Criticism as manifesto versus criticism as science: a new “Battle of the Books” in British modernist literature

Percy Lubbock, Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot are among those critical voices whose works are valuable and still constitute a viable presence in contemporary literary theory and criticism. Some of these critics are writer-critics; others are academic or professional critics. As authors of imaginative writing, some of them follow tradition and remain realists; others defy it and become modernists. Likewise, as literary critics, some of them continue the traditional subjective and combative critical argument; others attempt to be innovative in criticism and develop a more objective, scientific and methodological approach. The aim of the study is to disclose these critical perspectives in the first half of the twentieth century by focusing on Virginia Woolf’s Modern Fiction and Percy Lubbock’s The Craft of Fiction. The writer-critic Woolf condemns her contemporary realists, and praises the experimental fiction of which she is a major exponent, but as a critic she remains in the traditional way subjective, defensive and prescriptive. On the contrary, the critic Lubbock praises the achievement of the nineteenth century realists who made the novel an aesthetically coherent genre, whereas his critical work extends the systemic Jamesian attempt to discuss fiction scientifically in matters of its form and narrative techniques. Thus, this article aims to seek a possible dialogue between the writer-critics of the British modernist literature, and argue that although the writercritics explored in this work show discrepant literary attitudes, examining these writer-critics under the same umbrella might offer one way to unveil and enunciate the conflicting views on literary criticism prevalent in the modernist period in British literature.