Introduction

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book shows that the distinction drawn in many critical and theoretical works between what is central to a literary text and what is digressive, and it shows by means of the apparently extraordinary case of Fznnegans Wake that this is not a stable or a selfevident distinction. It examines some nodal points in the history, specific instances of theoretical and literary texts that deal with or exemplify this recurrently troubling issue. In attacking the belief in some "peculiar language" that belongs only to literature, William Wordsworth is posing the question of difference with particular force. The Peculiar Language of Literature historically based philological studies of the nineteenth century to the linguistic theory of the twentieth, and in so doing it liberates language from a certain myth of transparency and dependence upon the real.

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