Some anniversaries may seem to deserve to pass unnoticed. Why revive Gustave Lanson (1857-1934), the epitome of justly spurned literary positivism, on the centennial of the publication of his classic Histoire de la littérature française? Lanson's less than glorious reputation (established by 1913 and strengthened beyond correction after 1960) as the dogmatic sponsor of airless academic scholarship—which extinguished the life of literary works under the weight of idle historical fact, biographical and philological minutiae, and innumerable sources and influences—has not inspired a return of the sort that Novalis, August and Friedrich von Schlegel, Friedrich Schleiermacher, and Wilhelm Dilthey, to cite only the German traditions, have enjoyed in recent years. Yet such a return could be productive and rewarding, for Lanson, a focal point of French criticism at the dawn of the twentieth century, crystallizes significant trends from the past and anticipates crucial tenets of German and American literary reception theory.