Between words and things there is an intermediate stage, where words express their inexhaustible tension to become things. The workshop of this impossible, and always retried, metamorphosis is called literature.

The book consists of three chapters. The first sets out to define the literary field. Taking issue with the prevailing sceptical view, Paduano holds that it is possible to define literature on a functional basis, starting with its gratuitousness, which, he asserts, is paradoxically a social role. He argues that all the literary texts that constitute what we call western literature are a macrotext organized by a single tradition and governed by a relationship between ancient and modern which needs to be freed of all prejudices about value. The author’s perspective is that of an experienced classicist who is particularly sensitive to the contemporary vitality of the classical.

The second chapter discusses the theoretical debate on the reciprocal relations between author and reader, arguing in favour of a reception theory which respects the essential nature of the basic features of the original text.

The third chapter, which is the most important and innovative, disputes the common self-referential idea of literature, arguing not for a generic relationship with the real, but for a privileged relationship with the human condition, which for Aristotle was the entire reality that was the object of mimesis. In its creations of imaginary worlds, literature simultaneously and powerfully channels the two faculties which constitute the human being in all its manifestations: on the one hand, it channels the rational dimension, by organizing into a meaningful body a sequence of facts that don’t necessarily have meaning; and on the other hand it channels the emotional dimension, by expressing through the figures a disturbance of the transparency of language which directs it potentially towards the infinite (something characteristic of the language of the emotions) and also by articulating a conflict between repressed desire and repression on various levels.