“For nearly half a century, Cameron has been the gold standard of literary critical brilliance in the field of American literature. In The Likeness of Things Unlike, she continues her inquiry into the intricate ways in which literary language dwells in a region populated by the incommensurable, the unaccommodated, what cannot ‘be identified as this or that’ because they ‘emerge in excess of either,’ challenging paradigms and categories. There could be no better guide than the incomparable Cameron to chart this excitingly volatile linguistic territory. The Likeness of Things Unlike is a dazzling work of exhilarating intellectual vigor.”

Ross Posnock, Columbia University

“Cameron develops an intricate, scintillating argument about the commensurability of the incommensurate, taking us far beyond the traditional bounds of aesthetics—into philosophy, indeed quantum physics—and making us see American literature as if for the first time. A meditation on sameness and difference that takes our breath away.”

Wai Chee Dimock, Yale University

"In one of her poems, Emily Dickinson tells us that when a certain slant of light goes, it’s like the distance on the look of death. Conveying the necessary, difficult relation between the sensation and the abstraction is Dickinson’s work in that poem; exploring how Dickinson and four other writers articulate the paradoxically shared difference of entities that can’t fit together but can’t be disjoined is Cameron’s work in this book. With a rare intensity, The Likeness of Things Unlike asks its readers to stretch their conceptual capacities, to think in unaccustomed ways, and it rewards with a fresh sense of what Dickinson, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman, Willa Cather, and Wallace Stevens impossibly achieve. There’s nothing else quite like it."

Douglas Mao, Johns Hopkins University