Christ and Apollo presents these 'straitened gates of limitation' as the great good of literature. Insisting on the 'universal limitation, or particularity' that provokes the response of the imagination, Lynch writes that 'the heart, substance, and center of the human imagination, as of human life, must lie in the particular and limited image or thing'. This sui generis study reaches into the very heart of literature's nature, from the Greek dramatists to Dante, from Shakespeare to Proust, from Camus to Greene.