tour de force , Valentine Cunningham offers a sequence of controversial arguments in favour of the worldly stuff of texts, a commodity that he sees to be still too commonly discredited, down-played and repressed by post-modernist theory and practice.
In the course of its critique this books inspects, with startling originality, texts from the Bible to
Jane Eyre, Hamlet to
Batman (the movie),
Tristram Shandy to
Finnegan's Wake, concentrating particularly on classic nineteenth-century realist novels such as
Emma, Hard Times, Bleak House, Middlemarch, The Trumpet Major and
Heart of Darkness , as well as classic twentieth-century novels, including Beckett's
