Texting culture - culturing texts

The contributions to this collection of essays for Horst Breuer are a topically diverse yet analytically coherent evocation of the intellectual spirit in whose honour they are written. The contributors tackle a broad array of topics, including Shakespearean drama and nineteenth- to twenty-first-century narrative fiction, early modern culture, 'chick lit' and contemporary film. Drawing on such diverse methodologies as cultural history, corpus linguistics, narratology and psychoanalysis, they demonstrate how fruitfully these methodologies interact with a meticulous philological investigation of literary texts. While thus participating in the current reappraisal of traditional reading skills, the contributors nevertheless steer clear of a nostalgic desire to return to a mythical 'golden age' of literary impressionism. Instead, they seek to reformulate philological enquiry along pragmatic and rational lines, while incorporating in an innovative way the best and most useful elements of contemporary cultural theory.