|
Post by John Green on May 30, 2022 23:27:33 GMT
'Undiscovered', as in 'lost'. www.theguardian.com/books/2022/may/30/the-big-idea-could-the-greatest-works-of-literature-be-undiscovered"Using a statistical method borrowed from ecology, called “unseen species” modelling, they extrapolated from what has survived to gauge how much hasn’t – working backwards from the distribution of manuscripts we have today in order to estimate what must have existed in the past. The numbers they published in Science magazine earlier this year don’t make for happy reading, but they corroborate figures arrived at by other methods. The researchers concluded that a humbling 90% of medieval manuscripts preserving chivalric and heroic narratives – those relating to King Arthur, for example, or Sigurd (also known as Siegfried) – have gone. Of the stories themselves, about a third have been lost completely, meaning that no manuscript preserving them remains."
|
|
|
Post by Richard Marple on May 31, 2022 20:25:13 GMT
I don't think any original manuscripts of Shakespeare's plays still exist, though fortunately printing was around by his time, though that's no guarantee of preservation.
Some late 18th century novels that influenced Jayne Austen's works were thought to be lost, but literature experts eventually managed to track down copies & get them reprinted.
|
|