Reputation
Leavis' uncompromising zeal in promoting his views of literature drew mockery from some literary quarters. Leavis (as Simon Lacerous) and Scrutiny (as Thumbscrew) were satirized by Frederick Crews in the chapter Another Book to Cross off your List of his lampoon of literary criticism theory The Pooh Perplex A Student Casebook. In her novel Possession, A. S. Byatt wrote of one of her characters (Blackadder) "Leavis did to Blackadder what he did to serious students: he showed him the terrible, the magnificent importance and urgency of English literature and simultaneously deprived him of any confidence in his own capacity to contribute to or change it."
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Famous quotes containing the word reputation:
“Our culture, therefore, must not omit the arming of the man. Let him hear in season, that he is born into the state of war, and that the commonwealth and his own well-being require that he should not go dancing in the weeds of peace, but warned, self- collected, and neither defying nor dreading the thunder, let him take both reputation and life in his hand, and, with perfect urbanity, dare the gibbet and the mob by the absolute truth of his speech, and the rectitude of his behaviour.”
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—French Proverb. Quoted in Dictionary of Similes, ed. Frank J. Wilstach (1916)