This dissertation seeks to demonstrate at least one important way in which three major American novelists at the turn from the nineteenth century into the twentieth - Henry James, Edith Wharton and Willa Cather - impacted critical and literary thought through their theories and fiction. They adhered to the premise that the sister arts furnished a critical language and rubric by which to assess various elements of culture, including fiction. All three authors borrowed images, metaphors, and patterns from the plastic arts - painting, sculpture, music, the dramatic arts, architecture - which allowed them to fill a critical vacuum by supplying them with the vocabulary to describe, qualify, assess, and render visible basic elements of their own craft. (Dissertation Abstracts)