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 criticism: 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."
