval literature, Shakespeare, the seventeenth-century poets, Pope, Dryden, Johnson, the great romantics, the Victorians, and nearly all the important modern writers are seriously examined. Many of the articles have become classics, and resulted in revisions of previously accepted views. An important feature of Scrutiny, still of great interest, is the book review section, where many of the important books of the time, and some of the pretentious ones too, were reviewed as they appeared.

Scrutiny was first issued quarterly from Cambridge between 1932 and 1953, the principal editor throughout being Dr Leavis. It is now recognized as a formative influence on English intellectual and cultural life worthy to rank with the great reviews of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This 2008 reissue is of the 1963 combined set, including a final volume containing an important Retrospect by Dr Leavis and a substantial analytical index. Scrutiny offers an almost complete critical history of English literature from Chaucer to the mid-twentieth century. Medieval literature, Shakespeare, the seventeenth-century poets, Pope, Dryden, Johnson, the great romantics, the Victorians, and nearly all the important modern writers are seriously examined. Many of the articles have become classics, and resulted in revisions of previously accepted views. An important feature of Scrutiny, still of great interest, is the book review section, where many of the important books of the time, and some of the pretentious ones too, were reviewed as they appeared.