Introduction

Abstract

In How Tradition Works, I argued that a central problem for understanding literature and its interaction with culture was the problem of tradition, the ways that some kinds of sameness or stability become the background against which figures of innovation or change are visible.¹ The problem of tradition in literature is marginally more tractable than that of the challenge of understanding literature as a whole, not only because tradition is a smaller (albeit still massive) subset of the larger cultural phenomenon, but because of the fundamental similarities of both process and dynamics between biological and cultural traditions. Because both literary traditions and biological lineages work in analogous ways, tools developed for understanding one can be adapted to explain the other.