These modern examples, again instances of literary production and response that have to be read in terms of places and layerings, illustrate the key aspect that the book so wonderfully brings to our attention: literature is produced in places that are saturated with text, character, and experience; and these texts migrate, get archived, become parts of libraries and collections, and generate readers and texts in these very places, welcoming itinerant materials and engaging with them. What happens to the reader who dwells in this richness is both a defamiliarization, with regard to established temporal and topographical patterns, and a newfamiliarity with the landscapes and the configurations that make literatures and literary imagination emerge.
David Wallace, who studied at York (BA), Perugia, and Cambridge (Ph.D.), has been Judith Rodin Professor of English, University of Pennsylvania, since 1996, with visiting positions at Jerusalem, London, Leipzig, Melbourne, and Princeton. He has travelled and lectured widely across Europe, and also north America, Australia, and Japan, and has made a series of radio documentaries for the BBC. He is the author or editor of ten books, including Premodern Places and The Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature.