The humanistic heritage of James and Lubbock - the emergence of an aesthetic of the novel; the importance of E.M.Forster's "Aspects of the Novel"; privileging literary criticism - the legacy of F.R.Leavis's "The Great Tradition"; "the idea embodied in the cosmology" - the significance of Dorothy van Ghent's "The English Novel - Form and Function ; "formal realism" - the importance of Ian Watt's "The Rise of the Novel"; two major voices of the fifties - Northrop Frye's "Anatomy of Criticism" and Erich Auerbach's "Mimesis"; reading as a moral activity - the importance of Wayne Booth's "The Rhetoric of Fiction"; the consolation of form - the theoretical and historical significance of Frank Kermode's "The Sense of an Ending"; Marxist criticism of the English novel - Arnold Kettle's "An Introduction to the English Novel" and Raymond Williams' "The English Novel from Dickens to Lawrence"; the fictional theory of J.Hillis Miller - humanism, phenomenology and deconstruction in "The form of Victorian Fiction" and "Fiction and Repetition".

This is an examination of the principle works of Anglo-American novel criticism, defining the values, method and concepts that these works have in common and advancing a defence of Anglo-American humanistic criticism and the ideas proposed by Structuralism, Marxism and deconstruction.