Author Description

Review...we have here a treasury of essays whose authors, instead of sitting pat on some theoretical position, allow the text to 'move them differently', both in the usual sense and in the literal one of taking the text, with its power to elicit and chasten response, as a fixed point against which to measure change in their own relationship to it, and as a fulcrum against which to push forward their own development as critics. There is a general murmur of ice breaking and water running. -- Bernard Harrison, E.E. Ericksen Professor of Philosophy, The University of Utah Product Description The essays in this collection combine fresh interpretations of well known literary texts by leading critics (such as Frank Kermode, Sandra Gilbert, J. Hillis Miller, Barbara Hardy, Tony Tanner, and many others), those critics' retrospective thinking about their individual professional development, and an implicit communal reflection on changes on the critical and cultural scene of our times. It shows a transition from closed systems to more open configurations and from a view of texts as autonomous to complex interactions between text and context. Within the latter framework, ethical, social, ideological, political (feminist, post-colonial), psychoanalytic, and biographical dimensions of various texts are explored.