Literary activism : perspectives Literary Activism activism that revisits and interrogates an idea of literature emerges from a radically altered landscape for both publishing and academia where market pressures are effecting changes on language on the measuring of value on the concept of influence we might struggle to recognise. Taking in the roles of writer critic translator academic and publisher the essays in this volume follow no single line of enquiry. Rather they offer the beginnings of an analysis of the literary world at a certain moment of globalisation while also questioning whether a literary world exists and if it does where its boundaries lie. The collection moves in many directions from Arun Kolatkar and his near heroic refusal of both marketplace and reputation; to Derek Attridge who argues for a form of affirmative criticism which positions the critic as a lover of the text; while from Amsterdam Dubravka Ugresic reflects on life in a literary out of nation zone adrift in a territory where intellectual protest has been stripped of ideological impetus and subsumed by the voraciousness of the market. Taken together these essays initiate a series of conversations about who reads what and why about the practice of writing and criticism at this particular contemporary moment and about the activities and institutions that shape an understanding of what literature is and what it can do.