ABSTRACT
There has been a great deal of worthwhile discussion in recent years of how to measure scholarly excellence in forms other than the stately monograph, with the decline in academic publishing in the humanities. This chapter discusses the Inventions and Interventions, which is one of those curt, alliterative apothegms that promise more than they can deliver. Accordingly, a book that should have been neatly divided into two parts has turned into a kind of baggy critical drama in five acts. Nonetheless, the author does think of all relevant criticism as falling into one of these two categories: inventions, or elaborations of familiar themes that reveal unanticipated dimensions and inter-relations. Andy and Peter, along with their colleagues, offered impressive models of committed, responsible, and adventurous scholarship, giving him not only the tools and skills to find the way around the more familiar landscapes of literary studies.
