Harry Levin figured centrally in the postwar “restart” of Comparative Literature, to borrow Gerald Gillespie's apt term for the field's mid-twentieth-century reinvention and expansion.1 Charged with reorganizing Harvard's Department of Comparative Literature after World War II, Levin went on to advise students for over four decades. Only the third president of the American Comparative Literature Association, Levin became a presence within the field in myriad ways. Yet even amid expanding professional obligations, he came to personally know many leading writers and critics from within and beyond the United States, maintaining a connection to the larger nonacademic world of letters. When Levin wrote about the literary and critical dimensions of modernism, he did so not as a detached spectator but as someone who helped set its trajectory. Indeed, his book from 1982, Memories of the Moderns, confirmed his close and long-standing association with modernist writers and critics he had helped to bring within the twentieth-century humanities curriculum. Although she did not study with him, Marjorie Perloff has written that Levin informed her scholarly and professional aspirations. Looking through a Harvard catalog that listed Levin's course, “Proust, Joyce, and Mann,” she experienced something of an epiphany: “That I decided was my kind of course.”2 From that point on, she resolved, “Comp Lit was what I wanted to study.”Levin was himself marked by developments within another field that gained traction in the middle of the twentieth century: American Studies. The collection notably brings to the fore the significant “Americanist” dimension of Levin's contribution. Indeed, the collection directs attention to Levin's relationship to American Studies, a mid-twentieth-century historicist project that drew much of its critical energies from the steadfast refusal of any single method, as Henry Nash Smith argued in his 1957 essay, “Can ‘American Studies’ Develop a Method?”3 If Levin's “Why Literary Criticism Is Not an Exact Science,” from 1967, is not quite a companion piece to Smith's essay, it nevertheless reveals a shared sense that the postwar fortunes of Comparative Literature and American Studies depended on distance from the demand for a set “method.” For both fields, “history” and its attendant terms do not secure a ready-made or once-and-for-all method, much less found a science. Yet there is documentary evidence around which “decipherers” can gather. Acquiring professional standing as a comparatist as the historicist American Studies project was coming into postwar institutional form, Levin could not fail to notice—and be caught up in—a portentous development: “American literature, theretofore neglected by English departments, a vast and fertile territory was opened for cultivation just two generations ago. The ensuing rush and energetic settlement—abetted by nationalistic exercise—have reaped harvests of artistic enrichment and cultural self-awareness” (88). Reading the essays in the collection and taking stock of the range of American writers Levin addresses, one is obliged to ask how his impact on comparative literary studies was already shaped by his complex status as a quasi–American Studies scholar, and the ways the historicist arrangement of the field may have been a resource for comparative literature's postwar reset. Levin endorsed the humanistic valuation of cultural memory, or what he once referred to as the “recallable past,” itself but a synonym for the “usable past” American Studies critics set out to recover and nurture (124).One can spend quite some time thinking about Levin and his American Studies mentors and colleagues, including F. O. Matthiessen and Perry Miller. Yet more interesting is the work he undertook, including one of his more important early books, The Power of Blackness: Hawthorne, Poe, Melville (Knopf, 1958). Dedicated to Miller, The Power of Blackness was by Levin's own estimation part of the ever-widening body of American Studies scholarship, a counterpart to R. W. B. Lewis's The American Adam: Innocence, Tragedy, and Tradition in the Nineteenth Century (Chicago, 1955), a study of innocence in American literature. Yet what is at least as striking as the confluences are the efforts to render his own project an alternative to the “current reorganization of American Studies into a specialized academic discipline,” the product of a “forty-year conversation” dating from about World War I, the “self-critical” character of which had reached, by mid-century, a “self-congratulatory” impasse.4 In The Power of Blackness, Levin distances himself from “an up-and-coming sense of national importance” and concentrates on writers for whom the “distinctive attitude has been introspection, dissent, or irony.”5 Levin's attitude in turn allows for a study that explores writers who were “rather symbolists than realists,” whose meditations encompassed the “very worst of national problems, the peculiar institution of slavery.”6 Given such a recoding of American literary history, it is perhaps not altogether surprising that Levin closes with William Faulkner, for by the early twentieth century, the United States had acquired “her own store of ruins and ghosts,” including “that gloomy mansion that Colonel Sutpen built on slave labor in Absalom, Absalom!”7 The obligation to history in the case of The Power of Blackness involves an obligation to one's personal history. “One who is by profession a student of literature, and by birthright a citizen of the United States, would be doubly remiss if he were not keenly interested in the work of the major American writers,” Levin writes.8 Part of Levin's alternative American Studies involves reading American writing through his knowledge of European literature. Dante, Balzac, Baudelaire, Goethe, Mallarmé, among others, make their appearance alongside his American trio. In much the way that Saul Bellow Europeanized American literature, as Philip Rahv had it, Levin seemed to urge a nonromantic Europeanization of American Studies.Even when he is not analyzing American texts explicitly, Levin ever brings his impressive knowledge of U.S. literatures to bear on his chosen topics. In “The Title as Literary Genre,” he attributes the “varying terrains” registered in such titles as Henry James's Washington Square and Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio to a “national commitment to self-discovery” (210). Elsewhere, Levin is far less interested in the “American-ness” of different texts than he is in reconstructing the nexus of historical, biographical, and psychological factors that together set the ground for imaginative works. The publication of the journals of Thornton Wilder in the 1980s provides the occasion for the reconstruction of just such a nexus. Levin, who attended Wilder's Norton lectures when Wilder was Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard in 1950–1951, credits the playwright with moving beyond naturalism in a quest to revive the “morality play: Everyman, Mankind” (414). Considering Wilder's biography, Levin is intrigued by a writer who “was a personality in the sense that Henry James was” but of “mellow and generous temperament,” especially when placed alongside the “egocentric personalities” of a Hemingway or Fitzgerald (415). Levin speculates that the “fact that he was haunted by the ghost of a stillborn twin brother might have had something to do with his psychic duality.” Although Wilder offers distinct angles on the American scene, Levin concludes that “his oceanic awe before the tragic realities that bound our daily existence” emerges as the truly distinguishing feature of his writing (420).The Implications of Literary Criticism, edited by Jonathan Hart, assembles previously published essays, review essays, and book reviews by Levin, primarily written during the 1970s and 1980s. Hart's preface isolates a key line from Levin, one that can be read back into the entire arc of his career: “If we have any professional obligation, it is to history: to the interpretation of recorded experience in its continuities, from whenever they started until now” (13). Levin's sense of obligation is everywhere on display in The Implications of Literary Criticism, which brings to the fore the historicist and contextualist practices that marked his work. Levin chose the contents of the collection, but it remained an unpublished manuscript at the time of his death, in 1994. Hart organized the material and chose the essays that would serve as the introduction and conclusion: “The Implications of Literary Criticism” (originally published as “The Implication of Explication”) and “What Is Literature If Not Comparative?” respectively. Hart has included a comprehensive bibliography and other information related to Levin's scholarship and teaching, including a list of undergraduate and graduate courses he offered throughout his years at Harvard. A valuable resource for considering Levin's theoretical perspectives on the field and guiding critical concerns, the collection is also a compact yet rich archive of material about twentieth-century comparative literary studies. The collection offers avenues of inquiry not only into Levin's interpretive work as such but also into the larger “obligation” to history he and others made integral to varieties of twentieth-century comparative literary studies.Among the chronologically earliest essays in the collection, “Thematics and Criticism,” from 1968, conveys Levin's commitment to historical analysis and, at the same time, demonstrates his affinities for structuralism. (Levin once described his approach as “having something in common with what is called structuralism, though it has a more historical orientation.”)9 “Theme” was important to Levin, even as he worked against its presumed timelessness in favor of the more appealing if also “pseudoscientific approximation of the German Stoffgeschichte, literally the history of stuff or fabric” that throughout the twentieth century became the province of novelists. Levin notes that Thomas Mann “described the style and structure of his own writing as ‘thematisch’” (164–65). The exploration of theme as historical development and “polysemous” invention is above all an “adventure in the history of ideas” (177). But, as Levin more or less divulges, it is also an attempt to conceive of an alternative to the stark options of the late 1960s, the “self-limiting criterion of the New Critics” and the primacy accorded “external conditions” by Marxist philosophy (162). If this contrast seems caricatured, perhaps even an epistemological Cold War default, Levin's tracking of theme nonetheless reveals an informed and critical compass. He expresses confidence in a viable criticism that will remain committed to thematism, which addresses a given writer's “powers of observation and his years of experience” (178). Critics must continually return to “what the imagination is, how it works, what it needs to work upon, how by selecting and arranging it modifies and transforms, how it enhances life by endowing it with meanings and with values.” Criticism attends to the transformative and historical effects of the imagination.The commitment to history was the impetus for Levin's wide-ranging scholarship, a body of work that continually reached out beyond its primary academic sphere. Yet if the commitment to history informed Levin's analysis, it was inevitably a specific iteration of that commitment that pervaded his thinking. “History” belonged to a cluster of words that also included “custodianship” and “culture.” Before turning to that cluster, we might first consider “truth,” which allows Levin to cast literatures as forms of documentary evidence. Although not included in the collection, “Why Literary Criticism Is Not an Exact Science,” from 1967, invokes the “old liberal hope that truth may ultimately prevail against the winds of doctrine.”10 Levin continues, “Happily, the truth is by no means inaccessible. The objects of our study coincide with its documentation, which is much richer and more immediate than that of any other discipline. The specific concreteness of words gets diffused in transit, to be sure. Documents must be deciphered, and the possibilities of divergent readings are unlimited. Yet, in the long run, meanings are subject to the corroboration and verification of a consensus among the decipherers. Furthermore, the record is not less expressive when the document turns out to be a palimpsest.”11 In “Why Literary Criticism Is Not an Exact Science,” Levin declares a “preliminary need for clearing the air” around the study of literature.12 The emphasis in Levin's title falls on “exact,” for he indeed endorses a measure of verification in literary studies. A few essays in the collection undertake a defense of what one could call Levin's veridical approach to the study of literature. Literature, however palimpsestic, forms part of the larger record of history for Levin. Although he doesn't say as much, it follows that history, too, derives from a “consensus among the decipherers,” a formulation that is both suggestive and decidedly free of any connotations of friction, conflict, or violence.Levin's relationship to literature involves both an obligation to history and a concomitant custodial imagination. Writing as a humanist, Levin held that “it is our vocation to be, if co-existence is possible, with minds of those who have already lived” (109). Moreover, “as custodians of their memory, we must do whatever we can to keep their words alive.” The notion of custodianship, though arguably implicit in literary criticism, serves as the governing logic of Levin's work, the principle that underwrites his many forays into the history of literary practices. Levin's writing style added names upon names, references upon references, placing a premium on collecting and gathering, making these activities integral to the work of custodianship. In a portrait of Levin, Susanne Klingenstein rightly noted that an “abundance of names, quotations, references remained a hallmark of his writing.”13 In time, she surmises, he “learned to control his wealth of information.” But it is not obvious what it means to control a wealth of information, or if Levin ever intended to do so. The custodial imagination he endorsed followed from his incessant desire to bring more names, quotes, and references on the plane of his critical activity. Once present they can more properly be acknowledged and watched over. He concludes his essay “The Title as Literary Genre” in this way: “Nearly every one of the innumerable works in the world's literature has had a title. I have had time and space and lore enough to adduce no more than about 240” (216). The custodial relationship to literature, part and parcel of Levin's obligation to history, presumed a large and ever-growing humanistic database.Commenting on the Harvard department he led, Levin wrote that it never believed in “embracing or imposing a set of doctrines; indeed we strive toward a critical pluralism, wherein the whole spectrum of relevant views can be fairly presented.”14 The formulation “critical pluralism” provides clues as to Levin's titular “implications,” insofar as implications ever accommodate further implications on a model of inexhaustible critical procedures. The squeezing in of yet another referent, further related names, may well have been the very means by which Levin enacted “implication.” Curiously, Levin does not once make use of the word in his “Implications of Literary Criticism,” which lends the collection its title and serves as the introductory essay. But there is more to say about Levin's titular term. The very idea of implication is dual from the start, for according to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word has to do with the “action of implicating or the state of being implicated.” The indeterminacy of the term derives from the potential for any given implication to register activity and passivity simultaneously. Though he does not describe it in the ways I propose, Levin depends on the indeterminacy of implication in his conception of literary criticism. A meditation on the value of literary criticism, the essay does not, and need not, theorize “implication,” for the term is a kind of self-standing argument. Its open-endedness makes the futures of literary criticism themselves open-ended. Literary criticism has implications, and we should want it to have them, Levin argues. The indeterminacy of implications is what makes it possible to posit the futurity of literary criticism. But if it is to have a future, the past requires specific kinds of guardianship, that abiding sense of custodianship from which Levin's work flows.Implication serves as the best name for the ground of activity of a critic who declined any ready-made method. Yet whereas this approach routinely edifies, it is worth noting its peculiarities. What happens when recurrent implications and the profusion of names becomes an end in itself? At times, Levin does not let unpleasant facts deter the collection of references. In a consideration of George Santayana, Levin notes the appeal of Italian Fascism for the onetime Harvard philosopher, but soon assimilates it to the “long range of his cosmic pessimism” and turns to his facility with the genre of the essay, which “could recapture the modality of Emerson and Montaigne” (401). Hart attributes the treatment of Santayana to Levin's “characteristically generous” inclination (23). Yet Levin's decision to circumvent nettlesome political problems of different kinds, while also acknowledging them, follows from a much more thoroughgoing decision than generosity would suggest. By his own admission, Levin's critical temperament was from early on defined by his recognition of having “friends in many different camps,” a standing rationale for going “out of my way to avoid identification with any particular school or coterie or set of dogmas.”15 A corollary to this orientation may have been a reluctance to bring any particular school, coterie, or dogma under extended scrutiny.Yet Levin is not altogether without chosen foes. “To interpret a text with due justice should be to analyze it linguistically, structurally, historically, comparatively,” Levin asserts in one his few programmatic sentences (37). To do this capably and “warrant their own survival,” he continues, critics must work “near the core of communicated experience” (36). From this vantage point, Levin's essays, along with other components of this collection, revisit the very status of literary criticism and the task of the literary critic amid the challenges stemming from both a preoccupation with the “demise of the author” he finds reductive and an “embrace of the cheapest cultural ends” he associates with Marshall McLuhan (30). “The medium is the message,” McLuhan's alliterative argument-in-miniature, requires a response, for it is both a “shocking overstatement” and but a “reformulation of art-for-art's-sake geared to our electronic age.” Here it is worth returning to “The Implication of Explication,” the original title of the collection's opening essay, for the threat of McLuhan's argument is that it will minimize or altogether jettison explication as explanation. Levin's unusually strong response has to do with his investment in the “role of the college explainer,” that “explanatory critic” who “elucidates his texts by placing them in their historical and sociological contexts.”16 In “The Modern Humanities in Historical Perspective,” he elaborates on the explanatory critic as that figure who adopts a historicism that is “sympathetic rather than moralistic,” and who, when working in the comparative method, “contemplates all literature as one organic whole” by “drawing material from diversified sources in order to trace themes and delineate forms” (107).Levin's response to McLuhan, who shows up more than once in the collection, derives as well from his apprehensions about the “cheapest cultural ends” and brings us to another feature of his comparative literary practice. Alongside his commitment to history and custodianship is an ongoing meditation on the concept of culture. Indeed, Levin's work is bound up in the larger humanistic romance of the culture concept. Like many critics of the mid-to-late twentieth century, Raymond Williams among them, he returns to it with consistency and occasional consternation. In Refractions: Essays in Comparative Literature (Oxford, 1966), Levin wrote, “One of my larger premises is that culture itself is not exclusive nor twofold but inclusively manifold, that it is not the jealously flaunted prerequisite of either the arts or the sciences, classics or moderns, East or West, but embraces them all in one varying continuity.”17 Yet such definitions appear under duress by the time he is writing the essays collected in The Implications of Literary Criticism, and Levin thus feels the need to clarify his position vis-à-vis culture: “In the name of culture, men can move in two directions: toward the local or the cosmopolitan, toward the ingrained or the acquired, toward the particular or the universal” (50). Residing within the concept, this basic antinomy becomes part of literary criticism through a process that Levin describes as one in which the “lower-case cultures of the anthropologists have been gaining ground over the High Culture of the classical humanists.” Needless to say, Levin does not resolve the basic antinomy of culture, but his essays are interesting insofar as they attend, however imperfectly, to the morphing dynamic of the culture concept.Levin rightly devotes attention to that late twentieth-century artifact, “cultural identity,” noting that “identity,” too, travels divergent paths, “for it can mean individuality, being unique, and also similarity, having counterparts” (61). The built-in ambiguity of the concepts of culture and identity, doubled when yoked, require a sober return to those writers concerned with the “broadly human.” Here, Levin's choices are at once to be expected given his areas of expertise, but also at times surprising. Richard Wright, like Joyce and Gide, makes an appearance because from the start he “addressed both black and white publics,” knowing well that “generalities are meaningless unless they are arrived at through particulars” (59). Also surprising is the extent to which Frantz Fanon enters into Levin's reflections on the limits of cultural identity and efforts to slow the incursions of the “lower-case cultures of the anthropologists.” Levin wishes to tether culture to nation, not identity, and draws on the work of the anticolonial critic: “International consciousness, Frantz Fanon has said, must then develop out of national consciousness” (50). In Levin's reading, one of the main lessons to draw from Fanon is the denial of the “existence of a single black culture” and therefore the more general principle that “no two cultures were identical.” Claims are made in the “name of culture” and Levin would have us recall that when “he spoke of culture in the singular, Fanon was projecting an ideal into the future.” If Fanon is serviceable in Levin's effort to make sense of the work afforded by the culture concept, he remains closest to Arnold and Marx: “Culture was regarded by Marx as a classless heritage, which revolution would make accessible to the lower classes; heretofore denied its benefits, they would now be elevated by it.” Never one to end on an adversarial note, Levin expresses confidence that a yet-to-worked-out “natural balance” will eventually minimize the effects of cultural identity, which is finally “nothing more nor less than the mean between selfhood and otherness, between our respect for ourselves and our relationship with our fellow men and women” (65).When he writes that “the word culture is probably enunciated today more than it ever was in Matthew Arnold's prime” and that Arnold “would never have recognized some of its newer connotations,” Levin offers but a more circumspect version of Raymond Williams's late position:18 “I don't know how many times I've wished that I'd never heard the damned word.”19 What The Implications of Literary History makes clear is that Levin's career, like much of twentieth-century literary criticism, was entwined with the very concept of culture. It also helps to explain some of the strains that enter Levin's later interpretations and observations about topics such as deconstruction and technological change. Indeed, his late essays retain his characteristic clarity of purpose while also registering the sense of a recognizable world in which recognizablity is no longer guaranteed. In the pre-Google world of Levin's essays, the danger that scientists and humanists alike faced was that of technological advances in “audio–visual media,” itself a term that now seems antediluvian. Levin intuits the close of a “five-hundred-year cycle, during which the principle medium of communication and information and expression has been the book” (110). The book had in turn “inaugurated the recognizable world.” Levin's discussion of art and literature in “What Is Not Art?” does not look back with rose-tinted glasses on what he dubs the recognizable world. “We can probably agree with Hazlitt—and, for that matter, Marx—that the arts are not historically progressive,” he writes (43). Yet art will remain, he suggests, in large part because of its “aura of mystery, in the double sense of mystère and métir,” as that which is “at once a cult and a skill” (41).Discussions of deconstruction turn up in several of the essays, and although Levin adopts the position of the unpersuaded, he also seems to derive pleasure from pausing over deconstruction as a historical intervention, one for which he may have greater affinity than he is willing to declare. He feels compelled to ask, “Should we be put off by such a probing critique of textuality?” (91). His answers vary. On the one hand, he is keen to stave off that critique insofar as it calls into question “communing or intercommunication” and the very “mutuality of written expression” (90). He therefore asks the rhetorical question, “Why should critics be consigned to spending the rest of their lives in an intellectual quarantine of dangling signifiers and impounded uncertainties?” (91). Yet Levin is drawn to a new moment in literary criticism marked by “ample opportunity to generate rereadings” and “rewrite the palimpsests of previous generations” (93). Levin takes solace in the dialogic relationship of “readerly and writerly concerns” and envisions literary criticism “pluralistic enough to retain its stability while undergoing renewal” (95–96). It is therefore under the sign of renewal that Levin finally places deconstruction and related developments, for all of his reservations. Still, “The Implications of Literary Criticism” insists that whatever else literary studies does, it must go on “opting for some pragmatic notion of intersubjectivity” that allows critics to work with the documentary evidence bequeathed by writers (i.e., meet them “halfway”) and thereby remain “near the core of communicated experience, rather than disporting themselves on its peripheries” (32, 36). Meeting writers “halfway” as a critical directive may be seen as a variant on the very imprecision Levin endorsed in “Why Literary Studies Is Not an Exact Science” in the 1960s, for what matters about such work is achieving nearness to the “core of communicated experience” and such nearness is what can never be made subject to a predetermined formula.Levin was known for contextualism. “Contextuality provides the means of relating literature to the rest of life,” he once wrote.20 An essay on Henry James's The Ambassadors, which Levin wrote for an edition of the novel published in the mid-1970s, is among the collection's more stimulating contextualist performances. Indeed, it is something of a short master class in the approach. Working with James's journal, unpublished writings, and other novels, Levin makes a vigorous case, contra F. R. Leavis, for the significance of TheAmbassadors as a work “replete with intelligence and craftsmanship” (334). Levin is brilliant on Lewis Lambert Strether's European transformations, much as he is on “Woollett,” the “small, the stiff and narrow, community” in Massachusetts from which Strether hails and for which he serves as ambassador (328). By way of his many sources, Levin can broach the question of James's likeness to the character of Strether and invoke James's own admission of a “vague resemblance.” Yet Levin's inquiry, as his words suggest, never abandons craft and he turns to the “Jamesian idiolect” without ever abandoning or demoting biography (333). He notes a “plasticity of style” marked by “searches not so much for the mot juste as for the gradual approximation, the continuous modification, the qualifying nuance.” Levin's brand of contextualism brings authorial intention well within the scope of analysis without rendering it paramount. Making James's preface to his novel very much part of the overall set of materials he assiduously reads, Levin advocates taking advantage of opportunities to enter the “master's workshop.” As in his approach to literature generally, Levin presents The Ambassadors' richness as the set of biographical, historical, and authorial particulars that, like spokes of a wheel, converge on the textual hub.Yet even as it serves as the general orientation that best describes Levin's obligation to history, contextualism as a term does not surface all that often in The Implications of Literary Criticism. In “What Is Literature If Not Comparative?” Levin instead uncharacteristically puts forth a neologism—“debabelization”—to specify the purpose of comparative literary analysis (369). Levin seems to admit that in a period of exhaustion with historicist inclinations and the culture concept as such, to invoke contexts will not clarify the aims of comparative literary criticism or help adumbrate its future configurations. A new term for an old idea, debabelization is the practice of “using languages and literatures to communicate, rather than to set up barriers.” Less a theorized term than an occasion for reflection on comparative literature and the idea of comparison, debabelization engenders a set of contemplative, often elegant asides. Levin writes, “The method of comparison begins at the very moment when we are faced with more than one existing book. If there were but two books left in the world, they would still invite distinction, discrimination, differentiation—criticism, in short, better understanding” (374). Debabelization affirms anew the value of history, custodianship, and culture, for insofar as comparative criticism can further debabelization it must do so as a “cooperative effort, organizing and pooling the resources of knowledge.” Here it must be noted that Levin contrasts cooperative effort and “invidious comparisons,” and that his representative text for the latter is Edward Said's Orientalism, which he deems a “polemical survey” in which the “entire endeavor of occidental scholars to interpret the Orient is cavalierly reduced to a self-serving mirage.” Levin's debabelization—like his uses of “history”—gives specific inflections to comparison and literary studies, such that these require patent others, “invidious comparison,” among them.If Levin's work grew “graver” over time, as Klingenstein writes, this should not obscure a less pronounced but notable feature of his criticism.21 Beneath Levin's surfeit of references and names lurked a sharp wit. We find evidence of it on intermittent display throughout the collection. Evaluating Susan Sontag's call in “Against Interpretation” for an “erotics of art” to take the place of hermeneutics, Levin deadpans, “In as much as sex involves direct contact, while reading is perforce a matter of verbal codes and mental processes, her trope is misleading unless she was advising us to read the Kamasutra” (85). Even the world of higher education to which he gave his professional life becomes fodder for mischief, as when he reflects that the “exhortation ‘publish or perish’ has yielded an efflorescence of publications distinguished by their perishability” (86). Elsewhere, Levin opens “The Rhetoric of Revolution” with an ironic take on U.S. political culture: “Revolution, at its two-hundredth year, has become almost synonymous with tradition—as some of our most conservative ladies have borne witness by proclaiming themselves its daughters” (217). Because such opening gambits and asides offer up more assertion than mere implication, they provide occasions for trenchant analysis. Not a few readers will be left wondering why Levin kept levity in such check, and if a larger purview for it might have given a greater range of critical accents to his readings. This lingering question notwithstanding, the collection is an opportunity to revisit Levin's work. It offers several ways into what Hart calls the “complex and ironic literary history” Levin practiced (10).