These essays, brought together from the Paul de Man papers at the University of California (Irvine), make a significant contribution to the cultural history of deconstruction and the present state of literary theory. From 1955 to 1961, Paul de Man was Junior Fellow at Harvard University where he wrote a doctoral thesis entitled 'The Post-Romantic Predicament: a study in the poetry of Mallarmé and Yeats'. This dissertation is presented alongside his other texts from this period, including essays on Hölderlin, Keats and Stefan George. This collection reflects familiar concerns for de Man: the figurative dimension of language, the borders between philosophy and literature, the ideological obfuscations of Romanticism, and the difficulties of the North American heritage of New Criticism.