What is literature? What is the quality in a text that leads a reader to call it 'literary'? What is the 'certain way' of reading that calls into being the literary potential of a text? Why have we been unable to definitively answer these questions, and where does that leave us? Derek Attridge argues that the impossibility of definition leaves us at a beginning. From the point where literature resists definition, we can begin afresh to explore its workings. Rethinking aspects of the literary that have too long been taken for granted, this volume: considers literature's evasion from definition in light of the practice and institution of Western art; provides a rich new vocabulary for discussions of the literary, reworking such terms as invention, singularity, otherness, alterity, the event, performance and form; returns literature to the realm of ethics, and argues the ethical value of the literary institution to a culture; demonstrates how a new understanding of the literary might be applied in a 'responsible', creative mode of reading. The Singularity of Literature is a brilliant contribution to the theory of literature.