1. Fiction and reality Mimesis and the motive for fiction -- History and the new American novel -- The American political novel -- The real and imaginary worlds of Norman Mailer -- Nabokov and the art of politics -- Ada, or the perils of paradise -- Tristram shandy and the game of love -- The demons of history in Dickens's Tale -- Flaubert through his letters -- Proust and the ideological reader -- Borges, Stevens, and post-symbolist writing -- Daniel Martin and the mimetic task -- 2. The stances of criticism The American Edmund Wilson -- Literature and ideology in the thirties -- The education of Alfred Kazin -- Literary lives