" Originality can be expected from nobody except a lunatic, a hermit, or a sensational novelist." 1 That, anyway, is the opinion of Andrew Lang, the folklorist, columnist, editor, novelist, translator, and publishing impresario whose case will help organize the following pages. As Lang goes on to explain, he is being too hard on sensation novelists and lunatics; even the mad and even writers of scandalous novels, he claims, draw on prior experiences and pre-existing idioms, and so" no more than sane men, can they do anything original." 2 Only an actual hermit, if one could ever be found in so extreme a state as never to have been exposed to culture at all-only such an isolated individual might instantiate originality in any absolute sense. Everyone else, Lang reasons, reworks old material into new forms, reorganizes antecedent ideas and tropes, and, out of those historical precedents, creates something that, if it is not" original," is at least somehow new.

" Even the Aeneid was a pastiche, a string of plagiarisms," he argues this did not keep it from being a" rather unusual piece of work." 3 L honorific usage of" unusual" here-like his unorthodox reading of gil-suggests that his position does not align with the cliche that no new exists in the world. It is rather that stock situations, plot device other examples of what Lang calls literary" materials" are available common archive or public record, a repository of concepts available mixed, shaped, and re-formed by later intelligences into something that he insists, qualitatively different than what went into that initial aggreg tion. 4 What is usual can be made unusual through an artist's act of cr reassembly. It is precisely in bringing together, remediating, or" con lating" such old materials (the last is Walter Benjamin's term) that L artist-curator adds qualitative novelty to the network of prior texts