I shall be discussing the theory and method of Anglo-American novel
criticism in order to understand the way that the novel has been read,
taught, and written about since 1900 in England and America.
Implicitly and explicitly, I shall be arguing for the importance of an
ideology of reading which I call the Humanistic Heritage. My hope is
to contribute to a dialogue between traditional formal criticism that
has dominated Anglo-American criticism and recent criticism,
including structuralism, deconstruction, and Marxism.

In order to be able to make comparisons, my focus is on books that
treat the same subject: the English novel from Defoe through Joyce. I
shall discuss the trends in novel criticism in England, America, and the
English-speaking world since 1900. I have selected major texts which
illustrate those trends and which contribute to the Anglo-American
aesthetic of the novel. Henry James's fiction criticism and Percy Lubbock's
The Craft of Fiction ( 1921); E. M. Forster Aspects of the
Novel ( 1927); F. R. Leavis The Great Tradition ( 1948); Dorothy Van Ghent's
The English Novel: Form and Function ( 1953); Ian Watt The
Rise of the Novel ( 1957); Erich Auerbach Mimesis ( 1953); Northrop Frye's
Anatomy of Criticism ( 1957); Wayne Booth The Rhetoric of
Fiction ( 1961); Frank Kermode The Sense of an Ending ( 1967); the
Marxist novel criticism of Arnold Kettle and Raymond Williams; and
J. Hillis Miller The Form of Victorian Fiction ( 1968) and Fiction and
Repetition ( 1982). I have included Auerbach and Frye because,
although addressing the English novel less centrally, they have written
theoretical studies that have had a major influence on novel criticism.
And I discuss Williams and Kettle because Marxist principles have
played a significant if subsidiary role in the criticism of the English
novel.

While one might quarrel with some of my choices, I believe that
these are the books that have been most influential in the reading and
teaching of the English novel. I have taken no systematic survey, but I

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