ABSTRACT
It is no new thing for the academic linguist to turn his attention to literature. For centuries written texts were his almost exclusive concern: often, texts which were written rather than literary-any records of a directly inaccessible language community; but as often again, literary pieces, from the highly treasured sacred documents analysed and annotated by the Indian grammarians before Christ to the indisputably literary remains of the Germanic cultures of the early centuries of this era, equally treasured by nineteenthcentury philologists. If all philology was not literary criticism, much of it, at least from the points of view of objects studied and motives for study, has to be granted that title.
