ABSTRACT
The word ‘literature’ has three uses in contemporary English: it can refer to linguistic works of outstanding artistic merit (“She’s studying French Literature”); it can refer to printed promotional pamphlets and catalogues produced, for example, by damp-proofing companies and evangelical churches (“Would you like to take some of our literature?”); and it can refer to established written material used in a field of academic study (“He’s read widely in the immunology literature”). In this article, I shall only be concerned with ‘literature’ in the first sense.
