"Geoffrey Hartman: A Deviant Homage" collects the papers presented at two panels in honor of Geoffrey Hart-man at the North American Society for the Study of Romanticism, August, 2005, in Montreal, Canada. The title is derived from the theme of the conference, "Deviance...

Books The Unmediated Vision: An Interpretation of Wordsworth, Hopkins, Rilke and Valery. Yale Univ.Pr.1954; Harvest ppr. 1966 Andre Malraux. London: Bowes and Bowes; New York: Hilary House 1960 Wordsworth's Poetry 1787-1814. Yale Univ. Pr. 1964; Yale Ppr. 2nd ed. 1967;...

The Fate of Reading is a new selection of Geoffrey Hartman's writings, from work published during the past five years. Many essays resume the themes of an earlier selection, Beyond Formalism …, extending their implications or exacerbating them as the mood of Hartman's mind requires. A reader who does not already know Professor Hartman's work should repair that deficiency before tackling the new book. Otherwise, The Fate of Reading would appear a random miscellany of fugitive piec...

There can be no mistaking the fact that the study of meaning has now been vigorously contested. Some theorists hold that such study is always marred by a simplistic equation of meaning with the mental states of authors before or during the act of composition. A preoccupation with meaning, they say, leads to an undervaluing of conventional elements that are crucial to the way literature is perceived. But that cogent point is in itself no menace to academic business as usual. The real challenge comes from the...

[In "The Fate of Reading and Other Essays"], there emerges a consensus view of a possibly coherent theory of poetics. This is … validated by some extraordinarily deft analyses of Wordsworth, Keats, Collins, Valéry, Goethe and Christopher Smart, and much briefer but equally brilliant illuminations of a number of other writers…. "The Fate of Reading" is much more intensely speculative than ["Beyond Formalism"] and so much more anxious for patterns...