The Minority Press

The Minority Press was a short-lived British publishing house founded in 1930 by Gordon Fraser (1911–1981) while he was an undergraduate student at St. John's College (Cambridge). Fraser was an undergraduate student of F. R. Leavis. The Minority Press was essentially the book publishing arm of the Leavis camp of literary criticism. The Press published a series of six pamphlets, several reprint editions with new introductions, and a few longer essays on literary topics.

The first publication of the Press was Leavis' manifesto, Mass Civilization and Minority Culture (1930). Most of the other initial authors were fellow Cambridge students. Its last publication was in 1933.

At least some of the titles were printed by W. Heffer and Sons, Ltd. Cambridge, England.

The name of the press comes from Leavis' self-positioning as a literary critic upholding a minority - rather than a mass culture - stance; against an "anything goes" pluralism. Leavis wrote that

The potentialities of human experience in any age are realized by only a tiny minority, and the important poet is important because he belongs to this (and has also, of course, the power of communication) ... Almost all of us live by routine, and are not fully aware of what we feel; or, if that seems paradoxical, we do not express to ourselves an account of our possibilities of experience ... The poet is unusually sensitive, unusually aware, more sincere and more himself than the ordinary man can be. He knows what he feels and knows what he is interested in. He is a poet because his interest in his experience is not separable from his interest in words."

"In any period it is upon a very small minority that the discerning appreciation of art and literature depends: it is (apart from cases of the simple and familiar) only a few who are capable of unprompted, first-hand judgment. They are still a small minority, though a larger one, who are capable of endorsing such first-hand judgment by genuine personal response. ….. The minority capable not only of appreciating Dante, Shakespeare, Donne, Baudelaire, Hardy (to take major instances) but of recognising their latest successors constitute the consciousness of the race (or of a branch of it) at a given time. For such capacity does not belong merely to an isolated aesthetic realm: it implies responsiveness to theory as well as to art, to science and philosophy in so far as these may affect the sense of the human situation and of the nature of life. Upon this minority depends our power of profiting by the finest human experience of the past; they keep alive the subtlest and most perishable parts of tradition. Upon them depend the implicit standards that order the finer living of an age, the sense that this is worth more than that, this rather than that is the direction in which to go, that the centre is here rather than there. In their keeping, to use a metaphor that is metonymy also and will bear a good deal of pondering, is the language, the changing idiom, upon which fine living depends, and without which distinction of spirit is thwarted and incoherent, By culture I mean the use of such a language. (pp. 1-2)

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