Introduction: making the case for literary research across languages and cultures

Charles Burdett, Joseph Ford, Godela Weiss-Sussex and Naomi Wells

In her 2010 publication Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities, the US philosopher Martha Nussbaum starts her analysis of the crucial educational importance of the humanities with the sobering recognition that ‘[w]e are in the midst of a crisis of massive proportions and grave global significance […]: a world-wide crisis in education’.¹ Writing fifteen years on, in 2025, we recognise that this crisis has not passed, as the impact of isolationist governance, unbridled global capitalism, artificial intelligence and accelerated climate change continues to rise. The need for the humanities to equip citizens with the capacity to engage with these challenges is, thus, more urgent than ever, as it is the humanities that foster the abilities we need for the ‘creation of a world culture capable of constructively addressing the world’s most pressing problems’ and to educate ‘complete citizens who can think for themselves, criticize tradition, and understand the significance of another person’s sufferings and achievements’.²

Of course, honing these skills is the task and the domain of all the humanities subjects. But the study of literature has unique and crucial aspects to offer in this regard, as we will argue and exemplify through selected case studies in this volume – each of which makes the case for the value of engaging with literature in the curricula of schools and universities and in the academic research agenda, in particular in the disciplinary field of modern languages, or languages, cultures and societies as it is increasingly known. This is not to defend a tradition of philological endeavour for the sake of it, but to expound and emphasise the acute importance of literary studies in the world we live in.

Literature – by which we mean imaginative writing in prose, poetry or dramatic form that transports ideas, emotions and aesthetic values – is one of the profoundest expressions of the human; in fact, it may be seen as an archive of human experience, shaped through language. By reading literary works, therefore, we can gain access to and relate to ways of thinking other than our own. George Eliot put this perfectly in 1856 when she described her art as ‘the nearest thing to life; it is a mode of amplifying experience and extending our contact with our fellow men beyond the bounds of our personal lot’.³ More recently, in 2024, the Israeli author David Grossman reminded us how far-reaching this contact with the experience of others can be: in an interview in Die Zeit, he explained that literature ‘stärkt und erweitert […] den Kontakt mit dem Leben, es dehnt die Oberfläche der Seele aus, die mit der Komplexität des Lebens in Berührung kommt’ [strengthens and widens […] our contact with life, it expands the surface of the soul as it encounters the complexity of life].⁴

Literature, thus, gives us access to other worlds, but it also enables us to experience the commonalities of being human across cultures. Literature enhances empathy; it gives us a vocabulary of emotional and psychological literacy. Of course, anthropology, geography, psychology and a range of other social sciences do this, too, but as Dorrit Cohn puts it, it is the ‘principal privilege of the creative writer: to present the psyche of his subjects “omnisciently”’.⁵ The epistemological uniqueness of the literary text allows the reader access to the interiority of its characters in a way that remains inaccessible to any other approach; it enables the experience of living in a certain world – rather than just diagnosing it from the outside.

No wonder, then, that this experiential subtlety develops the reader’s capacity for empathy: Rick Rylance reports on psychological experiments showing not only that empathy grows with reading fiction,⁶ but also that literary fiction that does not reaffirm convention and readers’ expectations trains the mind in this way: ‘social experiences […] presented in literary fiction often disrupt our expectations. Readers of literary fiction must draw on more flexible interpretive resources to infer the feelings and thoughts of characters.’⁷

By eliciting empathy – and by so doing sowing the seeds of the will to action – literature has the power to promote change both on a global scale and in more localised ways. We could cite George Orwell’s Animal Farm (1945) or Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), but pursuing literary studies in a languages and cultures setting allows us to see the power of literature across different scales and contexts. Taking the specific example of German literature, Das Tränenhaus [The House of Tears], a novel published by Gabriele Reuter in 1909, with its moving exploration of the plight of unmarried mothers in Wilhelmine Germany, illustrates this point. The book caused a minor scandal on its publication, but had a tangible impact on social policy, as it informed the campaign to improve state provision of maternity care for women giving birth out of wedlock.⁸ There are many other examples of literary works across languages and cultures that have, in similar ways, highlighted social blind spots or deficiencies and have brought about change, through cognitive as well as affective engagement.

Once regarded as a central part of the curricula of Western democracies in the aftermath of the Second World War, books and the act of reading books are now increasingly seen as a threat to authoritarian and extreme right-wing agendas and social imaginaries in the United States and other parts of the world. Bans, which have very often involved removing books from schools and public libraries, target so-called ‘anti-American’ books that address themes of race, gender and LGBTQIA+ rights. It is notable that governments that divest from the importance of literary education – with the reasoning that studying books is less important than, say, STEM subjects – appear at the same time deeply threatened by the capacity of literature, and of those who study literature, to challenge authoritarianism and nefarious political agendas.⁹ For as Reham Hosny highlights in this volume in relation to authoritarian regimes in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region, literature can function as both ‘an archive and act of defiance’ by voicing counter-narratives that challenge those of dominant power structures.

Combined with factual knowledge and a political will, it is ‘narrative imagination’ – to use Nussbaum’s term – that can be the motor for change.¹⁰ But narrative imagination does not only work towards eliciting empathy, and literature’s potential for change does not only lie in its affective power. Literary fiction is also uniquely well placed to explore contingencies, to explore the ‘what if’; in this sense, literary writing is nothing less than a laboratory of ideas that can act as beacons for transformation. Encapsulating this aspect of potentiality and futurity, Gabriele Reuter’s contemporary, the activist and novelist Adele Schreiber, described works of fiction as ʻdie Spiegel […], die uns die Strahlen kommender Zeiten zuwerfen’ [the mirrors that show us the rays of times to come].¹¹

To stay with the example of literature in German, some of the postmigrant writing we currently see emerging in German-language publications is exploring precisely this potentiality. Tomer Gardi’s broken german (2016), for instance, ends with the hymnic celebration of a call shop in the centre of Berlin in which a multitude of languages mix with one another, ‘wunderschön und lebendig’ [incredibly beautifully and full of life].¹² This is an engaging image of vibrancy and conviviality, a hopeful encapsulation of the enrichment to be gained through cultural and linguistic plurality and, ultimately, it is an image of a society that embraces – rather than fears – heterogeneity. Gardi’s book shows how the non-homogeneous, the hybrid and the fluid can be made narratable, and it is an exemplary model of an artistic endeavour that works towards ‘undoing […] modes of Othering’.¹³ This is a literature that is generative and creative; it creates social imaginaries that, by transcending the boundaries of culture, can play a decisive part in societal transformation.

If all of this contributes to making the case for reading literature, it does not quite capture the particularity of literary study. For our argument, then, it is important to go further and draw attention to the fact that analysis of literary texts asks us to engage in a complex process of understanding that goes beyond gaining access to the mere content of any given text. Indeed, the study of literature engenders a way of thinking that equips us for an active and reflective engagement with the world. As Nicholas Harrison reminds us, ‘[a]ll writing, scientific/theoretical, “literary” or otherwise, demands interpretation’, whether that is about unveiling hidden agendas or cultural assumptions in science, journalism or literary writing.¹⁴ However, literary writing, in the way it can suspend reference and meaning in the world – in the way literary discourse operates as at once rooted in and detached from reality – might be seen to actively invite readers, as Harrison puts it, to think in creative and critical ways of making and remaking their worlds.¹⁵

Researching and teaching literary texts speaks precisely to this endeavour. Through academic engagement with literature, we uncover and make visible the discourses and ideologies that inform any given text; we foster the capacity for a way of reading that is attentive, critical and that discerns subtle detail; and we highlight how aesthetic form and content work together to construct or enhance the power of the text. Importantly, we do this in a way that does not negate the pure pleasure of reading. Avoiding a stance where ‘a text is being diagnosed rather than heard’, we aim to ‘give equal weight to cognitive and affective aspects of aesthetic response’,¹⁶ to balance analysis and experience.

To explain and exemplify how this kind of literary research and teaching works, let us consider the definition of literature proposed by the scholar of German realism, Martin Swales, as ‘an enriching reflection of and on being human in the world’.¹⁷ The condensed brevity of this wording conceals the fact that there are four separate dimensions of analysis referenced here that need to be engaged with to comprehend literary texts fully: the condition of ‘being human’ requires psychological and affective understanding, and representations of ‘being human in the world’ can only be understood on the basis of a good knowledge of the society and culture that informs any given text. Furthermore, an understanding of literary writing as a reflection of a world (enabling the experience of it) and a reflection on the world (pointing to the text’s inherent analytical quality), emphasises the multi-layered nature of literature. It is the task of literary research to clarify and lay bare the often-hidden entanglement and interaction of these layers. For, following Paul Ricoeur, we have to keep in mind that every mimetic act is a redescription, an interpretive, creative act.¹⁸ Even the realism of Fontane, Dickens and Flaubert is not an unmediated record of the social world, but at the same time as depicting the real, it is also an interrogation of the conventions and assumptions of the real. Their novels show us the materiality and also the assumptions and values of the social world in which they are set – not as existentially unalterable entities, but as products of a particular culture and age. They present a world – and at the same time question it or allude to the intangible truths beyond the material and social manifestations. Theodor Fontane expressed this duality through reference to the ‘tangible’ and the ‘true’ in his essay Unsere lyrische und epische Poesie seit 1848 [Our lyric and epic poetry since 1848] (1851): ‘Der Realismus will nicht die bloße Sinnenwelt und nichts als diese; er will am allerwenigsten das bloß Handgreifliche, aber er will das Wahre.’ [Realism does not want the mere world of the senses and nothing but this; least of all it wants the merely tangible, rather it wants what is true.]¹⁹

Exposing this duality and uncovering the truth about social experience, which exceeds the fact of that experience, is one of the tasks of literary research. Or, to put it differently, the particular value of studying literature lies in the double reading, the ‘aboutness’ of literature. A reading of Thomas Mann’s novel Buddenbrooks (1901), for instance, provides us with a wealth of detail, materiality and insights into the experience of a middle-class Hanse merchant family’s life. At the same time, an analytical approach reveals how, through subtly changing leitmotifs, through symbolism of objects and locations, and through a gradual move from sturdy matter-of-fact realism to highly-strung aestheticism in the course of the novel, Mann provides us – without it needing to be said – with a study of social, moral and psychological decline.

Textual analysis thus leads to an understanding of the essential interpretability of the written word, but studying the literary text also leads to a grasp of the multi-valency, specifically of literary texts. It enables the experience of simultaneously holding different levels or even ‘cross-currents of meaning’²⁰ at the same time. Students of literature learn to accept and cope with ambiguity and uncertainty, as they work on a complex text such as Goethe’s Faust. Is Faust the study of a man’s hubris as he vies with the gods? Is it the tragedy of the limitations of man? Is it a social tragedy about class and gender? Any attempt to provide a positive answer to these questions that doesn’t also allow for the equal validity of the other possibilities is doomed to fail, as any attempt to reduce this text – or even the character of Faust himself – to a single interpretation does the text an injustice. Instead, what the study of the text reveals is that in order to understand the full complexity of Goethe’s work, the need for clear-cut, single-strand simplification must be abandoned and an openness to a multiplicity of perspectives must be striven for.

Being able to do this multi-valent reading and this juggling of perspectives and interpretations in a language other than one’s own is hugely empowering. Perhaps, we might say, it is a squaring of the possibilities afforded by language learning, as the bilingual or multilingual speaker’s ability to engage with the world from several perspectives at once is equivalent to the literary analyst’s ability to hold several meanings and perspectives at the same time. Taken together, the study of literature in another language not only means more voices, more contingencies, but also promises the deepening of experience, culturally framed. The starkness and psychological intensity of Hamsun’s novels, the didacticism of Brecht’s texts and the social detail of Zola’s works not only give us access to new worlds, but also to new ways of looking at the world. Building on Swales’s definition of literature, then, we might propose to frame the study of literature in other languages as the study of reflections of and on being human in the world through the lens of culture and language.

Literary research in another language allows us a deeper understanding of the experience (in various positionalities) of living in a different culture – expressed in the framework of a language and aesthetic configurations that may be honed by specific traditions and influences. In her contribution to this volume, Sarah Bowden highlights the importance of studying texts from different eras to reveal the origins and the richness of such traditions. They may include untranslatable expressions of experience particular to this culture; take the idea of Heimat in German, for instance, a concept that is historically and ideologically enriched and only fully understandable with that knowledge of its tradition. And it may include literary conventions like the magical realism of Latin American writers, or embedded and nested narratives that emerge from Arabic storytelling and can be traced to early Sanskrit literature (see Rachel Scott, this volume), or Japanese haiku, all of which continue to influence authors from those and other parts of the world to this day.

Literary analysis enables transcultural and translingual perspectives and is a necessary background to any act of translation, whether linguistic or cultural. A recent study titled ‘Interpreting communities: small, minority and minor literatures in Europe’, for instance, set out to explore how being ascribed minority status provides a catalyst for literary writing, and privileges or forces particular forms of representation and aesthetic intervention. The study was set up as a cross-European comparative project, and thus a discerning analysis demanded deep cultural and linguistic understanding of individual cultures, conventions and languages, as well as great interpretative subtlety. Only on this basis was it possible to understand commonalities and (cultural and social) differences of literary strategies and contextualisations.²¹

The wider point is that no culture exists as a discrete formation but is the result of the complex interweaving of practices, lifeways and linguistic usages that are the inevitable result of histories of human mobility. A transnational approach to literature focuses on how texts written at different periods of time enable us to see the operation of the circulation of people, ideas and modes of behaviour. This is not to suggest that borders do not exist or that, in certain circumstances, they are not very tightly controlled. It is, however, to suggest that borders are contingent, porous and able only to obstruct – rather than impede – the effects of the movement of people and culture. By developing an approach that sees culture and territory as associated in ways that are fluid and constantly changing, we are far better equipped to address the social and psychological realities of mobility and migration and we are far better equipped to explore the legacies of centuries of European colonialism as they have been expressed through literary production. Over recent years, to take the example of literature in Italian,²² the history of Italian colonialism and its legacies have been addressed by such writers as Gabriella Ghermandi and Igiaba Scego whose work has examined from a post- and de-colonial position how deeply the history of involvement in Africa is ingrained within Italy’s transcultural past, its present and its likely future.²³ On the question of migration to Italy, texts like Amara Lakhous’s Divorzio all’islamica a viale Marconi (2010) or Shirin Ramzanali Fazel’s Io e l’Islam (2020), co-written with Simone Brioni, explore in detail both the nature of the transcultural present and the persistence of stereotypes with long antecedents.²⁴

To highlight, as we do here, the unique contributions of literary research must not be understood as an effort to silo off the study of literature to an isolated or even elitist activity to be practised by the privileged few. While we might point to external forces that have sought to marginalise literary research to the sidelines of academia, there is an equal risk in highlighting the ‘specialness’ of literary research that we become overly defensive in demarcating the boundaries of the field.

To better understand such dangers, it is useful to take a longer view of the relationship between literature and other forms of knowledge. Literature had historically been understood to much more fluidly encompass different forms of knowledge, but from the seventeenth century onwards, the increasing ‘scientification’ of knowledge and associated consolidation of disciplinarity saw literature, and the humanities more broadly, increasingly placed in opposition to the natural sciences. Through this process, the sciences established the primacy of observation and facticity over imagination and fiction in ways that increasingly determined the evaluative criteria of research more widely.²⁵

The consolidation of the social sciences, particularly sociology and anthropology, was also viewed as threatening what Vincent Debaene describes as ‘the special prerogative of literature’ in taking humankind as their object, leading, he argued, to an increasing marginalisation of literary study to an isolated focus on form.²⁶ Further disputes came to the fore in response to the emergence of cultural studies in the post-war years, which some literary researchers saw as a threat to both literature as a privileged object of study and to the study of literature in isolation from real-world concerns.²⁷

These disciplinary territorial battles fought across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have meant that literature and literary research have often suffered from being simultaneously dismissed as irrelevant to the serious business of ‘research’, while also being exalted to what Cary Nelson and Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar describe as ‘a timeless aesthetic realm outside history’.²⁸ In reality, as with many disciplinary disputes, such divisions served to obscure the ongoing interplay between literature, the sciences and the wider world throughout this period. For example, moving beyond the well-trodden ‘two cultures’ debate, Robert Craig and Ina Linge’s volume on the language of science and literature around 1900 highlights the strong crosscurrents of epistemic and aesthetic exchange between literature and the biological sciences in and beyond this period.²⁹ In recent decades, the work of literary scholars has been crucial in pushing literary research to engage with broader social and political contexts, for instance that of postcoloniality (see Emanuelle Santos in this volume). Edward Said, in particular, called out the solipsism of literary theorists who refused to engage with the ‘worldliness’ of texts and the historical conditions in which they are created.³⁰ While, as Santos emphasises, postcolonial literary studies in more recent years has shown a tendency to withdraw from the political, decolonial literary research provides a renewed emphasis on the agency of the critic who is conscious of the aim and intentions of their ‘worldly reading’. Cultural studies, equally, is arguably better understood not as an attempt to displace literary research but rather, as Stuart Hall emphasises, as an effort to impel such intellectual work to be reconfigured ‘as a practice which always thinks about its intervention in a world in which it would make some difference’.³¹

Alongside such developments from within literary and cultural studies, there have been efforts in other disciplinary areas, particularly in the social sciences, to reconsider how literary work might more actively inform their own practices. The turn in areas such as anthropology to more critical perspectives on the purported ‘objectivity’ of research led to an increasing foregrounding of the complexities of human subjectivity in ways that were more closely aligned with literary perspectives. James Clifford and George Marcus’s seminal volume on ‘writing culture’, in particular, sought to bring to the fore the poetics of ethnographic writing and the ‘literary procedures [that] pervade any work of cultural representation’.³²

Their work shines a light on the specific ways literature and literary research can contribute more broadly to knowledge production in terms of their ability to go beyond the limitations of scientific description of a purportedly objective reality. Such a perspective is captured in literary form in Jorge Luis Borges’s short story El etnógrafo, in which the ethnographer of the title returns from a period of fieldwork unwilling to reveal ‘the secret’ he has learnt, declaring instead that ‘Ahora que poseo el secreto, podría enunciarlo de cien modos distintos y aun contradictorios’ [Now that I possess the secret, I could articulate in one hundred different and even contradictory ways].³³ The emphasis of literature and literary research on the unstable nature of meaning and the limitations of language to express a singular objective reality offers a vital contribution to understanding the complexities of our current time. Lisa Lowe, for example, argued that the global conditions of recent decades ‘have pressed the empirical social sciences to its epistemological limits’.³⁴ Using the example of globalisation, she highlighted how its cultural mediations, including literary representations, provide the space and language for both critically interpreting global processes and, most importantly, for imagining the transformation and reorganisation of the current social order. In this volume, Anja Rekeszus further explores how processes of collaborative storytelling can provide communities with imaginative ways of engaging with complex social issues such as gentrification and of envisioning new forms of community action. As captured in the title of this volume, it is the capacity for literature and those who study it to imagine new realities beyond those captured by the scientific description of the world as it currently exists that arguably represents its greatest contribution to knowledge.

In order to fully realise this contribution, it is vital for literary researchers to look outwards and explore through collaborations with other disciplinary fields how such perspectives might be more directly brought to bear on other fields of knowledge. There is, nevertheless, the risk in interdisciplinary collaborations of literary researchers becoming marginal or subservient to more powerful and dominant fields. In particular, the value of interdisciplinary collaboration must be balanced with an acknowledgement of the real epistemological differences that exist, particularly between the more positivist tendencies of the sciences and the hermeneutic traditions of the humanities. The formation in recent decades of new interdisciplinary configurations within the humanities – such as the environmental humanities, the digital humanities and the medical humanities within which literary researchers play a central role – is vital for providing an institutional space where humanities researchers can engage with domains traditionally ‘owned’ by the medical, physical and computer sciences on their own terms.

To take the example of digital humanities, while they often borrow digital methods developed by computer and data scientists, their applications to humanities objects of study such as literary texts have been combined with critical reflection about the epistemological underpinnings of such tools. Most important here is the critical examination of the potential of such methods to obscure the complexities of human subjectivity and cultural expression. While there may be concerns that such methods are an effort to ‘datafy’ literature, bringing literary texts more actively into the broader realm of ‘research data’ has also provided an opportunity to highlight how the term ‘data’ itself must be reconceptualised not as neutral or objective categorisations of the world but rather as inevitably partial interpretations.

Bringing such complexities into the realms of computer and data sciences is proving of urgent importance in response to the rapid and often uncritical expansions of generative AI we are currently witnessing. As Lauren Klein and others highlight, the humanities have an underexplored potential to inform these developments with a more complex understanding of human culture and expression. Literary research has a particularly crucial role to play in bringing to the fore the complexities of meaning embedded in the ‘training data’ underpinning the development of generative AI tools and avoiding the reduction of ‘the inventive and cultural capacities of culture to “content”’.³⁵ Researchers of literatures in languages other than English are particularly well placed to foreground the cultural contingency of meaning and the marginalised or silenced voices excluded from the flattening and universalising principles underpinning generative AI technologies.³⁶

More generally, literary researchers embedded in highly interdisciplinary language schools or departments are uniquely positioned to further interdisciplinary dialogue and collaboration. In the UK context, such interdisciplinary configurations have been expanded through the move away from single-language departments to the consolidation of larger schools of languages that have increasingly collapsed the boundaries between the, traditionally, more literary European-language departments and the more social-sciences-oriented area studies departments. Tensions have, of course, arisen through such consolidations, driven at least partly by a fear that the primacy of literary scholarship within European-language departments might be under threat from a more applied vision of area studies. Certainly, the original political and instrumental drivers of establishing area studies after the Cold War are well known, but fields such as Latin American studies and Middle Eastern studies have undoubtedly evolved beyond such restrictions to encompass the study of a vast array of forms of cultural expression, including literature.

These new configurations could be seen to realise Gayatri Spivak’s earlier call for a greater alignment between comparative literature and area studies by pushing area studies to view ‘the language of the other not only as a “field” language’ and pushing literary studies to acknowledge the limitations of ‘the European outlines of its premise’.³⁷ In this respect, literary researchers from a more conventional modern languages tradition need not see these new configurations as a prompt to return to the old territorial wars fought between the sciences and the humanities, or between literary scholars and cultural studies researchers. Rather they present an opportunity for literary researchers to engage more closely with new collaborators and fields in ways that might further the potential of literary research to intervene more visibly in the world and its reimagination.

Such reimaginings of the world are at the heart of recent literary research that dialogues with other art forms, precisely as a way to understand the interpretative practices and structures that make our world. As exemplified by several contributions to this volume, the development of the field of comparative literature has led to critical engagements with written texts from across cultural and linguistic traditions. But the comparative lens also understands translation as a fundamentally human practice of understanding one another and our individual worlds. Thus, the ‘comparison’ in comparative literature is dynamic in that it spans the crossing of forms as well as cultures and times. Emma Bond’s work in this volume, for instance, at the intersection of museums and literary studies, emphasises how post-fiction can help readers to challenge the object accumulation logics of the museum and usher in new ways of negotiating and reading the world through the imperative of ‘letting go’ of objects, practices and mnemonic frameworks.

Meanwhile, Rachel Scott’s chapter addresses the intersection of the visual and the written word by focusing on a series of ancient tales and illustrations reimagined for contemporary audiences. Here, the literary exhibition, told in visual form, can be its own kind of ‘epistemic method’ reflective of a more holistic understanding of the material conditions of literature’s production and circulation in the world, as well as its power to speak through new encounters with communities that might otherwise view literature as marginal to their interests or experiences.³⁸

Similarly, in Abir Hamdar’s chapter on the writing of an ethno-drama together with Arabic-speaking cancer patients, it becomes clear that otherwise silenced or taboo topics can become more acutely visible and alive in a literary space. Indeed, Hamdar’s work encourages us to question the supposed boundary between the real and the imaginary as it is played out in the space of the theatre. Literature, in other words, is a kind of ‘real life’, just as the stories we tell ourselves create grounded and nuanced understandings of the challenges we face and help us overcome those challenges in the very process of telling and retelling them to others. Such acts of retelling in the chapters of Scott, Hamdar and also Rekeszus are further enhanced by the co-production methods they deploy in their respective projects.

The act of dialoguing across multiple forms and methodologies, while always returning to the literary as a mode of expression and critical interrogation, resonates with other chapters in the volume, engaged in interdisciplinary research that moves across languages and cultures, medical, environmental and digital humanities, as well as heritage studies. And much of this research also adopts modes of co-production that have become increasingly common across humanities and social science disciplines in recent years. At the heart of co-production is a desire to foster a reciprocal exchange of skills and knowledge, often deploying participatory methods that bring different communities into the world of research and vice versa. Here, so-called participants are increasingly brought in as ‘co-researchers’, as paid collaborators in research, challenging the idea that research is done only within the walls of the university, or by academics working alone with their ‘source’ texts.³⁹ Nicola Thomas’s chapter, for instance, builds on the increasing prevalence of ‘place-based’ agendas that can incorporate the use of participatory methodologies alongside readings of literary texts, which can be used as a source of data for understanding how concepts of time have developed and changed in local languages and contexts. Carol Tully’s contribution, similarly, highlights a mutually beneficial collaboration with the heritage industry in a joint endeavour to reveal historical depths, traditions and various travellers’ perspectives on a particular region (here Wales). Heike Bartel, meanwhile, demonstrates the ways in which literary texts interrogate how place influences concepts of masculinity and practices of eating among men and boys with eating disorders. Bartel’s work, both of drawing attention to existing literary texts from around the world about men with eating disorders and of facilitating readings of such texts by patients and health professionals, leads to new understandings of people’s experiences of illness, particularly where common narratives around men’s and boys’ experiences benefit from being questioned.

Over many years, literary research, in particular, has involved a vision of researchers working alone, wrestling with meaning or positioned in the ‘ivory tower’ of the traditional university, professing knowledge out of their own work of close reading. And yet, for a long time, collaboration (whether through teaching or research) has been a core part of most researchers’ experiences and brings about reciprocal insights and outcomes not available to the isolated academic researcher. Whether it is an exchange through teaching or one enabled through participatory research methods, literary study is, more often than not, a collaborative and socially engaged endeavour that enables spaces of cognitive and affective self-reflection not necessarily available through other forms of study. Our book provides yet another example of this kind of mutually beneficial collaboration.

If the myth of the lone academic belongs to a past of more static modes of literary criticism, the so-called ‘creative critical’ has recently emerged as an explicit challenge to the disciplinary ways of working that have become embedded particularly within literary studies. To quote Florian Mussgnug, Mathelinda Nabugodi and Thea Petrou’s ‘Prelude’ to their 2021 volume, Thinking Through Relation: Encounters in Creative Critical Writing, the creative critical is not one thing, but rather ‘stems from the artist or critic’s ability to query the human from diverse angles, including the position of its least privileged and most vulnerable designations’.⁴⁰ In addition, they underline how the creative critical mode, through its interruptive practices, is well equipped to attenuate the risk of what Rita Felski calls ‘antinormative normativity’ which has arguably become a part of some more traditional literary critical practices.⁴¹ Clearly, collaborative working has become a core part of doing this in recent literary studies research.

Across this volume we find explicit examples of collaborative, creative critical research that enact this challenge to ‘antinormative normativity’, by engaging through participatory methodologies with diverse communities of co-researchers in health, the arts and education on the question of why literature matters to wider society. Other approaches outside the scope of this book that deploy participatory and creative methodologies include the work of the theatre-maker and writer Neela Doležalová, who makes use of poetry in school-based workshops to encourage pupils to connect with the multiple languages they speak at home and in school. This work has led to the publication of 100 Poems for Belonging: An Anthology of Poems by Young Writers from Gearies Primary School as well as the production of a podcast exploring the role of multilingualism in education, and is the outcome of collaboration across the education sector, linguistics and literary studies.⁴² Poetry here is not simply a means of engaging young people’s creativity when it comes to bringing otherwise hidden or forbidden languages into the often monolingual classroom space; it is about digging deep into the emotional resonances and allowing for the emergence of the emotional impact of working and living within systems that deny creativity and perpetuate monolingual forms of living that are contrary to people’s everyday, affective existences.

Other examples of collaboration are evidenced in the UK’s 2014 Research Excellence Framework (REF) assessment exercise, highlighted in Scott’s chapter, where, for instance, literary scholar Anne Schwan’s work has informed education practices of reading and writing in prisons or where Rehana Ahmed’s work in postcolonial literature has informed wider understandings of Muslim culture and identities by British writers of Muslim heritage.⁴³ We could also cite Sam Durrant’s research on bibliotherapy and the use of literature as a means of working through traumatic experiences relating to slavery, colonialism and racism with asylum seekers and refugees in the UK.⁴⁴ In the above examples, poetry and literary engagement are arguably about discovering connection, collective solidarities and new communities; they are about forming groups of people who think otherwise and wish to build alternative visions of the world together, and poetry and literature offer the imaginative space to deconstruct existing worlds and work towards building new ones.

While the above may represent more obvious examples of collaborative or participatory methods in practice, creative critical work offers a more implicit shift in literary criticism towards examining researcher positionality and disrupting formal conventions of academic writing.⁴⁵ For example, the work of Timothy Mathews, Mathelinda Nabugodi, Clare Lees and Gillian Overing is arguably much closer to what we might think of as the work of the literary critic, but it is also engaged in a level of personal and professional vulnerability that interrupts established ways of doing criticism.⁴⁶ Nabugodi uses marginalia of her text to, for instance, navigate practices of naming in Walter Benjamin’s work, alongside that of her own personal experience:

How I came by my patronymic is a family anecdote. Scene: my mother at the social services, registering my birth to make a Soviet citizen of me. Social worker: ‘Given name?’ ‘Mathelinda.’ ‘Patronymic?’ ‘None.’ ‘What do you mean, “none”? Doesn’t she have a father?’⁴⁷

This more recent work sits at the border between what has become known as literary and creative criticism, and breaks that false division wide open. It does so in part by rehabilitating a tradition of twentieth-century cultural and literary criticism established in the work of bell hooks, Roland Barthes, Abdelkébir Khatibi, Helène Cixous, Walter Benjamin and others, but it is a practice, as Elina Mikkilä writes, that could be traced all the way back to Horace’s Ars poetica.⁴⁸

What is important here is not changing how we do literary criticism to demonstrate instances of impact that sit outside literary criticism, but rather to see that how we do criticism already contains within it a fundamentally creative mode of relating, or that there is always something else implied in critique that might not immediately be recognised. That might be, for many of us, a sort of psychosocial work on the self, on revealing or negotiating our own creative critical identities as people (as much as critics) – and, by implication, the identities of other readers – who come to encounter literary texts and who, of course, are no less capable critics than those employed in universities.

Such a practice is captured in a refrain in Mathews’s 2022 book, There and Not Here, where he appears to ask whether critics are really ‘trying to say something by writing about something else’.⁴⁹ This seems to be about the power of writing to engender forms of self-recognition, even (perhaps particularly?) when the writer-critic does not set out to consciously reflect on themselves. Or perhaps ‘trying to say something by writing about something else’ is a reflection of the fundamental work of interpretation in that the implications of one text are very often only more fully realised by reading that text filtered through another. A good example of this might be, say, reading Freud through W. H. Auden’s powerful poem, In Memory of Sigmund Freud, where the poet reduces Freud’s psychoanalysis to a repetitive practice of ‘[telling] the unhappy Present to recite the Past […] till sooner / or later it falter[s] at the line where / long ago the accusations had begun, / and suddenly knew by whom it had been judged’.⁵⁰ In any case, it is reflective of that now-common idea that to think, write and engage with others is a particularly good way of coming to a deeper understanding of one’s self. It resonates with the notion of ‘the stranger’s gaze’ that has long permeated all aspects of a languages and cultures education,⁵¹ but it is revealed perhaps most acutely in the deep imaginative engagement that emerges from acts of close reading and creative critical (re)writing.

We began this introduction to Literature for Change by citing Nussbaum’s words about a crisis in education – a crisis, we acknowledge, that has not passed, but rather that has mutated, morphed or given way to further instances of yet more intense crises. This sense of permanent crisis in the humanities, and among literary scholars in particular, has become a recurrent feature of criticism that seeks to address the future of the discipline in ways that often call for change while not taking account of the change that is already all around us.⁵² In her 2013 book Anti-Crisis, Janet Roitman makes the salient point that by always returning to the language of ‘crisis’, critics often fail to ask other important questions about how and why we might neglect to take account of the specificity of the realities we actually face.⁵³

In literary studies, and languages, cultures and societies specifically, there is no doubt that there are increasingly recurrent material crises of survival. Yet, in reading the chapters that make up this volume, there is a sense in which change is embraced as a fundamental part of what literature does. That is to say, literature and literary studies are rarely held up as the answer to any given ‘crisis’ we might face. Rather, literature forces us humans to reckon with the idea that crises are a narrative production of the societies we inhabit; that events are at once mediated by and reckoned with through reading and studying literature; and that life itself cannot be comprehended without the real and imaginative encounters stories bring.

In other words, change is not always sudden or immediate, or demanding of an urgent response; change is perhaps most often part of extended, longer-term processes of collaboration, relationship building, co-creation and storytelling that make up the examples advanced in this volume. This is literature for change, but recognising that change is made at each instant and cumulatively across time in ways into which literature, and its study, gives us unique insights.