In current contexts one can be a literary scholar and yet be working on objects other than poems, dramas or fiction. Something has happened to both the researchers and the discipline that has transformed this humanities domain, bringing it into a sharper focus to investigate the readability of contemporary social issues. The essays in this book, written by scholars from ten countries, range across this research domain, renamed 'literary-and-cultural studies', or LCS. LCS depends on four key concepts - textuality, fictionality, rhetoricity and historicity - which characterize both the material and the methods of their research. The 16 essays look at four broad fields: cultural memory; migration and translation; electronic textuality; and biopolitics, biosociality and the body. The aim of the collection is to deploy and enhance cultural literacy, a way of looking at social and cultural issues - especially issues of change and mobility - through the lens of literary thinking.