I do not know whether contemporary readers will find this collection sublimely au courant or ridiculously archaic. Here are the splendors of reader response, reception criticism, intertextuality, awareness of covert political statement, “new historical” breadth of non-literary knowledge, family history, impatience with authoritarian received opinion, significant recovery of the underworld of letters, and, in the final essay, innovation that spurns the shackles of footnotes, manfully leaps the barriers of proof, and embraces the ample body of Dame Speculation. Here too, though, is a stubborn insistence on relevant historical grounding, testing of hypotheses with evidence rather than self-affirming preconceptions, the primacy of a shaping author who at his best knows reasonably well what he is doing, and who with unspoken eloquence convinces me not to impose my values upon him, but to let him and his culture speak for themselves if I am clever enough to awake the dormant past.

Given such hopeless, or perhaps hopeful, indeterminacy and binary opposition, I thought it best to correct only obvious errors in the following essays, while no doubt overlooking many of which I was not aware. I have accordingly resisted the temptation of making substantive changes and of quarreling with myself. It would have been rude to usurp a position for which so many will feel qualified.