A critic of Garrett Stewart's brilliance and scope deserves a 'Reader,' but this fascinating book is far more than a collection of an author's most salient articles. A 'writing journal' of a teaching career that incorporates brief extracts of important books in the inspiring narrative of an immensely wide-ranging critical practice, Attention Spans engages the major developments of recent criticism. A tour de force.

Jonathan Culler, Class of 1916 Professor Emeritus of English and Comparative Literature, Cornell University, USA

Garrett Stewart is a multi-media close reader extraordinaire whose answerable style rewards close reading in turn. This selection of excerpts from each of his twenty books is interspersed with his own running commentary, stitching it all together and making his whole career's research and thinking-through seem as though it were all taking place in present time, while remaining full of scrupulous attention to the ways in which his work has evolved. After a dialogue with the editor, full of yet newer directions, this astonishing volume concludes with a glossary of Stewart's coinages.

Paul Fry, William Lampson Professor Emeritus of English, Yale University, USA

As David LaRocca tells us early in this volume, J Hillis Miller described Garrett Stewart, on the jacket of his second book, as 'more or less sui generis.' This turned out to be a prophetic description of the most wide-ranging and least doctrinaire critic of his generation. It also aptly describes Attention Spans, a book like no other, and one that does not belong to any recognisable genre. In staging a critical rereading of his own work, Stewart offers us an exhilarating history of aesthetic theory since New Criticism, which is also a virtuosic display of fine readerly attention. Continually unsettled, continually restless, it is written in what Stewart himself calls a 'language not quite gelled into the print that transmits it.' To read it is to feel, again and again, the lifted joy of shared thinking.

Peter Boxall, Goldsmiths' Professor of English Literature, University of Oxford, UK