The Decline of the Great Literary Name

In the 1959/60 academic year, the Austrian poet Ingeborg Bachmann gave a lecture on the naming of characters in novels. She observes that the best names within novels enter the general lexicon, become recognisable to a great many people, and have an impressive longevity in both cultural and personal memory. The examples given include Emma Bovary, Don Quixote, Anna Karenina, and Julien Sorel from Stendhal’s The Red and the Black.