Introduction

At the beginning of the twentieth century, Max Weber argued that the modern West is suffering from a crisis of meaning. Following Friedrich Nietzsche, he forecast that with the loss of religious faith, life would come to be experienced as disenchanted and ultimately meaningless. Despite its unparalleled material achievements, the modern West, in this reading, is suffering from a crisis of meaning, no longer able to answer the only really important question: ‘What shall we do and how shall we live?’ (Weber, 1949: 143). Once Weber’s thesis is outlined, this question is established as an evaluative benchmark for the chapters that follow. Attention then turns to methodological considerations related to analysing cultural texts. The approaches of seminal theorists in the sociology of literature including Leo Löwenthal and Ernest Bramsted are considered before a wider approach to reading cultural texts is outlined.