Within the last two decades Ambrose Bierce has begun to attract the scholarly attention his work deserves. For example, Brigid Brophy remarked in 1973 that those who were ignorant of literary history were hailing postmodern writers for their startling innovations, unaware of the fact that Bierce had done--and done better--the same kind of thing a century ago. Brophy's aperçu holds not only for Bierce's fiction but for his methodological works as well. Thus the distinction between criticism and literary theory which is so marked a feature of the contemporary intellectual scene is one that Bierce had already made. Since he eschewed the former to concentrate on the latter at a time when it had not yet become a flourishing industry, his writings on that subject attracted little attention in his own day. Now, however, it is time to recognize the sound theoretical basis on which Bierce's short...