The idea of studying texts in context has become a major new emphasis in contemporary literary studies. This book explores the idea of contexts and the way they affect texts, concentrating upon: the writer's context; the reader's context; the text's context; the language context; and the meaning context. Through a series of units comprising texts, exercises and readings, Adrian Beard sets out a framework for studying texts and their contexts and shows how this approach can lead to a valuable new understanding of the changing and multiple meanings of any text. This accessible set of materials...