I'm baffled by John DeMoss' article. When was it written? The e-mail did not contain any information about the source or the author. Am I right in guessing that the article is at least 20 years old and was never published in print?
In his opening paragraph, John DeMoss ridicules the whole critical literature on Sebastian Knight as "shoddy", "faulty" and "riddled with misreadings" but he only references a handful of outdated articles from the 1960s and 70s. I hope that this diatribe predates the excellent essays on Sebastian Knight by Michael Begnal, Brian Boyd, Julian Connolly, John Lanchester, Michael Maar, Jonathan Sisson, Michael Wood and other authors because they certainly don't deserve to be condemned as "shoddy scholarship".
DeMoss' claim to give "a more consistent and thorough solution to the puzzle than has been put forward up to this point" further indicates that this article dates from the early 1980s because some of its findings (at least the more convincing ones) have already been discussed at length in more recent essays.
Can anyone, the list editor or perhaps John DeMoss himself, confirm my guess?
Jan Stottmeister