In How Literature Works important issues of literary theory are vividly illustrated by application to a wide variety of texts, many quoted and discussed at length. The theoretical aspects covered include the structural characteristics of literary texts, the psychology of the reading process and the social function of literature. The book also deals with such general questions as the relationship between literary texts and `objective' prose and the relationship between poems written to work as songs and those in which the lyric form is used to develop an argument: the singing and the speaking voice.