ABSTRACT
A few years ago, an English critic published a book on the modern English novel with the bleak title of The Withered Branch. The lines of development in the two countries ceased to run parallel in the second phase of the novel, the period of doctrinaire naturalism, but they curved back toward the parallel in the third phase, with the common response to the catastrophe of the First World War and the fragmentation of the traditional social and intellectual structure. The novel of ideas, in turn, has demonstrated anew the uniqueness of the novel form, and the pointlessness of the 'classical' criticism whose terms of reference are so frequently borrowed from the other arts. One of the most prominent ideas embedded in the novel throughout its history has been the idea of society, which the English novelist often continues to treat in the realistic novel of symbolic incident, and the American with a desiccated, debased naturalism.
