George Steiner's accomplishments in criticism, in theory of literature, and in the history of ideas have made him a central figure on the contemporary intellectual scene. He is as widely known for his frequent contributions to the New Yorker and TLS as he is for his many books. In "Reading George Steiner" Nathan Scott and Ronald Sharp bring together a group of eminent American and European critics to offer the first major assessment of Steiner's work.

Famous literary friendships such as those between H.L. Mencken and James Joyce, Gustave Flaubert and Ivan Turgenev, and Elizabeth Bishop and Marianne Moore are examined in this magnificent collection of stories, legends, poems, essays, letters, and memoirs that illuminate the breadth and depth of friendship in all its human complexity.

If, as George Gissing once wrote, "to like Keats is a test of fitness for understanding poetry", then the essays collected in this volume suggest that literary criticism remains a lively and vigorous endeavor. Written by a broad range of prominent scholars -- senior Romanticists as well as younger critics and major poets -- the essays offer a fresh reevaluation of the nature and importance of John Keats's achievement. The idealistic aesthete or humanistic hero admired by earlier generations of readers develops into a much richer, more complex image of the poet. The product of a continuing critical dialogue, this new Keats attests not only to his own enduring appeal but to the persistent vitality of poetry itself amid the distractions of a fragmented postmodern culture.

An introduction by Robert M. Ryan reviews the history of Keats scholarship, situating new critical assessments by M. H. Abrams, Walter Jackson Bate, Eavan Boland, David Bromwich, Hermione de Almeida, Terence Alan Hoagwood, Elizabeth Jones, Debbie Lee, Philip Levine, Donald H- Reiman, Ronald A. Sharp, George Steiner, Jack Stillinger, Aileen Ward, and Susan Wolfson.