ABSTRACT

The Good-Morrow offers many pleasures, many kinds of information, and many opportunities for grounding and structuring the developing ideas that we all have about the world. It serves as a model for the literary work in general: of what it consists of, how it works, and how it may be studied. That is a heavy burden for one little poem to bear, however, and not all literary works are alike. This chapter focuses on a small community of texts from different genres, from different English-speaking nations, and from different historical periods. Texts offer a wide range of impressions of what literature can be, and of why we might want to spend our time on it. We can even hope, through literature, to play an active part. Furthermore, a literary text, being read, is such a complex object that it is inconceivable that it will ever take shape, in two people's heads, in exactly the same way.