In this delightfully angular collection, Donald Marshall conducts a conversation with insightful interlocutors in such creatively dialectical fashion as to press into the tough hermeneutical issues and yet simultaneously offer fresh readings of certain accomodatingly resilient texts. This is a conversation deeply indebted to tradition, yet which challenges and extends our appreciation of how tradition works when it works, as also how it ossifies, atrophies or collapses in upon itself when it fails the test of apparent contradiction. Marshall's own excursus upon Plato's introduction to such matters in the Symposium is a brilliant harbinger of very good critical reflection to come in the subsequent essays.

David Lyle Jeffrey, Provost and Distinguished Professor of Literature and Humanities, Baylor University

Without sparing the rod of intellectual rigor, this is a sympathetic and broad-ranging anthology of essays renewing and complicating the concept of tradition from Plato to Gadamer and beyond. The editor adds an exemplary introduction.

Geoffrey Hartman, Sterling Professor Emeritus of English and Comparative Literature, Yale University