England is an island, but our language is an ocean: The Great Tradition is exinct, the novel lives

Continuing on yesterday's post/rant about FR Leavis's incredibly limited view of what he archly calls The Great Tradition - granted, yes, he's writing about the Great Tradition in his own very narrow sphere of English literature, writing in I think about 1930? So of course he misses all the great English writers from many cultures and, yes!, social classes who emerged after World War II and yes, by his design, he's writing only about "British" writers (we'll give him Henry James, and TS Eliot as well if he wants him, as long as we can keep Bellow, IB Singer, Alexander Hemon, Jhumpa Lahiri, E Danticot - and all who have settled here and made their literary career in American-English). But how can he dismiss the 18th-century English writers (Austen aside) who established the entire tone for British literature - the struggle for inclusion, recognition by society at large, for successful and happy marriage? How can he dismiss Dickens (Hard Times aside), with his compendious and entertaining and often hilarious view of London and of British culture high and low? What happened for Forster, whose Passage to India (and Howards End as well) meet all of FRL's criteria of greatness of form and welcoming insight into society and culture? And Woolf, and Joyce - has he no patience or ear for the beauty of language and the will to expand literature beyond its known and accepted boundaries? I started a list yesterday of a few types of "greatness" that FRL entirely overlooks, and the list can go on, with many writers appearing in multiple categories (e.g., Proust gives insight into consciousness, philosophy and ideals, view of society, humor, experiment in form, beautiful language, just for starters) Yes, I have expanded beyond the boundaries of English fiction, and why not? England is an island but our language is the ocean. EM Forster said something like English poetry fears no man (or woman?), but English fiction cannot stand up against the greatest in French and Russian. Probably true, but really who cares? If you can’t recognize the greatness of Tolstoy, Dostoyevky, Chekhov (short stories only, but that’s another topic), Flaubert, Proust, Stendahl, andCervantes of course, then why are you even reading this? We are standing on the shoulders of giants and can see far more great novels that FRL could see even in his limited scope – all those mentioned above, and yesterday, and who can we not count among the greatest Kafka, forexample, and Lampedusa?, and Gracia Marquez? And in America what about Roth and Updike and Morrison? The Great Tradition ix extinct; the novel lives.