literary tradition to foreign models and rules," M. H. Abrams has argued, "Young's

suggestion that a great work of literature grows out of the impenetrable depths of the

mind of genius" became very appealing (The Mirror and the Lamp 202).

 Nearly two centuries before another generation of young writers would denounce

the "tradition of quality" in favor of the individual artist, German theorists from Herder to

Goethe to Kant formulated a new literary tradition in which the author was reborn as a

Romantic genius. In 1815, William Wordsworth declared that genuine authorship was not

the imitation of life but "the introduction of a new element into the intellectual universe."

Genius was that which "was never done before" (qtd. in Woodmansee 16). At the turn of

the nineteenth century, authorship became redefined as individual expression. Thus, the

modern author was born.

 It was this author that the critics at the Cahiers du Cinema invoked when they

contended that even a Hollywood director might be considered an auteur. Interestingly,

Courtney Lehmann points out that "the word 'auteur' is actually an etymological

precursor of the word 'author,' appearing in Old French well before the English variant

'author' emerged in the sixteenth century" (56). But even if the auteur had been around

for centuries, he gained particular authority after World War II. As the title of Irving

Pichel's article in the November 1946 issue of the Revue du Cinema declared, "Creation

must be the work of one person" (qtd. in Hillier 5). This provocative contention assigned

the attributes of Romantic authorship to directors who expressed their personal vision

through thematic and stylistic consistencies, in spite of the constraints of the studio

system. True authorship in cinema was no longer collaborative production but individual

self-expression. As Helen Stoddart suggests, an auteur became the name for a director