The gnomon is the part of a sundial that casts its shadow, and Gnomon:
Essays on Contemporary Literature represents, in its author s words, a
report on ten years watching of shadows. Collecting the earliest short
essays and reviews by a man who was arguably the greatest
English-language critic-scholar of the twentieth century, Gnomon not
only provides valuable, entertaining, and often scabrous insights into
the workings of literature, as well as the books of such modern giants
as William Carlos Williams, Ford Madox Ford, Wyndham Lewis, and Ezra
Pound, but is itself a cross-section of the development of Kenner s own
body of work, which in its beauty, irreverence, and disregard for
convention proves him as much an artist as the men and women he spent
his life championing.