"In the wake of the formalist "New Critical" consensus of the mid twentieth century, a central, recurrent problem in the field of literary study has been that of how the literary text was to be related to the various and proliferating contexts that now jostled for critical attention. Were these contexts to be considered as simply "background" to a literary text that was still pre-eminent, if no longer solitary, in the mind of the reader? Or might the contexts become so absorbing that the literary text was not so much contextually displayed as displaced, and its charisma shattered? The quality of balanced judgment was suddenly especially valuable. Few scholars in the second half of the twentieth century possessed that quality to the extent of Howard Erskine-Hill, the man honored in this collection of essays from friends and former pupils." "The essays range from Shakespeare and early modern literature to Wordsworth. They evince scrupulous care over the handling of evidence, an interdisciplinary impulse yoked always to a prizing of the literary (particularly the poetic), a willingness to embrace an ambitious argument where it can be supported, a humaneness of temper, particularly in polemic. Latent within them all is a wrestling with the central problem of text and context."--BOOK JACKET.