Reading old books: writing with traditions

Introduction : ideas of literary tradition

Petrarch, scholarship, and traditions of love poetry

Chaucer and Boccaccio's Il Filostrato

Renaissance epics : Ariosto, Tasso, and Spenser

Reading and community as a support for the new in Elizabeth Gaskell's Mary Barton

European and African literary traditions in Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o's Wizard of the Crow

Conclusion : writers' and readers' traditions.