have consulted numerous colleagues in England and America. Were
my study to have included criticism of the American novel, I would
have surely included Richard Chase The American Novel and Its
Tradition ( 1957); D. H. Lawrence Studies in Classic American
Literature ( 1923), and the work of Edmund Wilson. Were my study to
have attempted a survey of important recent work on the novel, it
would have included a discussion of feminist criticism.

The tradition of humanistic novel criticism should be understood as
a coherent, but heterogeneous, aesthetic. I shall examine the major
books of each critic -- the books that really make a difference -- in terms
of their response to prior and contemporary literary theory and
practice, as well as to their cultural milieu. Each critical work will be
examined as an instance of a particular critical approach and for its
critical significance to us. Critical texts, like novels, enact in their form
and technique their values. I have sought to enact in my discussions the
eclecticism, pluralism, and open-mindedness which I think is the
essence of an enlightened humanism. Thus I examine each book
according to its own aesthetic and intellectual assumptions before
stepping back to consider its limitations and contribution. I am
interested in how the various approaches of these critics create and
reflect the aesthetic, moral, and intellectual concepts of the culture
which produced them. Even as they powerfully respond to the works
they examine, our critics often reveal their own desperate search for
order, within both traditional and recalcitrant texts, as a response to the
historical chaos in the twentieth century. (Is it surprising that most of
the critics I discuss enact in their critical practice the criteria and
standards they admire in novelists?)

The work of Barthes, Derrida, and their followers has taught us to be
wary of simple explanations that privilege thematic unity and to
inquire into how literary works signify. But many of us are uncomfort-
able with their attack on voice, mimesis, and the effort to discover
reasonably accurate interpretations. We have not addressed our
critical tradition as a subject of serious inquiry, and that may be why
recent criticism has conquered the ground so easily. The challenge of
structuralism and post-structuralism has often sent traditional Anglo-
American critics to the barricades, but little effort has been made to
define what principles have been employed to speak about fiction in
England and America. That the humanistic tradition of novel criticism
has in fact produced a corpus of interpretive material remarkable in its
quality and responsive to the literature it addresses is prima facie
evidence for the force of its intellectual and methodological assump-

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