the world is questioned; whilst Mailer's Of a Fire on the Moon doubts the believability of the poetic as opposed to the scientific view of the world. In all four texts Kernan sees the old order passing, with protagonists trying to write in the old Romantic way "in the face of a world which their powers can no longer master and transform" Kernan's discussion of the changes in the social institution of literature is informed by the sociological theories of Peter L. Berger, who is cited several times in the book. Other writers and thinkers who figure prominently in his account include Northrop Frye, Matthew Arnold, André Malraux, William Wordsworth, and Marshall McLuhan. Reception John L. Brown, reviewing the book for World Literature Today, applauded how "Kernan's text—tentative, low-keyed, conciliatory—is mercifully free from the contentiousness of many contemporary critical works of criticism." However, Brown noted that "[a] certain anxiety pervades Kernan's essay as he ventures into an alien terrain, far from the fields he knows best—the drama and the satire of the English Renaissance—and which he has tilled with such profit .... the author seems to be engaged in battering down doors which have stood open or at least well ajar for a very long time." According to Brown, Kernan's dim view of recent trends in criticism was pragmatic: "He does not wish to condemn out of hand currently voguish techniques such as 'semiotics, reader-response, or grammatology,' but simply questions whether they will be as useful to students and to society as the more traditional view of literature as an imaginative account of "people living out the most intense human experiences." Jan Cohn, writing in Modern Fiction Studies, described Kernan's book as "broadly conceived and historically complex" Cohn went on to say: "Kernan is cautious about predictions, but he argues that if literature can no longer be understood as the carrier of absolute truth and unchanging values, it can be restructured as a vital kind of system-making, attuned to the later twentieth-century view of man as the constructor of codes and systems, the 'creator of cosmic, social, and linguistic fictions'...." Laura A. Curtis reviewed the book in Modern Language Studies and concluded, "Kernan's book is a densely packed argument from a fresh, provocative perspective inspired by the sociological theories of Peter Berger." Robert W. Daniel in The Sewanee Review observed: "At times Kernan is careless, with both his references and