Part 1. On the reading of modern fiction. Prophetic vogue of the anti-heroine. Crisis

in fiction or in readership?

Flight from innocence : England's newest literary generation. New Transcendentalists : a quasi-religious mode in American fiction multiform American imagination. Unwilling ironists --

Part 2. Three post-psychological novels. Writer and her vision : Ivy Compton-Burnett. Carson McCullers : love perverse and perfect. Affirmation and love in T.S. Eliot. Huxley revisited. Shaw and his Boswell. Memo : to Bernard Shaw. Reviews by Trilling. Criticism par excellence : V.S. Pritchett. Tragedy of delusion : criticism by Joyce Carol Oates. Poet of the air

and earth : Antoine de Saint-Exupery.

Beautiful and undammed : stories by Fitzgerald. Where the center always holds : stories by Brendan Gill. God bless you, Mr. Vonnegut. Realists of the interior : women poets of today. Bitches and sad ladies. World of William Saroyan. Day of one's own : Eudora Welty --

Part 3. Crossing the ethnic barrier. Spearhead of British modernism. Passion for letters : Scofield Thayer and the Dial. Specialist of the hoax : Max Beerbohm. Black odyssey, white world. Britain's lopsided view. Despiritualized Americans : Soviet views of American literature. Charmed circle : the Irish writers --

Part 4. Decline of "mass markets". Lowly state of book reviewing. Poets, printers and pamphleteers. They gambled on genius.