Kierkegaard's Influence on Literature, Criticism and Art (Tome IV: The Anglophone World). Edited by Jon Stewart. Pp. xv, 239, Farnham, Surrey, Ashgate, 2013, £65.00

Here is an interesting question: what do the writers W.H. Auden, James Baldwin, Don DeLillo, Louise Erdrich, James Joyce, David Lodge, Flannery O’ Connor, Walker Percy, and William Styron all have in common? The answer, according to this edited collection, which is part of volume 12 in the ‘Kierkegaard Research: Sources, Reception and Resources’ series published by Ashgate, is that they were all influenced by the work of Soren Kierkegaard.What the editor, Jon Stewart, has accomplished here is to bring together a first‐rate team of international scholars to write tight and interesting pieces that describe how the writers listed above, as well as the literary critics Harold Bloom and George Steiner, and even the composer Samuel Barber, were impacted in their work by reading Soren Kierkegaard, who himself was among the most literary and imaginative of philosophers. Kierkegaard, it is worth remembering, wrote under various pseudonyms, utilized irony in the service of indirect communication, and could be hilariously funny or deeply serious depending on his mood and purpose.