Who are we? What am I? What is an ‘I’? What does it mean to say ‘me’?What is the relationship between an ‘I’ in a literary text and an ‘I’ outside it? One of the central ideas of this book is literature’s capacity to question, defamiliarize and even transform the sense of who or what we are. In the next few pages we would like to elaborate further on this, by trying to look at the nature of personal identity or ‘me’ both in broadly historical and theoretical terms and more specifically in terms of what literary texts themselves suggest.