Of the parts in Aristotle's famous definition in the Poetics that "a whole is that which has beginning, middle, and end" (Aristotle 2321(Aristotle [1450b), the middle is certainly the one that has received the least attention. Richard Kopley's The Formal Center in Literature deals with this middle ground in a way that is more strongly reminiscent of Frank Kermode's The Sense of an Ending (1967) than to Edward Said 's Beginnings (1975), placing itself firmly into the tradition of formalism and philology. Well-known within Poe Studies as an advocate of close reading, Kopley offers fifteen chapters on the form of literary texts, mostly novels and short stories, from Edgar Allan Poe's Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (1838) to Zadie Smith's White Teeth (2000). The volume is a culmination of Kopley's work on what he has called the "formal center" in Anglophone literature since his 1988 essay on "Bartleby, the Scrivener." The formal center, Kopley defines, may be "a single point," "parallel words or phrases," or a chiasmus (6); it "is usually framed by parallel language or passages, but may be indicated, too, by narrative divisions or narrative time" (7). Discussing hypotheses on the relevance of chiasmus to premodern literature such as its mnemonic value, Kopley establishes a humanist rationale for the assumption that "as long as we have a sense that there is a metaphorical center to our knowledge, a felt center to our being, to our aspiration, then there will be literal centers in some works of literature" (11). While the monograph engages with some Cultural Studies issues such as sexuality (ch.s 9, 12, and 13) and multiculturalism (ch. 15), its approach amounts to a clear focus on the self-reflexive qualities of canonical literary works, examining such devices as allusion ( 18) and mise-en-abyme (74) as well as motifs such as echoes (59), mirrors (88-89), circles (43), or scales (96).