ABSTRACT
The important developments in the theory and practice of criticism between 1945 and 1968 are best understood in terms of emergent challenges to the dominance of New Criticism and its English counterpart, the Leavisite current. The Victorian novelists, in fact, benefited particularly from this flourishing of novel-criticism and made up in the 1960s what their reputations had lost in the 1920s. For the New Critics in the United States, and for the Leavis group in England, the immediate post-war period was one of triumphant consolidation. The New-Critical approach had the effect of dissolving the specific moral and emotional effect of a Shakespeare tragedy into merely intellectual platitudes in which the tragic element is forgotten altogether. The new favour in which novelistic realism found itself among British critics contrasted oddly with the enthusiasm for 'romance' in North America, encouraged by Frye and others. A more spectacular affront to the position of Christian criticism came from a gentile atheist, William Empson.
