One of the deans of literary criticism in America, M. H. Abrams is Class of 1916 Professor of English at Cornell University. He is the author of two landmark books, The Mirror and the Lamp and Natural Supernaturalism, and general editor of the Norton Anthology of English Literature...
In method the essays represent a combination of historical and biographical interpretation, explication of specific texts, and the study of sources, genre, and style; less formally, they represent the application of knowledge and intuition based on several decades of reading,...