[Confrontations: Studies in the Intellectual and Literary Relations between Germany, England, and the United States during the Nineteenth Century, a] miscellany from the study of a very great scholar, has all the virtues which collections of a similar nature tend often to lack: a lucid and readable style artfully concealing mountainous learning, consistent evidence of original thought, and, in spite of being a collection of essays and reviews written over a thirty-five year period, real organic unity.

Reading Confrontations means encountering René Wellek as a literary historian at important focal points mid-way between his work in the history of ideas, as exemplified by Immanuel Kant in England 1793–1838, and his monumental History of Modern Criticism, the mid-way focus being visualized as intellectual rather than chronological transition. For it is in essays like "Carlyle and German Romanticism (1929)," "Emerson and German Philosophy (1943)," and "De Quincey's Status in the History of Ideas...