As students we are taught that literature is not an abstract phenomenon and walks hand in hand with history, arts, economics, social sciences and any field of human knowledge - literature is the expression of an age, the reflection of a nation's culture and the sound of a people's language. As a teacher myself, I feel the responsibility of communicating all this to our students and of helping them to become autonomous in thinking about and looking at the world. To succeed in all this, our students need teachers who are willing and able to convey to them a passion for literature and a sense of the cultural richness it puts at our disposal. It is thus undeniable that teachers play a key role in this process and that qualified teachers know that literature can be both the source and the object of their teaching activities. (Cristina Vallaro, Introduction)