Two quotes indicate some of my interests.  According to the poet-heroine of Aurora Leigh, Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s novel-in-verse (1856), “The world of books is still the world” (1.792).  Late in the century, speaking through another mask in “The Decay of Lying” (1889), Oscar Wilde contended that “Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates life.”  Both attest to the power of print culture to touch and shape lives (perhaps not coincidentally, since Barrett Browning was an early influence on Wilde).   Both statements suggest that we can engage issues that matter by reading literary texts, and that study of literature should not be divorced from material culture and the reception of imaginative creations.