"In the essays collected in "Crimes of Writing," Stewart continues to build on her reputation as one of the most productive and challenging deconstructors of the disciplinary boundaries that supposedly separate literary history and critical theory from contemporary cultural analysis."-- Michael Moon, Duke University

1. Crimes of Writing 3
2. Psalmanazar's Others 31
3. Notes on Distressed Genres 66
4. Scandals of the Ballad 102
5. The Birth of Authenticity in the Progress of Anxiety: Fragments of an Eighteenth-Century Daydream 132
6. Exogamous Relations: Travel Writing, the Incest Prohibition, and Hawthorne's Transformation 173
7. Ceci Tuera Cela: Graffiti as Crime and Art 206
8. The Marquis de Meese 235
9. Coda: Reverse Trompe l'Oeil\The Eruption of the Real 273
Works Cited 291
Index 311

Susan Stewart is Professor of English at Temple University. She is the author of On Longing, also published by Duke University Press.