A comprehensive overview of the modern critical tradition in the early twentieth century, first published in 2000.

Introduction Louis Menand and Lawrence Rainey; Part I. The Modernists: 1. T. S. Eliot Louis Menand; 2. Ezra Pound A. Walton Litz and Lawrence Rainey; 3. Gertrude Stein Steven Meyer; 4. Virginia Woolf Maria di Battista; 5. Wyndham Lewis Vincent Sherry; 6. W. B. Yeats Lucy McDiarmid; 7. The Harlem renaissance Michael North; Part II. The New Critics: 8. I. A. Richards Paul H. Fry; 9. The Southern New Critics Mark Jancovitch; 10. William Empson Michael Wood; 11. R. P. Blackmur Michael Wood; 12. Kenneth Burke Eugene Goodheart; 13. Yvor Winters Donald Davie; Part III. The Critic and The Institutions of Culture: 14. Criticism and the Academy Wallace Martin; 15. The critic and society, 1900-50 Morris Dickstein; 16. The British 'man of letters' and the rise of the professional Josephine M. Guy and Ian Small; 17. F. R. Leavis Michael Bell; 18. Lionel Trilling Harvey Teres; 19. Poet-critics Lawrence Lipking; 20. Criticism of fiction Michael Levenson; Bibliography; Index.