Surveying the state of American letters in 1928, Edmund Wilson complained that he had searched in vain for a "genuine literary criticism" that did more than simply "let out a whoop" for the books it approved of. Where was the criticism that dealt seriously with "ideas and art"? Where was the writer who was "at once first-rate and nothing but a literary critic"? Wilson feared that such a creature did not exist - at least not in America (things were different in France, where writers imbibed the "language of criticism" with their mothers' milk).
You can read the rest of my review of James Wood's splendid new book How Fiction Works in the New Statesman.