Strange affiliations: Germaine Greer, F.R. Leavis, and a literary critique of modernity

Abstract

Germaine Greer is generally considered to be a contrary figure whose disparate and contradictory oeuvre can only be explained with reference to her idiosyncratic temperament. While Greer rose to fame as a feminist polemicist, she initially trained as a literary critic and has continued to write literary criticism. To analyse her oeuvre as that of a literary critic heavily influenced by the themes and methodologies of Leavisite criticism is to expose the similarities between her earlier and later works, and to shed light on her divergence from feminist criticism. Leavisite criticism provided Greer with a mandate and a framework for a critique of modernity that she then adapted to a feminist politics. In Culture and Society Raymond Williams links Leavisite literary criticism to a long English tradition of social criticism, and demonstrates how the themes and concerns of a Romantic anti-modernity can produce divergent and contradictory political positions. Germaine Greer is one more strange affiliation to this tradition of literary and political criticism.