Literature and criticism make individuals aware of how language operates through an elusive dialectic of presence and absence, making a world available to us and simultaneously separating us from it. One way to approach the idea of the person - an idea that literature and criticism have done much to shape and confirm - is by interpreting it within such a dialectic, as an evolving and evaluative term. Chapters in this book look at the issues of the vocabularies of hermeneutics and phenomenology, scientific verification, philosophy of imagination, Judaeo-Christian religion and Marxism and the conclusion attempts a synthesis describing some relations between literature and culture, focused on the category of the person. Throughout the theoretical positions are developed by means of exegesis of appropriate literary texts. This book is designed to prove of interest to departments of literature and language. Other books by this author include Reading the New Testament , Literature and the Discovery of Method in the English Renaissance , Literature of Mysticism in Western Tradition and Images and Ideas in Literature of the English Renaissance