[Said's] book is relaxed and discursive, original, immensely learned, fluently written. -- John Bayley New York Times Book Review This striking book...represents an imporant contribution to literary criticism as well as suggesting a new direction for criticism to take. Publishers Weekly It is a pleasure to read someone who not only has studied and thought so carefully but is also beginning to substantiate, as distinct from announcing, a genuinely emergent way of thinking. -- Raymond Williams The Guardian The intellectual excitment of each essay and the enlightening effect of the brilliant thinking and writing of the book as a whole move the reader to the recognition of Said's major contribution to contemporary literary critical theory and practice. English Literature in Transition Provocative and exacting; the essays provoke due interrogation of contemporary literary, and exact from the reader the care and conscientiousness the question at issue warrant...The book issues from a remarkably sharp intelligence, forcing us to face questions and possibilities that literary theorists on the whole prefer not even to raise. -- Denis Donoghue The New Republic
Edward W. Said was University Professor at Columbia University.
Introduction: Secular Criticism 1. The World, the Text, and the Critic 2. Swift's Tory Anarchy 3. Swift as Intellectual 4. Conrad: The Presentation of Narrative 5. On Repetition 6. On Originality 7. roads Taken and Not Taken in Contemporary Criticism 8. Reflections on AMerican "Left" Literary Criticism 9. Criticism Between Culture and System 10. Traveling Theory 11. Raymond Schwab and the Romance of Ideas 12. Islam, Philolgy, and French Culture: Renan and Massignon Conclusion: Religious Criticism Notes Index