Introduction: David Hook

This is the text rescued from a group of thirteen battered sheets of A4 paper, consisting of page proofs from three separate works, reused by Alan Deyermond on their blank versos as was his laudable habit. It represents the surviving typescript of a lecture delivered by him in Oviedo in 2003, as the opening session of the Jornadas de Homenaje Universitario a Isabel Uria Maqua (15–16 October). This torn, dog-eared typescript (the pages were not contained in a folder or document wallet) is a typical specimen of what seems to have been his late modus operandi in preparing a conference paper or lecture, in that it can have functioned only as an aide-memoire during delivery of his contribution since it is not a complete script. Here, for example, there is an initial typed list of summary section headings, followed by a separate page for each of these sections with the relevant heading typed at the top. Below the typed heading may come one of three things: an entirely blank sheet, a typed text with or without manuscript additions, or a manuscript text. Where elaborative text is present below the heading, it sometimes continues onto a further page without a heading where it could not be fitted on a single sheet. Some of the pages thus contain fairly full and coherent text, but others have merely brief jottings, of plot summaries, names, or titles, of connections or parallels between texts, or notes to check something.