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In a critical epoch that has privileged, for twenty years or more, difference, decantering, discontinuity, diversity, and pluralism over the elder gods of Unity, Totality, and Mastery, so much American nonfiction still finds itself attempting to appease those elder gods and their former conventions. Those of us who read regularly in criticism often find “books” whose “chapters” are, it’s clear once we read two, three, or four of them, disconnected occasional essays. Often the “Introduction” that claims the remainder of the study will not attempt to negotiate its topic with systematic rigor actually introduces a collection of considerations simply of different topics. At the editorial level, forces (usually called “commercial”—though sometimes even more mystified than that) militate to present collections and chrestomathies as concentrated studies.

The fiction writer is used to the same forces at work in the contouring of books: “Novels sell better than collections of short stories,” we are told. “It’s a truism of almost any fictive practice — mysteries, westerns, science fiction, or naturalistic fiction.”

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