Scrutiny: A Quarterly Review Vol. 2 1933-34

Scrutiny was first issued quarterly from Cambridge between 1932 and 1953, the principal editor throughout being Dr Leavis. It is now recognized as a formative influence on English intellectual and cultural life worthy to rank with the great reviews of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This 2008 reissue is of the 1963 combined set, including a final volume containing an important Retrospect by Dr Leavis and a substantial analytical index. Scrutiny offers an almost complete critical history of English literature from Chaucer to the mid-twentieth century. Medieval literature, Shakespeare, the seventeenth-century poets, Pope, Dryden, Johnson, the great romantics, the Victorians, and nearly all the important modern writers are seriously examined. Many of the articles have become classics, and resulted in revisions of previously accepted views. An important feature of Scrutiny, still of great interest, is the book review section, where many of the important books of the time, and some of the pretentious ones too, were reviewed as they appeared.

Volume 2 No. 1 June, 1933: A Cure for Amnesia; Revaluations (I): John Webster; Festivals of Fire, Section II; Evaluations (II): Croce; English Tradition and Idiom; The French Novel of To-day; 'Hero and Leader,'; Comments and Reviews; 'This Poetical Renascence,'; Songs of Experience, Words for Music Perhaps; Dunbar and the 'Scottish renaissance,'; Donne Not an Elizabethan, The Oxford Book of Sixteenth Century Verse; Sixteen Bobs'-Worth of Culture, The English Muse; The Lost Leader, A Study of Wordsworth; Reading About Art; Dostoevsky or Dickens? Light in August; 'Quicunque Vult...,' Essays in Order; In Job's Balances, reviewed by Michael Oakeshott; A Realist Looks at Democracy and If the Blind Lead; Arnold Bennett: American Version, Dreiser and the Land of the Free; Short Notices; Volume 2 No. 2 September, 1933: XXX Cantos of Ezra Pound; Milton's Verse; Scrutiny of Examinations; To Maecenas, a Poem; Will Economics Follow the Robbins Road?; Mr Kitchin on the Insignificance of Economics; Comments and Reviews; 'Our Serious Weeklies,'; Flank-Rubbing and Criticism; 'The Machine Unchained'; Art and the Negative Impulses, Voyage au Bout de la Nuit; Joyce and 'The Revolution of the Word'; Canons of Giant Art; Battles Long Ago, Conquistador; Literary Quotation and Allusion, and Plagiarism; 'Go to the Professors!'; The Christian Renaissance; Film; Moscow Dialogues, etc.; Good Intentions in Education, The Educational Frontier; Short Notices; Volume 2 No. 3 December, 1933: On Metaphysical Poetry; French Literary Periodicals; Prospectus for a Weekly; The Criticism of William Empson; The Significance of Economics Thus Conceived; Foot-Note to the Above; Sonnet by Gongora and Translation; Revaluations (II): The Poetry of Pope; Comments and Reviews; The Essayist at Large; Mr Eliot at Harvard, The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism; The Latest Yeats; Henryson, Chaucer and the 'Scottish Language,'; The Case of Mr Pound, Active Anthology; Lytton Strachey; Towards Standards of Criticism; Gog-Magog; The First Lord Melchett; Aspects of the Rise of Economic Individualism; Mr. Christopher Dawson, a note; Social Eddies, Recent Social Trends in the United States; The Rigour of the Game, The Dynamics of Education; Social Development in Young Children; Eddington, Jeans and Sullivan; War: Can the Intelligent Stop It?; Notes on Contributors; Volume 2 No. 4 March, 1934: Editorial; Revaluations (III): Burns; The Scientific Best Seller; The Irony of Swift; What Shall We Teach?; Fleet Street and Pierian Roses; Comments and Reviews; Art for the Common Reader; Music and the Community; Life's Old Boy, Lessons from the Varsity of Life; Change in the Farm; Changing Emphasis in Anthropology; Madelin's Le Consulat et L'Empir; Satire, The Poems of Charles Churchill; Sense and Poetry; Contemporary Literature and Social Revolution; Middleton Murry's Blake; Elizabethan Prose.