Up to, and more or less including, the D. H. Lawrence book of 1955, [Leavis's] work has a singular coherence. Revaluation and New Bearings mapped out the terrain of English poetry; The Great Tradition and D. H. Lawrence, Novelist did the same for the novel. Leavis's views on teaching were given in Education and the University and in his introduction to Mill on Bentham and Coleridge, and the latter also indicated his line on 19th-century English thought. Any lacunae remaining were filled by the sparkling essays of For Continuity and The Common Pursuit. Even after 1955, the discussion of prose fiction was further extended by such studies as those of individual works by George Eliot, Mark Twain, Henry James and Joseph Conrad which are found in Anna Karenina and other essays….

Around 1963, however, a new era had begun. It heralded Leavis's retirement from lecturing at Cambridge and was marked by...