Lanson, Gustave (1857-1934). Critic and historian of French literature. A professor of rhetoric and belles-lettres by training and a disciple of Brunetière, he became the promoter of literary history in France, later known as ‘Lansonism’.
His influence was at its peak between the Dreyfus Affair and the separation of Church and State in 1905. He stood for the democratization and laicization of the lycée, through the substitution of history for rhetoric, and allied himself with historians and sociologists, thus giving new scientific legitimacy to literary studies. He applied classical philology to modern literature, and at the same time called for a vast social history of literary life. After conventional essays (e.g. Bossuet, 1891), his Histoire de la littérature française (1895, many times reprinted) became the standard textbook of the Third Republic; with his Voltaire (1906), he shifted the balance from the 17th to the 18th c. in the training of citizens. His critical editions, of Voltaire's Lettres philosophiques (1909) and Lamartine's Méditations (1915), and his Manuel bibliographique de la littérature française moderne (1909-14) long set the standards for academic scholarship. His method, formalized by his followers (for instance Gustave Rudler, for many years a professor in Oxford, in Techniques de la critique et de l'histoire littéraire, 1923) and reduced to a positivistic study of sources and influences, had the effect of cutting off literary studies from literary life until the attacks of ‘la nouvelle critique’ in the 1960s [see Criticism, 4].
[Antoine Compagnon]
