Erin Symons

My project examines the influence of early-twentieth-century literary criticism on the novelistic practice of authors including Ian McEwan, Kazuo Ishiguro and Julian Barnes. By tracing the transmission of T. S. Eliot and F. R. Leavis’s ideas of literary ‘value’ and ‘tradition’ into postwar university English Schools, Creative Writing Departments and the wider literary-intellectual culture of the late twentieth century, it seeks to understand stylistic developments in the modern British novel in relation to the ‘revolution’ in criticism that occurred at Cambridge in the 1920s and 1930s. More broadly, it argues that developments in literary studies in this period had much farther ranging cultural consequences than current accounts suggest.