Introduction

Peter Stallybrass is Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania, where he mainly teaches Renaissance and Cultural Studies, and is interested in theories of the body and of transgression. He co-edits the University of Pennsylvania Press's New Cultural Studies. It was not Ernst Robert Curtius's inclination to follow up his own remark and indeed people can detect a certain amused astonishment when he realizes where his investigations have finally led him. From the first it seems that the ranking of types of author was modelled upon social rank according to property classifications and this interrelation was still being actively invoked in the nineteenth century. The new historian, the genealogist, will know what to make of this masquerade. He will not be too serious to enjoy it; on the contrary, he will push the masquerade to its limits and prepare the great carnival of time where masks are constantly reappearing.