Literature and cultural change

What are the connections between literature and culture, and between literature and cultural change? Literature and its conventions are obviously subject to cultural change, and can be used as documentary evidence of particular aspects of culture and cultural change. But how are its aesthetic dimensions and cognitive affordances related to such change, both within the intrinsic dynamics of cultures as systems of signification and in the manifold contacts with other cultures? And how does literature itself contribute to cultural change? The essays in this volume examine the impact of cultural change on the evolution of literature, and they investigate how literature - from the early modern period to the present - has been an active agent in motivating, instigating or hindering cultural change, trying to speed it up or slow it down. Ranging from early modern drama to poetry of the First World War and from contemporary ecopoetry to migrant literature of the 1950s, they explore questions of literature and cultural change from theoretical and historical perspectives in literary and cultural studies.