As a critic of the novel, Leavis’s main tenet was that great novelists show an intense moral interest in life, and that this moral interest determines the nature of their form in fiction (Bilan 115). Authors within this tradition were all characterised by a serious or responsible attitude to the moral complexity of life and included Jane Austen, George Eliot, Henry James, Joseph Conrad, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Charles Dickens, and D.H. Lawrence. In The Great Tradition Leavis attempted to set out his conception of the proper relation between form/composition and moral interest/art and life. This proved to be a contentious issue in the critical world, as Leavis refused to separate art from life, or the aesthetic or formal from the moral. He insisted that the great novelist’s preoccupation with form was a matter of responsibility towards a rich moral interest, and that works of art with a limited formal concern
would always be of lesser quality.

Despite being somewhat discredited, Leavis's influence in the establishment of canons and the study of literature has been immense through the creation of a literary value system. Influenced by T.S.Eliot, he attacked late Victorian poetry and celebrated the work of modern poets such as T.S.Eliot, Ezra Pound and Gerard Manley Hopkins in New Bearings in English Poetry (1932) and looked at C17th Century poetry in Revaluation: Tradition and Development in English Poetry (1936). Later Leavis examined the novel, and established it as a serious topic of academic study and critique. The Great Tradition (1948) argues that Jane Austen, George Eliot, Henry James, and Joseph Conrad were the greatest novelists and that D.H.Lawrence was the only contemporary heir to this tradition, whilst dismissing Thomas Hardy. Though he looked to other authors in Anna Karenina and Other Essays (1967) and Dickens the Novelist (1970). His collection of essays The Common Pursuit (1952) reveal the breadth of his work.
Developing the earlier ideas of Matthew Arnold and Henry James, whose arguments mixed culture with morality, Leavis expressed his opinions with a moral severity, asserting that literature represented life and texts were to be assessed according to the content and the author's moral position. This was to be done through ‘close reading' without any knowledge of social or historical context, the structure of ideas or attending to stylistic and semiotic considerations as later advocated by Roland Barthes. This approach was developed by I. A. Richards in America, who insisted students come to a ‘true judgement' of a text by studying it in complete isolation without knowledge of even author or date it was written. This became known as 'practical criticism' or 'New Criticism'. While lauding intuition and attacking theory, Queenie and F.R.Leavis's approach relied on an the construction of a tradition, based on the nostalgic belief in a ‘healthy' and ‘vital' form of ‘essential Englishness' now lost and to be once
again found in good literature

مدري حسيت هالكلام حلو بس مدري عن نظرياته تكلمي بشكل عام اذا مالقيتي ابد.