During the course of his career Lodge has published several books of literary criticism and many reviews and articles. Most of his criticism is concerned with fiction, and often reflects his own interests and preoccupations as a novelist. The combination of poet and critic is familiar in literary history; the creative and critical faculties are closely related in the process of composition, since this involves not only inspiration but the capacity to test and assess what has been written, to revise and if necessary to delete. Novelists have less often been active critics, perhaps because their art is so demanding of time and effort. But Henry James, who used to rewrite other people's novels in his head when he was reading them, was a good critic, as were Virginia Woolf and E. M. Forster. And so is Lodge. He has often written as a literary journalist, with a general educated readership in mind. For many years, however, he was also a university teacher and produced the kind of academic criticism which attempts to be systematic, is specialized in its approach and terminology, and is directed in the first instance at other professionals. (Though even when writing in an academic context Lodge has usually retained the lucidity of his journalistic prose.)

His first critical book, Language of Fiction (1966),was published at a time when criticism of the novel was still undeveloped compared with what became known in the 1940s as the ‘New Criticism’, which extended and systematized the work of T. S. Eliot, I. A. Richards and William Empson in the close reading of poetry. In the 1960s serious discussion of the novel as a literary form had not developed much beyond the pioneering work of James, Forster and Percy Lubbock earlier in the century. Language of Fiction is essentially an attempt to apply the New Criticism to the reading of novels; its underlying assumption is that a novel is just as much a unique order of words as a poem, and has to be approached by a close analytical attention to its language. The first part of the book contains a series of succinct but inconclusive discussions of current ideas about the relations between literature and language, drawn from linguistics as well as literary scholarship.