Bluebeard, the title character of Charles Perrault’s story “Barbebleue” (1697) kills his wives for looking into the locked room where he stores the corpses of other disobedient wives.
His final wife, however, escapes Bluebeard’s punishment.
Archibald Macleish (1892-1982) said, “A poem should not mean/But be” in Ars Poetica.
The Chinese master criminal Dr. Fu Manchu appeared in 13 novels by Sax Rohmer beginning in 1913. He received his main opposition from Sir Denis Nayland Smith, loosely connected with Scotland Yard. Smith’s sidekick was Dr. Petrie.
In Sophocles’ tragedy Oedipus at Colonus (c. 406 B.C.), the blinded Oedipus wanders by accident into the sacred grove of the furies at Colonus in Attica, about a mile northwest of Athens.
P. L. Travers invented Mary Poppins, in a series of books beginning with Mary Poppins in 1934.
Faust’s soul is rescued by a choir of angels at the end of Goethe’s Faust (1808).
Daniel Defoe based The Life and Strange Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1719-20) on the real-life story of Alexander Selkirk (1676-1721), a Scottish sailor who survived for more than four years on the desert island of Juan Fernandez off the Chilean coast. He became a celebrity after his rescue and homecoming in 1709.