
Thirteen of the essays in this volume were selected from sixty-one papers delivered at the 1962 joint meeting of the Midwest Modern Language Association and the Central Renaissance Conference. Two essays, “The Road of Excess” by Northrop Frye and “ King Lear as Metaphor” by L. C. Knights, were originally presented as major lectures during the conference, whose central theme was criticism in relation to myth and symbol. Edited with a foreword by Bernice Slote, this book, as Miss Slote writes, is “an experiment in by repeated views from somewhat different vantage points, the essays present definitions and illustrate forms of a comparatively new way of considering literature—a concentration on myth and symbol.”