EDNOTE. Prof. Goldschweer has put me to shame. My claim to be the progenitor of a new critical genre was mistaken--as documented below. Worse yet, Ziolkowski's volume with its seminal essay "The Telltale Teeth: Psychodontia to Sociodontia" is on my shelf and I must have read it. He adds many names to the (transcen-)dental canon. Among them a couple of novels I have recently read---but obviously with insufficient attention to the dental theme: Frank Norris's 1899 _McTeague_ and Georges Bernanos' _Diairy of Country Priest -(circa 1930?). Alert reader Basil Lawrence calls attention William Goldman's _Marathon Man_.

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There is an article on that subject in Theodore Ziolkowski's Varieties of Literary Thematics (Princeton 1983), including Guenther Grass (I think), but not Nabokov (if my memory doesn't deceive me).