DESCRIPTION:

My book raises fascinating questions: why cannot we tell easily what gives us reading pleasure; why does classic writing discourage single-minded responses; how did narrative fiction arise out of other literary kinds; why did eighteenth-century poets, playwrights and novelists feel obliged to recall Renaissance humanism; similarly, why did authors of the following centuries perpetuate the dialectic of their forbears; why, again, should literary history aim at interdisciplinarity given the sister arts of painting, music and poesis; why is narrative prose formal and informal, aesthetic yet colloquial; why, finally, is it inevitable that the deliberate unfolding of literary texts should be challenged to be of at least two minds?