Unlike the literature it marshals as its subject, literary criticism frequently finds itself in the position of having to defend its existence, of taking breaks from dealing with fiction and poetry in order to deal with itself. Wordsworth, himself an elite critic, considered criticism an “inglorious employment.” Most writers resent critics the way criminals resent judges. A critic’s pen, though, is not a gavel only; judging is just one component of what he does.

What does he do? Here’s Northrop Frye in 1961: “The critic’s function is to interpret every work of literature in the light of all the literature he knows, to keep constantly struggling to understand what literature as a whole is all about.” Frye’s term “function” puts you in mind of Matthew Arnold’s authoritative 1865 essay “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time,” in which Arnold concedes that “the critical power is of lower rank than the creative,” but “the elements with which the creative power works are ideas.” The best critics supply those ideas, which in turn help forge what Arnold dubs “the moment,” the perceptual milieu, “the intellectual situation of which the creative power can profitably avail itself.” The artist’s daemon rises and thrives only “when criticism has done its work” of generating “a current of true and fresh ideas.” Cleanth Brooks, channeling Arnold in 1951, was more succinct: “Healthy criticism and healthy creation do tend to go hand in hand.” In a very real sense, literature doesn’t fully live until criticism completes it.

For nearly four decades, Cynthia Ozick has been among the most vigorous critics in the land. Across six collections of critical nonfiction—including her latest, Critics, Monsters, Fanatics, and Other Literary Essays—she wields an apprehension of uncommon exactitude and style. Hers is a criticism of nourishing potency that finds equal footing with the literature it seeks to augment. Reading her you understand immediately how criticism can itself soar with art, and how the critical essay well done is its own best argument for being.

Whether by denigrating the dud term “Kafkaesque,” parsing Lionel Trilling’s noble ineptitude as a novelist, or considering how the Shoah should and should not be depicted in literature, Ozick is always affirming the role and responsibility of the critic. Leading by example, by robust doing, has rarely looked better. What’s more, her prepotent aptitude as a novelist and storywriter—she has authored eleven books of fiction—works to lend the job title “novelist-critic” some of the same prestige as “poet-critic,” its more reverberant counterpart. In this, Ozick is kin not to those critics she has helped bring into focus—Harold Bloom, George Steiner, Gershom Scholem among them—but to those critical-creative titans of twentieth century British literature: Virginia Woolf, E. M. Forster, D. H. Lawrence, Aldous Huxley.

CRITICS, MONSTERS, FANATICS, AND OTHER LITERARY ESSAYS, by Cynthia Ozick Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, pp. 224, $25

Informed by her exquisite temperament—Oscar Wilde believed that temperament was the key to any strong critic—Ozick’s essays steadfastly ask the crucial questions, not only How did a writer or book or idea come to be? but What is the literary mind? What is literature? She responds to literature in the only way that really matters: With a surging reciprocity, a consummate force and flooding of her selfhood. She advocates for no theory, no obfuscating unliterary agenda, and she has no time for those who do, the academics “destined to vanish like the fog they evoke.” Literature is pleasure—it is beauty and revelation and wisdom, or it is not literature. Criticism matters because “envisioning society whole by way of contemplation of its parts, the delicate along with the tumultuous, the weighty together with the trifling, is how a culture can learn to imagine its own face.”