Introduction

The term ‘condition’ implies a mode or a state of being. In the way in which we employ the term in this study, it implies an attempt to defi ne not a property nor a quality of literature, but a set of circumstances essential to it-in other words, those circumstances which determine the modality of literature’s existence. To talk of conditions, then, signals an ambition to defi ne what makes literature possible, rather than what constitutes it, a subtle but important conceptual shift. The subject of this book is the implication of this shift for understanding literary creativity and defi ning literary value. So although we refer to aspects of literary theory, we are not concerned with discussing the numerous attempts made by theorists to identify the features of a work which lead it to be labelled ‘literature’, or with the alleged political or ideological character of that labelling. In the same way, although we discuss details of literary history, we are not principally interested in providing a comprehensive account of the conditions which, at any given moment, made the production of a literary work possible or determined the way in which it was read and interpreted. The subject which does concern us is the usefulness of the turn away from properties to conditions, one closely associated with the work of Jerome J. McGann, whose 1991 monograph The Textual Condition was instrumental in popularizing the term.