For Continuity

UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA LIBRARIES COLLEGE LIBRARY Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2012 with funding from LYRASIS Members and Sloan Foundation http://www.archive.org/details/forcontinuityOOIeav FOR CONTINUITY FOR CONTINUITY By F. R. LEAVIS Essay Index Reprint Series % BOOKS FOR LIBRARIES PRESS FREEPORT, NEW YORK First Published 1933 Reprinted 1968 LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOG CARD NUMBER: 68-54355 PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA . . CONTENTS PAGE Prefatory: Marxism and Cultural Continuity Mass Civilisation and Minority Culture " The Literary Mind 13 " 47 What's Wrong with Criticism ? . 68 Babbitt Buys the World 9i Arnold Bennett: American Version 97 John Dos Passos 102 in D. H. Lawrence D. H. Lawrence and Professor Irving Babbitt 149 "Under which King, Bezonian?' Restatements for Critics Poetical Renascence Joyce and Word" " 176 . " This 160 " 190 The Revolution of the 207 PREFATORY: MARXISM AND CULTURAL CONTINUITY OF book the first component piece, Mass Civilisation and Minority Culture, appeared as a pamphlet three years ago. If I had rewritten it this year the only change would have been that I should have found for it some more recent illustrations: the reasons for insisting on the case it presents are not less strong now than The rest of the book, but for the longer before. essay on D. H. Lawrence, appeared in Scrutiny as articles and reviews, and I do not think it is merely author's vision parental bias that makes me see the following — — them, reprinted together with the first piece, as forming more than a collection. For they all illustrate, develop and enforce, in ways more and less obvious, the same preoccupation and the same argument the preoccupation and the argument of Mass Civilisation and Minority Culture; and, moreover, misunderstanding possible, it seems, when they were separate will be less easy in the book. I have not eliminated the repeated mention of Scrutiny ; that, without a good deal of rewriting, would have been impossible. Indeed, the reminder of the occasional circumstances of production seemed appropriate, since "occasional" in this case intimates not a lack of seriousness and intensity, but the — FOR CONTINUITY 2 and purely theoretical spirit, and such a reminder may, for some readers, com- reverse of an academic plement positively the admission, made at the end of this prefatory note, of disabilities on the plane of theoretical exposition. But perhaps the most common criticism will not be that the preoccupation of the following pages insufficiently consistent, intense is