ABSTRACT
Several years after it was published, an editor began encouraging the author to do a follow-up to her book American Literary Criticism from the 1930s to the 1980s, which during the subsequent decade sold about 10,000 copies, was translated into several languages, and garnered good reviews and a Choice award. From time to time she would contemplate two versions of such a sequel. It is in this context that the editor of Genre: Forms of Discourse and Culture invited me, along with other critical theorists, to contribute to a 2000 special ‘Desert Island’ issue of the journal then recently under new editorship. When she first receives the invitation for the ’Desert Island’ project, she had two immediate reactions: one practical, one theoretical. The practical took the form of mulling over what one text she would choose, which sent her to her notes for the work she had been contemplating on classic contemporary theory books.
