Includes bibliographical references (p. 201-207) and index.

What is a reader? -- What is a writer? -- Breakfast with the Cumaean sibyl, or, A poet's education -- Don't know much about history : sameness versus originality in poetry -- Is there a Southern poetry? -- Poet as pitchman : James Dickey, American poet -- Emerson, Poe, and American criticism in the nineteenth century -- Slouching toward Baltimore : twentieth-century literary criticism -- What is a critic? -- Mr. Post-everything : the life and times of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch -- "Thing you can't explain" : theory and the unconscious -- Reviewers in the popular press and their impact on the novel -- M.L. Rosenthal and our life in poetry -- Ghosts and gadabouts : gothic and picaresque in the American novel -- Born in the marketplace : the emergence of the American novel -- It isn't about America, it is America : Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn -- What is a book?