The Literary Agenda is a series of short polemical monographs about
the importance of literature and of reading in the wider world and
about the state of literary education inside schools and
universities. The category of 'the literary' has always been
contentious. What is clear, however, is how increasingly it is
dismissed or is unrecognised as a way of thinking or an arena for
thought. It is sceptically challenged from within, for example, by
the sometimes rival claims of cultural history, contextualized
explanation, or media studies. It is shaken from without by even
greater pressures: by economic exigency and the severe social
attitudes that can follow from it; by technological change that may
leave the traditional forms of serious human communication looking
merely antiquated. For just these reasons this is the right time
for renewal, to start reinvigorated work into the meaning and value
of literary reading. We live in days, no leaving them or choosing
them. What's in a day? With their natural narrative arc they begin
and they end, and in between we talk about how they are going or
wonder 'where' they have gone. They each have their small stories,
non-stories, ephemeral stories. So every day slips by, most days
much like most other days. We eat, we sleep, we go to work; we
endure, enjoy, continue. Day after day, day before day, it is the
recurring of no particular story in endless, beginningless
succession. At the same time, any single day is also a unique date,
with its multi-digit identity, its moment-at last, and never
again-of here and now, today. And on longer scales, the slow small
shifts of ordinary days and their surrounding stories will
eventually remake the days that have been and gone as the times
that are no more. An ordinary day from decades, let alone centuries
ago must now be a 'once' long passed away, the old days to be
regretted-or to be revived in all the curiosity of their historical
difference. Everyday Stories makes us think again about the
ordinary life we are in, day after day and day by day: always the
same, and always slightly changing. Entering into the single day,
drawing out the stories that surround us, this book goes into
everyday stories of many descriptions, old and new: both in
literature and in that story-laden place and time we call real
life.
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