The World, the Text, and the Critic
[Said's] book is relaxed and discursive, original, immensely learned, fluently written. (John BayleyNew York Times Book Review)This striking book…represents an important contribution to literary criticism as well as suggesting a new direction for criticism to take. (Publishers Weekly)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 WilliamsThe Guardian)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)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 DonoghueThe New Republic)A learned, lucid, powerful book. It speaks with a particular and moving urgency to the issues facing criticism today. (Stanley Fisher)