In this critical

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

Watt and Golding's

Rites of Passage .