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I: Introduction
The fundamental question that motivates the following essay is a simple one, though demanding in its scope: does any piece of literature, in which I include myths, legends, and diary entries ... ect., exist in a vacuum? Put another way, should a piece of literature be viewed as a self-contained universe, mostly unaffected by its physical or metaphysical surroundings?
Our first impulse, no doubt, is to answer in the negative, for, intuitively, it seems clear to any student of the field that literature, like any of the arts, has a direct connection to the outer world. After all, many historians, sociologists, and psychologists, just to name a few, have, to some extent, delved into literature to extract and establish exactly such a connection. Further, students of literature have used painstaking methodology to show the connection between an author, the life he lived, and his work.

Thus, there is a strong precedent for the claim that external factors play a role in the creation of any literary work. If the above question is to be an aid to furthering our understanding of literature, then, our reading of 'physical and metaphysical surroundings' must be taken more narrowly: the interpretation I shall take up here is one in which 'surroundings' refers to other literary works. This reading is justified by the following consideration: given that works are linked in one way or another to the external world, can we not assume, that works of literature must therefore be connected to one other? That is, if we use the (cliché) phrase of a piece of work serving as a 'mirror of society', it seems, at the very least, plausible to suppose that certain elements of society might be reflected in more than one mirror.

Once again, the answer to this question appears to be straight forward, for terms such as 'Zeitgeist', fields of study i.e. most notably that of comparative literature, as well as a great amount of literary research, all indicate that works of literature are often connected in one way or another. Nevertheless, the degree of connection seems to vary inversely in proportion to two factors: time and distance. Thus, literary scholars have little difficulty in finding plausible links between works of authors occupying the same geographical area at roughly the same period of time. One only has to look at the classification that any given piece of literature undergoes to confirm this point. When the interval at which two or more literary pieces were conceived changes significantly, however, the connection becomes more tenuous, even when the geographical reference point remains the same. Thus, attempts to draw comparisons between the work of Gryphius and that of Lessing, for example, are somewhat more speculative and open to debate than are comparisons made between works originating at roughly the same time. Still, that comparisons of this nature have been made, and that in today's intellectual climate they are not cause for major controversy, shows that a time differential between works does not in itself rule out the plausibility of comparisons. It is only when we take this practice a step further and separate the texts to be compared by geography and time that controversy arises; for once the continuation of thought development has been broken, that is when diffusion ,in the anthropological sense , cannot account for any resemblance/connection found, then it seems as though we have reached a point where no possible justification for connection can be given. The suggestion I make in this and subsequent papers is that this seeming lack of justification may be illusory; that is, there may be elements in literary works that transgress geographical and chronological divides. If so, we ought to investigate what these elements could be, and what significance they have for the field of literature.
To be certain, this is not the first time that questions of this sort arise; in his paper "Science of Literature" Barthes argues the following:

It is not the images, the ideas or the verses that the mythological voice of the Muse whispers to the writer; it is rather the great logic of symbols and the great empty forms which help him speak and operate (14)

Without entering into a detailed discussion about the merits of the structuralist movement, I will nevertheless address the issue briefly in order to position my enterprise within the context of discussions of this sort. Although the fundamental arguments that structuralists make seem sound, their execution, for the purpose at hand, is too abstract: the binary matrix so preferred by the majority of its adherents is of limited use when trying to establish a coherent theory of universal elements in literature. ....

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