Hazard Adams is professor emeritus of comparative literature at the University of Washington. His many publications include Blake and Yeats: The Contrary Vision, The Interests of Criticism, and Critical Theory since Plato, as well as two novels, The Truth about Dragons: An Anti-romance and The Horses of Instruction.

"A delicious chowder of quips and ironies. One may have heard individual lines at faculty cocktail parties, but listening to all the disparate voices of the university together, one realizes how much we sound like a thousand Franz Kafkas trying to sing a madrigal."--Chronicle of Higher Education "An enjoyable description (and vivisection!) of the various people in Academe. Essential for anyone who extracts his livelihood from the forests primeval of Academe and who periodically suffers fits on the meaning of it all."--Choice

• Preface to the Second Edition   viiPreface to the First Edition   ix1   A Primer of Academic Politics   12   Stereotypics   313   Tribes: Les Purs et les Appliques   634   Rites de Passage: Coming of age in Academe   775   The Rhythm of the Year: Solar Rituals   976   Styles and the Decay of Style   1097   Bureaucriticism: What's Wrong and Why It Isn't Likely to Be Fixed   1218   Confessio Amantis   139A Triptych of Appendixes   1451)   A Political Primer for the Chair of English: Form and Content   147b)   How Departments Commit Suicide   161c)   Definition and/as Survival   179

Hazard Adams is professor emeritus of comparative literature at the University of Washington. His many publications include Blake and Yeats: The Contrary Vision, The Interests of Criticism, and Critical Theory since Plato, as well as two novels, The Truth about Dragons: An Anti-romance and The Horses of Instruction.

"A delicious chowder of quips and ironies. One may have heard individual lines at faculty cocktail parties, but listening to all the disparate voices of the university together, one realizes how much we sound like a thousand Franz Kafkas trying to sing a madrigal."--Chronicle of Higher Education "An enjoyable description (and vivisection!) of the various people in Academe. Essential for anyone who extracts his livelihood from the forests primeval of Academe and who periodically suffers fits on the meaning of it all."--Choice

• Preface to the Second Edition   viiPreface to the First Edition   ix1   A Primer of Academic Politics   12   Stereotypics   313   Tribes: Les Purs et les Appliques   634   Rites de Passage: Coming of age in Academe   775   The Rhythm of the Year: Solar Rituals   976   Styles and the Decay of Style   1097   Bureaucriticism: What's Wrong and Why It Isn't Likely to Be Fixed   1218   Confessio Amantis   139A Triptych of Appendixes   1451)   A Political Primer for the Chair of English: Form and Content   147b)   How Departments Commit Suicide   161c)   Definition and/as Survival   179