What takes place in an encounter? This question, with its immodest refusal to limit itself to any given cultural or historical site, might seem a flagrant symptom of all that is wrong with ‘Theory’, as it is called, in contemporary literary studies. If literary theory should, at least in theory, offer criticism a chance to reflect on its own interpretative practices – and above all to interrogate the history of those practices – what it actually does, so the argument goes, is to lead literary critics away from an authentic reading experience into a dark, tangled wood of pseudo-metaphysical speculation. The recent history of the literary academy can thus be viewed as a conflict between two starkly opposed forces: on one side, a properly adult criticism whose methods have remained rigorous (that is to say, fully subservient to the authority of historians), and on the other the siren voices of Theory, calling critics to ruin from across the sea. If the seductive allure of Theory has waned somewhat since its golden age in the early 1970s, it is none the less felt to be the duty of any responsible critic to guard against a return of the methodological muddle and sloppy thinking it ushered in.