Seth Lerer explores our relationship to the literary past in an age marked by historical self-consciousness, critical distance, and shifts in cultural literacy. He examines a range of fiction, poetry, and criticism in order to understand the ways in which the literary past makes us, and how we create canons for reading, teaching, and scholarship.

• Preface: 'Today, makes Yesterday mean'


• 1: Traditions of Tradition


• 2: The Copperfield Experience


• 3: My 1984


• 4: 'This Loved Philology': Poems of the Fall


• 5: The Tears of Odysseus


• Acknowledgements

Seth Lerer was born in Brooklyn, New York, and educated at Wesleyan, Oxford, and the University of Chicago. He has taught at Princeton, Stanford, and the University of California at San Diego, and is the author or editor of twelve previous books. His work has been awarded the Harry Levin Prize of the American Comparative Literature Association, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and many other recognitions.