Leavis sought an academic elite to police moral literary judgment

Evidence

Amis’s brand of rationalism, such as it is, owes less to the classic Cartesian model than to that same earnest English offshoot we have already seen. “The Voice of the Lonely Crowd” at one point interrupts its excoriation of the religious mindset to meander off into the byways of personal reminiscence and the annals of literary criticism. In the same central segment where Amis invokes Shelley, he describes two previous attempts to corral literature into yielding an ideological message. The first was F. R. Leavis’s call for an academic elite to promote the true judgment of literary texts—a judgment that was, as we have seen, taken to have a moral dimension. Famously, central to this process was the creation of the “Great Tradition,” the canon of revered literary works, never extensive but reflecting Leavis’s preference for a direct style and residually Puritan moral seriousness. — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 99

Categorization

• XREF: The Great Tradition canon and its moral seriousness parallel the Puritan-moral lens through which the reader reads Naqvi’s and Hamid’s novels as evidence.