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.
The real pleasure of Lerers essay lies in his elegant close readings and his fluid mapping of intertextual pathways. Tradition is a quietly affecting book, not least in the way that it encourages readers to reflect on their own archives of the self, and the particular stories that have shaped us along the way.
