This book is a collection of selected articles published during the past three decades in various journals, anthologies, and conference proceedings. No substantive alterations have been made in the original text, but many editorial changes have been introduced. For example, not only have typographical errors been corrected, but for the sake of uniformity spelling has been standardized; all bibliographical references are now in the APA style of author, date, and page number(s); and all chapters have been subdivided into sections with numbers and headings. Moreover, to avoid duplication, the individual bibliographies have been combined into one for the whole book; to update the publication information, works that were originally listed as “in press” have been provided with the subsequent actual publication date; and entries by the same author for the same year have been appropriately redesignated.

With regard to the titles of the chapters, I have followed something of a middle course. The original article titles have been left unchanged, except for two things. The first is that the year of original publication has been added in parentheses at the end of each title. The second is that in some cases, in part 1, subtitles have been added in order to reflect the two-fold aspect (critical and thematic) of that group of chapters. The original titles and the added dates ensure the unambiguous and easy identification of the original articles from the bibliography, where they had to be listed because of cross-referencing.