This view is strictly back to front. It implies that in focusing closely on a given text, the critic is only and forever interested in texts in isolation. This book takes issue with this idea precisely in its attempt to derive symptomatic examples from a range of texts spread across the world. We cannot bypass the stage of engagement with literary texts as texts. If the relative autonomy of a work of art means anything at all, it surely requires of us attention to those facets of any piece of writing that are conflicted. It draws our eye to the rough brushstroke, the flaw in the material, the clash that suddenly sheds new and unintended light. In other words, we can understand the way in which literature makes its meaning as literature only by attending to voice and rhythm, the stated and the elliptical, the whole melding of past, present, and future through which the work of prose fiction takes shape, presented by the author as choices of form. From these essential features, we can then work outward toward a better grasp of the way that works of fiction and their generic frames at given points in space and time help to construct, reinforce, but also sometimes contest everyday commonplaces.

Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, loc. 55