It’s about time that someone put the literary critic James Wood in historical context. (Comparisons to Edmund Wilson don’t count.) His new book, How Fiction Works, has been getting all kinds of attention in the usual literary venues. Contrary to what some reviewers and interviewers appear to believe, Wood’s is only one of many possible critical approaches, and it’s one that critics of times past would not necessarily recognize.

Rohan Maitzen at Novel Readings recently finished reading How Fiction Works. In a detailed analysis that I can’t do full justice to here, Maitzen scrutinizes Wood’s “post-Jamesian formulations.” For instance, Wood argues that we read fiction “because it pleases us, moves us, is beautiful, and so on—because it is alive and we are alive. “

Maitzen responds:

Well, maybe, but not everybody, and not all the time: for instance, most of the Victorian critics I have been editing for my Broadview anthology would not have recognized this highly aestheticized motive for novel reading. Is it fair, or even sensible, to say that they were simply wrong? Or to ignore how the formal developments of the Victorian novel furthered ends not adequately respected by Wood’s post-Jamesian formulations? … “Progress!” he exclaims after a quotation from Proust: “In Fielding and Defoe, even in the much richer Cervantes, revelation of this altering kind occurs at the level of plot.” But were Fielding and Defoe trying to do what Proust did and failing?

Good question.