THE PROCESS OF MAKING LITERATURE ranges from the creation of an individual work to the shaping of a corpus or the establishing of a major work as a classic part of written culture. A sense of the origins of meaning in this process is a firm foundation for understanding a work, not necessarily a final interpretation, but a way of staying close to the quick of creation and its direction.

This is too simple a theory to need much elaboration other than the practice of the case studies that follow. The proof of the pudding is in the eating. As Goethe said, “the phenomena are the theory.”

What follows does however rest on a reasoned position: that literary works are viable acts of communication between author and reader, generated in real historical contexts, shaped by the time, place, and circumstances in which they arose, and open to reconstruction with the help of the marks these forces have left on them. Literary biography has never lost its interest for a scholarly and a wider readership, and to look closely at the genesis of a work is to give that interest a sharper focus where it most matters, at the point where meaning is created from the materials of experience and the skills of the literary craft. Upon this common ground every genesis is then a different and absorbing human story.

The present book casts a wide net for a limited haul—the studies are small in number when set against the infinite corpus of literary works whose every genesis might be reconstructed. So this is only a representative selection, but it takes in a variety of types, from the writing of single poems and novels to the genesis of a genre, from a handful of plays to a complete writing career.

The first four case studies, of Homer, the Bible, Montaigne, and Shakespeare, treat classic early instances of complex genesis from outside my immediate professional field. They are designed to set the scene for the later German examples. I offer both kinds, in the teeth of Goethe's warning that “there are two things you cannot sufficiently beware of: obstinacy, if you limit yourself to your specialism; inadequacy if you go outside it.” So a degree of modesty is in order.