"This is an admirable text—fascinating, provocative and critically incisive all the way through. Pinkney writes with wit, clarity and brio."—Steven Connor

"This is a lucid, witty, scholarly, accessible and original rereading. Theory, here, has become practice; so that one can recognize the necessity of the former in the day-to-day business of reading, teaching and learning. I really enjoyed the sequence of deconstructive turns, the controlled intertextuality, the reengagement of close reading with cultural history, the style of the enterprise."—Peter Widdowson

"Learned, witty, exciting to read in its penetrating subversions of critical orthodoxy, written throughout with an infectious esprit."—Graham Holderness