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emperor Napoleon (who read the works in Italian translation). The enthusiastic Napoleon forthwith commissioned Ingres to paint a canvas called The Dream of Ossian, and many other painters found inspiration in the topic in the early years of the nineteenth century, producing representations of Ossian on the Bank of the Lora, Invoking the Gods to the Strains of a Harp, and Ossian Receiving Napoleonic Officers. Not only had Ossian become literature, his work produced other literature; indeed, it produced or generated national literatures. Lost or found? Imposture though Ossian might be, this “found” poet had a huge effect on the spread of European romantic nationalism. The fame and influence of his poetry extended from Scotland to France, Germany, and Hungary. Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wills Wilde owes his first two names to the heroes of Ossianic poems—and in his own compelling fiction about forgery and poetry, “The Portrait of Mr. W. H.,” he cites both Chatterton and Macpherson.

When it comes to literature, these two ideas are not always symmetrical. Where Donne was “lost” for a while because he was seldom reprinted and even more seldom read, and Chaucer was “lost” because his language and metrics were not understood, both were “found”—restored to the canon and the literary tradition—through the work of subsequent editors and critics.

Does intention matter? Does inadvertence?

In what would prove to be an amusing and instructive pedagogical improvisation, the critic Stanley Fish once invited his students of a 1971 summer course in seventeenth-century religious poetry to interpret a poem they found on the blackboard when they entered the class. The poem was a list of names left over from Fish’s previous class in the same room—a class in contemporary theories of linguistics and literary criticism. Predictably, the students leaped imaginatively to their task, finding religious allegories, symbols, doctrines, and holy puns, as well as an underlying structure that disclosed both a Hebrew and a Christian subtext. “As soon as my students were aware that it was poetry they were seeing,” Fish wrote, “they began to look with poetry-seeing eyes, that is, with eyes that saw everything in relation to the properties they knew poems to possess.” For Fish, this was not a discouraging but an intriguing event, as was the explanation he offered: “Interpretation is not the art of construing but the art of constructing. Interpreters do not decode poems: they make them.”59 In subsequent books and articles, he would go on to develop his reader-response theory of “interpretive communities”—a theory that Fish, who began his career as a Miltonist, demonstrated most signally through a reading, not of ephemera on a blackboard, but of the Variorum Commentary on the works of John Milton.60

Fish’s pedagogical stunt did not make the names on the blackboard literature. What it did do—and what an early experiment by I. A. Richards also did, although Richards used published poems rather than found text—was to demonstrate that there are literary ways of reading. (Richards’s book chronicling the process, Practical Criticism, was subtitled A Study of Literary Judgment.)61 Not all of these ways are successful or pertinent. But let us imagine for a moment that Fish’s students, in that long-ago classroom at the University of Buffalo, had had recourse to instant Internet searches or had determined that their task was to historicize the set of words (all proper names) on the board, or to seek out the ethical, moral, or political connections among them. They would have avoided the excessive critical ingenuity that Fish both admits and admires, and that he does not call misplaced, though others might. They might even have correctly identified the individuals listed, although each was represented only by a surname, so there was plenty of room for error. And they might have constructed a narrative about the connections between Jacobs-Rosenbaum, the coauthors of linguistic textbooks, and Levin and Thorne, who were each then working on a possible relationship between