ABSTRACT
One of the founding principles of this Handbook is that scholars cannot regard themselves as adequately educated unless they have some understanding of both the intellectual and the material history of literature. It is this history that provides the rich soil out of which even the most recent and radical piece of literature grows. If you do research in literature, it is likely that most of your time will be spent studying the ‘meaning’ or ‘significance’ of texts. In order to do this you will have to make assumptions about the integrity of that text, assumptions about the way in which the author wrote (or ‘produced’) it, and assumptions about the way in which the author’s contemporaries read (or ‘consumed’) it. Even if you are not worried about the historical context, you will need to know something about how your texts are produced and consumed today.
