The Christian can speak meaningfully of Christ as the ground and norm of this mythopoieic faculty and that mythopoiesis in contemporary secularity is finally judged by the mythos of Christ as both myth and myth-maker. Beginning with an observation of the mythopoieic elements in the fantasy fiction of Tolkien, Rowling, Pratchett, and Le Guin, I have attempted to contextualise their employment of and delight in a ‘mythic sensibility’ within a Christian theology of human participation in divine creativity. The implication of all such mythopoiesis into the mythopoiesis of Christ and in Christ is ultimately a seeking after God, a being-drawn into the Trinitarian return of God to God. Even when this desire has gone astray, it remains bound up in the Trinitarian procession, by virtue of God’s grace in creation, and in the redemption of the world through Jesus Christ. Our mythopoieic faculty remains redeemable because it, like all human endeavour, remains hallowed by the Incarnation and taken up by the risen Christ.

This chapter uses Heidegger’s and Arendt’s joint reading in 1925 of Thomas Mann’s novel The Magic Mountain (1924) to argue that Heidegger’s lived literary practice in the 1920s does not match the invocations of poetic specialness that the philosopher theorizes from the mid 1930s onwards. Drawing on Heidegger’s letters to Arendt, as well as on the lecture courses from the mid 1920s which Heidegger used to clarify the arguments that became Being and Time, the chapter reconstructs Heidegger’s response to Mann’s novel. The episode suggests a counterfactual alternative mode of Heideggerian literary reading. Mann’s novel, as a model to think with, emphasizes the exchange with others and the competing discourses that resist grounding in a more fundamental viewpoint, such as the phenomenological ontology of the early Heidegger or the “thinking” of the later Heidegger. At the same time, the reading of Mann allows us to re-contextualize Heidegger’s engagement with his scientific and philosophical contemporaries, such as Einstein, Bergson, and Russell.

The introduction offers an overview of recent scholarly discourse and approaches to comics and graphic novels. It provides brief close readings of panels from Rodolphe Töpffer’s L’Histoire d’Albert, the anonymous comic strip, Lucy and Sophie Say Good Bye, George Herriman’s Krazy Kat, Chris Ware’s Jimmy Corrigan, and Emil Ferris’ My Favorite Thing is Monsters, which apply comics methodologies of reading language (Hannah Miodrag) and analyzing graphic novels (Jan Baetens and Hugo Frey), among others. To further highlight the scope of comics analyses across the variety of forms of the medium, the introduction discusses the comics in the light of Rita Felski’s concepts of knowledge and enchantment.

The introduction ends with an overview of the Companion’s seventeen chapters, from the first part on Forms, to the second one on Readings, and ending with Uses.

According to Rita Felski, literary studies have for too long been restricted to what Paul Ricoeur famously called the “hermeneutics of suspicion.” It should now return to the text itself as a locus not only of power, interest, and domination, but of literary value, inviting engagement intellectually, emotionally, and imaginatively. Via a reading of Wittgenstein’s work on aesthetics, including his conception of aspect-perception, this chapter reflects on Felski’s proposal, arguing that its opposition between suspicion and humanism might be too simple. While Wittgenstein offers a powerful defense of a humanist view according to which a literary text encourages responsiveness to expressive meaning, it is argued that his view can be extended to include meaning constituted in various historical contexts as well. As a result, the text, as Adorno and Said claim, can never escape its dual determination as both worldly and inherently meaningful.

The history of literature has long been viewed in its relationship to politics. For much of the twentieth century, we were schooled to find the politics of literature not in its acknowledged commitments but as lying deep within its unconsciously ideological structures and forms. The Introduction to the volume, as well as offering succinct summaries of the eighteen essays that make it up, calls for attending to literature’s political surfaces: to recognise that twentieth-century authors wrote in direct response to political movements, ideas, and events, that many were activists for or against them, and that literature and politics over the twentieth century coincided, overlapped, and clashed. Taking its cue from Toni Morrison’s unapologetic mixing of commitment and literature in her 1973 Foreword to Sula, the Introduction argues that several works by twentieth-century individuals were political in specific, open, and direct ways. This is of course not to say that these writers did not question literature’s relationship to politics, nor that they didn’t quiz literature’s ability to effect politics.

This conclusion places the arguments of Virtual Play within the larger context of virtual and fictional experiences in our culture, and reiterates the stakes of a more participatory, more vicarious criticism for understanding why imaginative literature continues to matter today. It gives a brief account of the ‘patch notes’ to the popular video game The Sims 4, and suggests how the imaginative structure of digital simulations meaningfully parallels the pleasures of novel fiction we have been documenting. Finally, it acknowledges potential problems with and proposes a future direction for this research, pointing to the role that vicarious reading has to play both in raising and answering questions about simulated violence and intimacy.

From the 1980s a pincer movement on editorial prerogatives came into play. The post-structuralist movement gradually undermined the assumption that works required a single reading text based on final authorial intention. Texts were also revealed to have a social dimension, as the meanings of their versional, redesigned and reprinted forms are ‘realised’ by successive readerships. The inherited but rarely inspected work-concept was thrown into doubt.

Conscientious editors who nevertheless felt the need to intervene on behalf of a new readership seemed to be left with no ground to stand on.

This chapter argues that a failure to theorise the work-concept is at the root of the problem. It shows that we need a broader concept of textual agency and an emphasis on the role of the reader in the functioning of what may now be cast as the embodied or living work. The role of the reader applies also for the scholarly edition, which emerges as a form of argument, aimed at the reader, about the archival materials it deploys.

Other possible work-models are considered, especially those implied in the writings of Franco Moretti and Rita Felski, based on the actor-network theory of Bruno Latour.