Harry Berger, Jr, has long been one of our most revered and respected literary and cultural critics. Since the late nineties, a stream of remarkable and innovative publications have shown how very broad his interests are, moving from Shakespeare to baroque painting, to Plato, to theories of early culture.

"...Acknowledging the extraordinary, multidimensional work of Harry Berger Jr., and consists of a lively set of celebratory contemplations (more talks than essays) on his scholarly career." -Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 "The sections on theory and academic community, in particular, raise questions about the conduct of the profession itself, and this emphasis probably makes the book most useful to those who are interested in reassessing the place of these disciplines in the university and trying to discern future directions for humanistic research." -Choice "Somewhere in his innermost closet Harry Berger, Jr. must harbor the secret of perennial freshness. For decades now his vitally important work has conferred the power to see with new eyes familiar works of literature, philosophy, and art, as if their innermost meanings were being glimpsed for the first time. This fine connection of essays captures the subtle flavor of Berger's magical elixir of critical youth." -- -Stephen Greenblatt Harvard University "Very few members of any profession have bestowed a touch more rare... Renaissance studies has been lucky to benefit from the precedents of this master mapmaker. -Renaissance Quarterly "After a half-century of ground-breaking, earth-shaking work, Harry Berger, Jr., certainly deserves this tribute: twenty essay that celebrate, contemplate, critique, and take flight from Berger's always generative criticism." -- -Margreta de Grazia University of Pennsylvania "For more than half a century Harry Berger, Jr., has been producing seminal work of astonishing depth and brilliance, thoroughly interdisciplinary, massively learned, philosophically sophisticated; but also mischievous, uninhibited, genuinely liberating. These essays by students and friends celebrate and respond to one of the major figures in American letters, whose work has significantly remade the practice of cultural history. The volume is invaluable, a tribute and guide to a protean body of work." -- -Stephen Orgel Stanford University