ABSTRACT
Literature is something that people have invented; and they have done so repeatedly, in different places, in different contexts. Insofar as defining literature means constructing a model of human communication in which a line is drawn between one kind of writing and another, then categorising a text as literature is itself, if done thoughtfully, a creative act. Literature and its facets and manifestations, such as allegory and irony, play out in the following spaces: between form and meaning; between narrators and characters; between the author, the reader and the text; between objective truth and subjective interpretation. Many of the greatest experiences that literature has to offer come from the gaps and tensions between these terms, and most of the important things that theorists of literature have to say are attempts at describing how these gaps and tensions work.
