None is thought to have a distinguished prose style or toreflect a concern with the unities and economies of formal con-struction that modern criticism seeks in great works of ar

n fact, what all of these texts share, from the perspective of mod-ern criticism, is a certain set of defects that excludes them fromthe ranks of the great masterpieces: an absence of finely delineatedcharacters, a lack of verisimilitude in the story line, an excessivereliance on plot, and a certain sensationalism in the events por-trayed.