Fiedler has long been a lone ranger in those marches where academic respectability merges into individual guru-mongering and self-promotion. And it has been a specialised pleasure to watch the ways in which he handled this dual personality, getting himself skilfully into just the right amount of trouble and ducking back into professional decorum. The respectable academic claims to be amusedly outraged; but he draws secret nutriment from the open lawlessness of one clearly of his own tribe. We cannot quite be dead seems the implicit message of their invitations to visiting professorships and general tendering of academic amenities. More deeply, Fiedler caters to the dream life of the American profession of literary criticism and scholarship by committing with naked hands those vaunting acts of parricide and cultural appropriation which the corporate body can perform only gloved and muffled. For the ignominy of the whole academic study of English...