Forgotten Treasures: A Symposium

For me the most neglected work by a well-known author is Arthur Schnitzler’s novella “Leutnant Guetl,” published at the very start of our century in 1900. The story uses the stream-of-consciousness technique (years before Joyce) to light up through a lieutenant’s psyche Austria’s troubled fin de siecle. Also suffering from what is to me outrageous neglect is Dudley Young’s “Origins of the Sacred,” a marvelously imaginative and ecumenically knowledgeable meditation on the religious instinct, published in the United States in 1991.