Oscar Wilde famously spoke of ‘the critic as artist’ whilst Terry Eagleton once celebrated ‘the critic as clown’. This exciting new volume brings together a range of writings that seek to radically re-imagine the often pale figure of the literary critic. In doing so we here glimpse a host of unfamiliar figures from the critic as pedestrian to the critic as suicide through the critic as revivalist and even the critic as bodger. The result is a book that seeks to locate the truly critical critic – or, to be paradoxical, the critic as critic; the critic who is a critic of criticism as conventionally understood. This is the final volume of the immensely successful ‘Critical Inventions’ series.