In seventeenth and eighteenth-century England and France a boisterous debate, traditionally known as the “Battle of the Books,” raged for many decades. The issue at stake was one of style: should we accept the “Antients” (to use Jonathan Swift’s spelling) as our models and exemplars in matters literary, given their immemorial legacy of acutely expressive prose and verse, or should we rather forge a “Modern” style and manner befitting our own age and its peculiar requirements and contingencies? Charles Perrault in France in the 1695 preface to his Contes sided resolutely with the moderns, and this on moral grounds: the ancient fables taught a destructive morality. Interestingly enough, he singled out the pernicious effects of certain misogynistic classical tales on young girls’ moral nature and declared: “I maintain that my fables deserve more to be related than most of the ancient tales … if one considers them from the moral aspect.”

Similar debates took place at other times and in other cultures. In ninth-century Baghdad, to name but one, poets argued strenuously over whether it was better to ape the style of those earlier desert-dwelling bards who had made the original glory of literary Arabic or to forge an idiom and manner reflective of the overly refined and courtly world in which the poets actually lived. The scurrilous wag (and great poet) Abû Nuwâs went so far as to lampoon the early poets and to state that the only thing he himself sought in the ancient ruins was a