Structuralism has greatly enhanced the explanatory power of literary critiscim, but often at the expense of alienating and excluding the common reader by the difficulty of its concepts and the unfamiliarity of its jargon. The essays and review articles gathered in this volume represent the author’s attempt to assimilate the influence of structuralism without paying the proce of incomprehensibility to all but a small group of initiates. David Lodge is actively involved in university teaching, academic criticism, literary journalism and novel writing; these essays reflect his concern to preserve the connection and continuity between these different discourses.

          The authors and topics discussed range from Thomas Hardy to Tom Wolfe and from the poetics of fiction to the poetry of Psychobabble. Several of the essays directly apply to structuralist methods of analysis, but the collection as a whole aims to demonstrate the possibility of working with structuralism in the sense of working alongside it, recognizing its existence as a fact of intellectual life without being totally dominated by it.