“In fashioning English into a serious discipline, these men and women [F. R. Leavis, Q. D. Roth (later Leavis), and I. A. Richards] blasted apart the assumptions of the pre-war upper-class generation. No subsequent movement within English studies has come near to recapturing the courage and radicalism of their stand. In the early 1920s it was desperately unclear why English was worth studying at all; by the early 1930s it had become a question of why it was worth wasting your time on anything else. English was not only a subject worth studying, but the supremely civilizing pursuit, the spiritual essence of the social formation. Far from constituting some amateur or impressionistic enterprise, English was an arena in which the most fundamental questions of human existence — what it meant to be a person, to engage in significant relationship with others, to live from the vital centre of the most essential values — were thrown into vivid relief and made the object of the most intensive scrutiny. Scrutiny was the title of the critical journal launched in 1932 by the Leavises, which has yet to be surpassed in its tenacious devotion to the moral centrality of English studies, their crucial relevance to the quality of social life as a whole. Whatever the ‘failure’ or ‘success’ of Scrutiny, however, one might argue the toss between the anti-Leavisian prejudice of the literary establishment and the waspishness of the Scrutiny movement itself, the fact remains that English students in England today are ‘Leavisites’ whether they know it or not, irremediably altered by that historic intervention. There is no more need to be a card-carrying Leavisite today than there is to be a card-carrying Copernican: that current has entered the bloodstream of English studies in England as Copernicus reshaped our astronomical beliefs, has become a form of spontaneous critical wisdom as deep-seated as our conviction that the earth moves round the sun. That the ‘Leavis debate’ is effectively dead is perhaps the major sign of Scrutiny’s victory.”
— Terry Eagleton, “The Rise of English,” Literary Theory: An Introduction
