ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book provides an investigation of the retrospection involved in reading the kinds of writing which deploy rhetorical and poetical resources intensively and are generally known now as 'literature' (and in previous periods as 'poetry' in a much broader sense than the term now has). It then examines both the kinds of relations which literary texts bear to their historical contexts and also the power of certain literary writers to disrupt, exceed, and eventually outlive some of those contexts, while continuing to bear witness to them. The book begins with the hypothesis that a new paradigm of reading emerged in many quarters in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It made the practice of reading more prominent, more active, and potentially more independent of authorial control.
