Other writers and thinkers who figure prominently in his account include Northrop Frye, Matthew Arnold, André Malraux, William Wordsworth, and Marshall McLuhan.

"[3] However, Brown noted that "[a] certain anxiety pervades Kernan's essay as he ventures into an alien terrain, far from the fields he knows best—the drama and the satire of the English Renaissance—and which he has tilled with such profit .... the author seems to be engaged in battering down doors which have stood open or at least well ajar for a very long time.

"[3] Jan Cohn, writing in Modern Fiction Studies, described Kernan's book as "broadly conceived and historically complex"[4] Cohn went on to say: "Kernan is cautious about predictions, but he argues that if literature can no longer be understood as the carrier of absolute truth and unchanging values, it can be restructured as a vital kind of system-making, attuned to the later twentieth-century view of man as the constructor of codes and systems, the 'creator of cosmic, social, and linguistic fictions'...." Laura A. Curtis reviewed the book in Modern Language Studies and concluded, "Kernan's book is a densely packed argument from a fresh, provocative perspective inspired by the sociological theories of Peter Berger.

"[7] Judie Newman, writing in The Yearbook of English Studies, found in Kernan's book "an attractive emphasis on the major question of metamorphosis in the literary canon, and patches of perceptive local criticism generate fresh insights into the four novels.

The study lacks, however, the polemical thrust of the essay, reserving until its close Professor Kernan's main point: his regret that the literary text is now being used solely as a basis for a science of interpretation, and that semiotics, reader response, and grammatology have displaced humanist works on the bookshelves.