With his open-hearted engagement with texts, Greven offers new styles of connection and navigates critical questions deftly and in ways that illuminate the work with tremendous lucidity and élan. The writing is splendid.

An engaging, theoretically sophisticated book. . . Ultimately, this monograph should appeal to scholars of intertextuality, transatlantic studies, queer and gender studies, nineteenth-century American literary studies, and especially the works of Hawthorne and Melville. It is a book whose individual textual readings well reward the time spent with them.

Tracing lines of influence in texts while at the same time broadening perspectives on those texts, as Greven’s book demonstrates, bears important fruit. This study, then, achieves what it advocates and renews the value of an approach for our times.

A solid literary study, bringing with it not only considerations of justice and Shakespeare’s inspiring, terrifying (and English) precedent but, as interpreted by Frederick Douglass, racial concerns. . . Although Greven (Univ. South Carolina) evokes the influence theories of Harold Bloom, his focus is less on the agony of wrestling with predecessors than how one engagement with a predecessor text opens up others . . . A productive rereading of crucial American texts. Recommended.

What David Greven’s book firmly establishes in a spirit not of agonistic rivalry but of open-hearted embrace of other scholars is that critical reading of a text, just as well, may mother us all.

[A] superb study . . . All the Devils Are Here accomplishes many things at once. On its face—and how interesting to feature the “face” of King Lear’s wild Edgar on the cover of the book! (and I should add that there are lovely illustrations throughout)—Greven’s study offers fascinating readings of major novels by Cooper, Hawthorne, and Melville, which makes it valuable to anyone interested in these authors or American Romanticism more broadly. It is a major contribution to the theory of influence, and thus an important work of literary theory and methodology in its own right. It also models a creatively psychoanalytical approach to literature that is irreducible to any school of Freudian thought, while also demonstrating the possibilities of a nuanced, flexible, and innovative way of reading such concepts as incest, narcissism, and melancholia. Partly for this reason, All the Devils Are Here is also a valuable addition to the field of gender and sexuality studies, not to mention studies of race and religion, and to cultural studies writ large. At the risk of ending this review with a pun, I expect that Greven’s study will itself be quite influential, rightly so.

Greven’s range of reference is always impressive, and his bibliography is both extensive and apt, covering classic readings of the last century alongside more unusual interventions. Also, Greven’s focus on contemporary concerns, especially those of race, sexuality and queerness, enables him to offer genuinely new insights into well-known texts, shifting the dynamic of influence studies away from a linear historical approach towards more subtle thematic resonances. Indeed, Greven’s non-agonistic reconceptualization of influence as a collaborative and creative dialogue is a valuable addition to critical scholarship.

Reflects thoughtfully and comments incisively upon the diverse ways in which race and gender intersect in the Anglo-American literary tradition, opens further vistas for future interrogation, and functions as a case in point of its primary thesis that studies of literary influence remain of critical relevance today.