`The critic explicitly acknowledges his dependence on prior words that make his word a kind of answer. He calls to other texts "that they might answer him."'
Geoffrey Hartman
is the first book devoted to an exploration of the `intellectual poetry' of the critic who, whether or not he `represents the future of the profession', is a unique and major voice in twentieth-century criticism.
Professor Atkins explains clearly Hartman's key ideas and places his work in the contexts of Romanticism and Judaism on which he has written extensively. In
he provides a valuable introduction to a major critical voice who has called into question our assumptions about the distinction between commentary and imaginative literature.