The question "What is literature?" must be pivotal in literary theory: serious scholarly interest in literature, one may reasonably assert, presupposes a correct delimitation of this phenomenon as well as an account of its central characteristics. In the first respect the task is a relatively simple one. We all know that for instance novels, poems, and plays are literature, and border-line cases such as essays and memoirs need pose no serious problem. On the contrary, they indicate that there is a border line – otherwise certain texts would not be able to straddle it.