Mieke Bal has had a significant impact on every field she has touched, from Old Testament scholarship and narratology to critical methods and visual culture. This brilliant and controversial intellectual invariably performs a high-wire act at the point where critical issues and methods intersect&;or collide. She is deeply interested in the problems of cultural analysis across a range of disciplines. A Mieke Bal Reader brings together for the first time a representative collection of her work that distills her broad interests and areas of expertise. This Reader is organized into four parts, reflecting the fields that Bal has most profoundly influenced: literary study, interdisciplinary methodology, visual analysis, and postmodern theology. The essays include some of Bal&;s most characteristic and provocative work, capturing her at the top of her form. &;Narration and Focalization,&; for example, provides the groundwork for Bal&;s ideas on narrative, while &;Reading Art?&; clearly outlines her concept of reading images. &;Religious Canon and Literary Identity&; reenvisions Bal&;s own work at the intersection of theology and cultural analysis, while &;Enfolding Feminism&; argues for a new feminist rallying cry that is not a position but a metaphor. More than a dozen other essays round out the four sections, each of which is interdisciplinary in its own right: the section devoted to literature, for instance, ranges widely over psychoanalysis, theology, photography, and even autobiography. A Mieke Bal Reader is the product of a capacious intellect and a sustained commitment to critical thinking. It will prove to be instructive, maddening,  and groundbreaking&;in short, all the hallmarks of intellectual inquiry at its best.