The epigraph to Literary Theories of Uncertainty is taken from Kafka’s The Trial: ‘Selbst die kleinste Unsicherheit in der geringfügigsten Sache ist doch immer quälend’: ‘Even the smallest uncertainty in the slightest of matters is still always agonising’. From Miss Montag’s equivocal consolation to Josef K.: Now I hope also to have acted in your interest, as even the smallest uncertainty in the slightest of matters is still always agonising, and if one can, as in this case, easily eliminate it, then it is better if this is done promptly. We can imagine a principle for criticism that proposes precisely this: if one can easily eliminate an uncertainty, then it is best done promptly. The modern research essay is broadly structured upon the ritualised creation of tension, some lightly agonising uncertainty, followed by the release provided by a systematic resolution. The original Montaignesque essai, dedicated to the trials and travails of experience and exploration, has transformed generically to become more like a trial in our English legal sense. Such a critical principle as we may take from the epigraph would require, as Kafka does, a hefty dose of irony. As Mette Leonard Høeg duly describes in her introduction, literature’s effect so depends upon the power of uncertainty that it is a disservice to bluntly resolve it. Artistic features and figurations, paradoxes, ambiguities of the human condition, these uncertainties as presented in literature cannot be resolved easily or promptly. To perform a rational and systematic analysis of a literary work, to make certain that which is uncertain, risks eliminating the experience of uncertainty. This potential incongruence between criticism and literary experience also pertains to the current post-critique movement in America, which proposes that the hermeneutics of suspicion inherent in a certain kind of criticism reduces a work to an encoded message needing decoding; and to get back to literature we must consider moving beyond critique (read theories: Marxist, queer, eco-, and so on). Institutional mechanisms like the peer-review process or the Research Excellence Framework may play their part in shaping essays that function like trials: essays that may or may not acknowledge a literary work’s competing and simultaneous truths, and in any case by the end pronounce judgement.