.... The first part examines the notion of literary progress developed by Charles Perrault and Fontenelle, as well as the opposition to it by Boileau and other antiquarians, during the querelle des Anciens et des Modernes in the later seventeenth century. The second part treats the reception of those arguments...

... and fables, this Jesuit came to inaugurate with Fontenelle—who himself had no inter- est in any religion revealed before Moses—a comparative ethnology of Euro- pean ancients and American savages. A reconstructive or restorative comparatism—which sought at times to establish a spiritual genealogy...