Illuminating Eco

Book excerpt: Illuminating Eco provides an opportunity to view the interaction between Umberto Eco's fiction and his theoretical texts, and suggests future avenues of research. Covering the range of British scholarship on Eco's literary and theoretical work, essays by scholars such as Michael Caesar and David Robey consider Eco's writing through the reading strategies suggested by his texts, in light of alternative critical approaches, and by challenging previous theoretical interpretations of Eco's work. Among the contributions are Eco's written response to these essays and a translation of the final chapter from his Sulla letteratura, in which Eco discusses the conception and execution of his narrative works. Its interdisciplinary nature makes this collection accessible to a wide readership in order to situate Eco's work in the greater literary and critical sphere.