Presenting the argument that contemporary criticism has lost its moral authority (and blaming modernism for that loss), Goodheart focuses on contending spiritual views. In particular he analyzes the dialectic between the Protestant-inspired humanist tradition of Carlyle, Arnold, Ruskin, and Lawrence and the decay of Catholicism represented by Joyce, Eliot, and others. The author argues that literary modernism renders suspect all privileged positions, and thereby undermines the critical art. To support this theory, he analyzes the work of a number of nineteenth century and contemporary novelists, poets, and critics. Chapter titles are modernism and the critical spirit; English social criticism and the spirit of reformation; the reality of disillusion in T.S. Eliot; the organic society of F.R. Leavis; a postscript to the higher criticism: the case of Philip Rieff; the formalist avant-garde and the autonomy of aesthetic values; aristocrats and Jacobins: the happy few in "The Charterhouse of Parma"; Flaubert and the powerlessness of art; and the blasphemy of Joycean art. (FL)