Walter L. Reed (Ph.D.Yale) is theWilliam Rand Kenan, Jr. University Professor of English and Comparative Literature in the Graduate Institute of the Liberal Arts atEmory University, USA. Professor Reednbsp; has taught literature at Yale, the University of Texas, Austin, and Emory University. His publications include Dialogues of the Word (Oxford University Press, 1993), An Exemplary History of the Novel (University of Chicago Press, 1981) Meditations on the Hero: A Study of the Romantic Hero in Nineteenth-Century Fiction (Yale University Press, 1974).nbsp;