The twentieth century has been blessed with a number of excellent artists who have also been significant critics. The best of these have gone beyond the kind of activity which consists of mere apology or justification for their own work and have explored major questions of import to society as a whole in both their imaginative and discursive writings. Typical of this concern at its most intense among writers and critics of fiction is the work of Caroline Gordon, who has been emphatic in her insistence on the close unity between technique and vision, craft and moral implications in a work of art.

In an important study published in 1961, Wayne Booth takes Miss Gordon to task for arguing in favor of "showing" and against "telling." He is evidently an admirer of her stories; but he implies that her critical position is too narrow and arbitrary, too narrowly determined...