ABSTRACT
The book concludes with a consideration of what this kind of approach to literature might lead to in future projects, what led me to this approach in the first place, and a brief consideration of whether/why art and literature is valuable to us to begin with. It is an admittedly personal closing statement of the kind that some readers may identify with, and others may not. But I think the split there may well reflect that which exists in literary studies generally at this moment. In the Epilogue, I am hoping we can take the direction suggested long ago by Oscar Wilde, somewhat more recently by Susan Sontag, and quite recently by Avelina Lésper, and discover a renewed (not to say Arnoldian) emphasis on seeing the literary (or other artistic) work “as in itself it really is.”
