"Leavisism isolates certain key aspects of mass culture for special discussion. Popular fiction, for example, is condemned for offering addictive forms of ;compensation' and 'distraction':

This form of compensation...is the very reverse of recreation, in that it tends, not to strengthen and refresh the addict for living, but to increase his unfitness by habituating him to weak evasions, to the refusal to face reality at all (Leavis and Thompson, 1977: 100).

Q.D. Leavis (1978) refers to such reading as 'a drug addiction to fiction' (152), and for those readers of romantic fiction it can lead to 'a habit of fantasying [which] will lead to maladjustment in actual life' (54). Self-abuse is one thing, but there is worse: their addiction 'helps to make a social atmosphere unfavorable to the aspirations of the minority.'"

"The growing importance placed on leisure is seen as a sign of this loss [of quality of work and organic community]. Whereas in the past a worker lived in his or her work, he or she now works in order to live outside his or her work."

"What we are presented with is not a historical account, but a lterary myth to draw attention to the nature of our supposed loss: 'the memory of the old order must be the chief incitement towards a new' (Leavis and Thompson, 1977: 97)."