ABSTRACT
Studying what is contemporary in literature depends very largely on understanding what we, readers of literary texts, do. It is readers who read texts in the midst of their ongoing lives and times (their present), recognise texts as contemporary or otherwise, and make sense of them accordingly. As I have observed in chapter 1, we naturally bring our present-day
perspectives to reading any literary text, whether recent or from the distant past. It is therefore likely that we perceive some degree of contemporary relevance in all the literature we read. However, it is equally the case that we do make judgements of contemporary relevance with an awareness of what is recent and what isn’t. For instance, when we read a play by Shakespeare, we understand it in terms of presentday concerns, but at the same time we do not lose sight of the fact that it appeared in the historical context of the sixteenth/seventeenth century. Such a juxtaposition of our sense of the present and awareness of the past usually clarifies our understanding of both present and past. When we read contemporary literature, we do not necessarily call upon a clear sense of history; we usually plunge into the contemporary text without much reflection because it appears to speak to current concerns in an immediate fashion.
