«The intellectual excitement of each essay and the enlightening effect of the brilliant thinking and writing of the book as a whole move the reader to the recognition of Said’s major contribution to contemporary literary critical theory and practice.»

English Literature in Transition

«This striking book…represents an important contribution to literary criticism as well as suggesting a new direction for criticism to take.»

Publishers Weekly

«A learned, lucid, powerful book. It speaks with a particular and moving urgency to the issues facing criticism today.»

Stanley Fisher

«[Said’s] book is relaxed and discursive, original, immensely learned, fluently written.»

John Bayley, New York Times Book Review

«It is a pleasure to read someone who not only has studied and thought so carefully but is also beginning to substantiate, as distinct from announcing, a genuinely emergent way of thinking.»

Raymond Williams, The Guardian

«Provocative and exacting; the essays provoke due interrogation of contemporary literary, and exact from the reader the care and conscientiousness the question at issue warrant… The book issues from a remarkably sharp intelligence, forcing us to face questions and possibilities that literary theorists on the whole prefer not even to raise.»

Denis Donoghue, The New Republic