The Life of Texts: An Introduction to Literary Studies

This innovative introduction to literary studies takes 'the life of texts' as its overarching frame.It provides a conceptual and methodological toolbox for analysing novels, poems, and all sorts of other texts as they circulate in oral, print, and digital form.It shows how texts inspire each other, and how stories migrate across media.It explains why literature has been interpreted in different ways across time.Finally, it asks why some texts fascinate people so much that they are reproduced and passed on to others in the form of new editions, in adaptations to film and theatre, and, last but not least, in the ways we look at the world and act out our lives. The Life of Texts is designed around particular issues rather than the history of the discipline as such.Each chapter concentrates on a different aspect of 'the life of texts' and introduces the key debates and concepts relevant to its study.The issues discussed range from aesthetics and narrative to intertextuality and intermedial