The aims of this book are to examine the current status of the interaction between literary studies and the philosophy of literature, to articulate some of its potentialities and difficulties, and implement a genuinely interdisciplinary dialogue between the two fields by featuring twelve essays on shared issues written by scholars from both disciplines. The chapters have been written with a cross-disciplinary audience in mind and in all cases we and the authors have striven to make the contributions interesting, understandable and relevant when viewed from the perspectives of those working in either field. Neither we nor the contributors attempt to disguise or ignore the difficulties that underlie writing for such a collection and engaging in interdisciplinary dialogue; indeed, we highlight some of them in this Introduction. Despite the difficulties, however, we thought it worthwhile to try and achieve these aims, at least in part, because in our own practice we have found the insights provided by committed engagement with the "other' field useful in shedding new light on some of the problems we have encountered in our work. Andrea Selleri found that the discussions about intentionality undertaken in the philosophy of literature helped him define the theoretical stakes of his historical work on the idea of the author in nineteenth-century literary culture, and Philip Gaydon found working in the University of Warwick's English and Comparative Literary Studies department on children's literature opened up his study of epistemological questions within the philosophy of literature in novel ways.