The Term and Concept of Symbolism in Literary History

of this paper. The word goes back to ancient Greece and had, there, a complex history which has not, I suspect, been traced adequately in the only history of the term, Max Schlesinger's Geschichte des Symbols, published in 1912.x What I want to discuss is something much more specific: not even symbol and in literature but the term and concept of as a period in literary history. It can, I suggest, be conveniently used as a general term for the literature in all Western countries following the decline of 19th-century realism and naturalism and preceding the rise of the new avant-garde movements: futurism, expressionism, surrealism, existentialism, or whatever else. How has it come about? Can such a use be justified? We must distinguish among different problems: the history of the word need not be identical with the history of the concept as we might today formulate it. We must ask, on the one hand, what the contemporaries meant by it, who called himself a symbolist or who wanted to be included in a movement called symbolism, and on the other hand, what modern scholarship might decide about who is to be included and what characteristics of the period seem decisive. In speaking of symbolism as a period-term located in history we must also think of its situation in space. Literary terms most frequently radiate from one center but do so unevenly; they seem to stop at the frontiers of some countries or cross them and languish there or, surprisingly, flourish more vigorously on a new soil. A geography of literary terms is needed which might attempt to account for the spread and distribution of terms by examining rival terms or accidents of biography or simply the total situation of a literature. There seems to be a widespread agreement that the literary history