Leading literary critics, important writers and reviewers, and distinguished scholars grace a remarkable collection of essays on reading, writing, and teaching - and on a set of relations among these activities that has animated academic and publishing circles in America for half a century. The collection marks forty years of teaching at Amherst College by William H. Pritchard, Henry Clay Folger Professor of English.

Under Criticism: Essays for William H. Pritchard boasts a literary-historical sweep that goes beyond even Pritchard's own; in format the collection represents a spectrum of contemporary criticism ranging from classroom memoirs to analytic essays-in-criticism to assessment of the state of academic letters today. Some of these various tales out of school are highly personal, and as a group they exhibit considerable ideological divergence.

Marxist, humanist, phenomenologist, de-constructionist, feminist, classicist, post-modernist, and revanchist positions all are aired.