Frank Kermode is among the most prominent and theoretically sophisticated British literary critics of the post-World War II period. An accomplished scholar of Renaissance and modern literature, Kermode has had a significant impact on the study of Edmund Spenser, William Shakespeare, John Milton, William Butler Yeats, T. S. Eliot, and Wallace Stevens, as well as on biblical scholarship, the English Romantics, and the study of the novel. He has published influential works on the theory of narrative, on literary interpretation, and on canon formation, and was a crucial medium for the introduction of French structuralism and post-structuralism to the British academy. Kermode's work is remarkably wide-ranging and eclectic, and written with clarity and elegance. His books are notable for the way they span vast periods of history--from the Bible to postmodernism, from St. Augustine to Sigmund Freud--and discuss texts from several languages. Kermode's work also draws on diverse...