"Kobayashi Hideo (1902-83) was the most important Japanese literary critic of the twentieth century, as crucial a presence in his own literary culture as Edmund Wilson, Walter Benjamin, and Roland Barthes were in theirs." "This book is a collection of the most significant and enduring works from the period when Kobayashi established himself as Japan's preeminent literary critic. It consists of five complete essays - "Multiple Designs," "The Anxiety of Modern Literature," "Literature of the Lost Home," "Chaos in the Literary World," and "Discourse on Fiction of the Self" - and excerpts from 37 other works." "The selections reflect the wide range of Kobayashi's early work, from meditations on the nature of literature and of criticism to studies of individual Japanese and Western writers. Among the subjects considered are: Marxism, the Japanese I-novel or fiction of the self, the ideological chaos and cultural anxieties afflicting Japan in the 1930s, cultural identity and Westernization, the psychological novel, Akutagawa Ryunosuke, Shiga Naoya, Tanizaki Junichiro, Rimbaud, Baudelaire, Valery, and Dostoevsky."--BOOK JACKET.