Collection of 15 essays previously published, 1978-1992, as the Ben Belitt Lectureship series

Introduction: The monologue as conversation / Phillip Lopate -- The uncommon reader / George Steiner -- Divination / Frank Kermode -- To the tally of my soul: Whitman's image of voice / Harold Bloom -- The politics of modern criticism / Denis Donoghue -- The making of a critic / Irving Howe -- The uses of decadence: Wilde, Yeats, Joyce / Richard Ellmann -- Long walk, short life / Bernard Melamud -- Literature and belief: Three "spiritual exercises" / Ben Belitt -- Summations / Saul Bellow -- Magic and spells / Hugh Kenner -- The barber of Kasbeam: Nabokov on cruelty / Richard Rorty -- Collective violence and sacrifice in Shakespeare's Julius Caesar / Rene Girard -- Three in a bed: fiction, morals, and politics / Nadine Gordimer -- Dylan the durable? On Dylan Thomas / Seamus Heaney -- What Henry James knew / Cynthia Ozick

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