1. The Establishment of the Discipline
Before the 19th c. and the modern definition of both history and literature, there existed chronicles of writers and books (including both belles-lettres and the sciences), e.g. the monumental 12 volumes of the Histoire littéraire de la France by Dom Rivet and Dom Clémencet (1733-63) [see Maurists]. But the awareness of literature as a social institution related to nations and historical periods hardly appeared in France before German Romanticism inspired Germaine de Staël's De la littérature (1800), which asserted the ‘influence of religion, customs, and laws on literature’, and Chateaubriand's Génie du christianisme (1802), which explained aesthetic value by the religious quality of a civilization.
Whereas La Harpe's Lycée (1799-1805) still dogmatically judges works of art against a rational, Aristotelian ideal of beauty, the basic assumption of literary history will henceforth be that the beautiful is not universal, but historically relative—this poses the difficult question of the possible survival into future ages of a historically conditioned beauty. Villemain, in his Tableau de la littérature française au XVIIIe siècle (1828-9), and Sainte-Beuve, in Port-Royal (1840), paved the way for the separation of literary history both from impressionist criticism and from mere history of literature understood as a collection of separate studies. Literary history increasingly contextualized literature in order to determine the meaning of texts. Sainte-Beuve explained individual works through the biography of their authors, giving portraits of the groups with which they were associated. Taine, more positivistic in his determinism [see Comte], appealed to the three necessary and sufficient elements of la race, le milieu, and le moment. Brunetière added the evolution of genres, modelled on Darwin's evolution of species. It was Lanson who finally established literary history as the alternative to rhetoric and belles-lettres both in lycées, where it became an official part of the syllabus in 1880, and in the universities, which were reformed in 1902. Whereas rhetoric allegedly served to reproduce the élite of orators, literary history was to train all the citizens of a modern democracy.
Literary history thus became the academic discipline which defined how literature was taught and studied from the 1890s on. As a discipline, it grounded its scientific and social legitimacy in the positivist history of the late 19th c.— Péguy mocked the ‘well-organized gang’ of historians who reorganized France's educational system after the defeat of 1870—but it also touches upon and borrows from sociology and criticism. As a historical genre obsessed with the method of establishing facts, it extends the application of the reliable tools of classical and medieval philology to modern literature. In this view, literary facts of the past are primarily texts. Literary history first proceeds to the collection and identification of documents, the rigorous establishment of texts, and the editing of unpublished material. It then compiles biographies and bibliographies, and compares individual works and group mentalities in order to specify originalities and to distinguish schools and movements.
Lanson never wanted to limit the new discipline to textual erudition. He consistently insisted that it should (as a part of sociology) aim also at global descriptions and explanations of all literary phenomena and institutions pertaining to the production and reception of books. After the series of monographs and authors was available, the next step would be to attempt what he called the ‘portrait of the literary life of the nation, the history of culture and of the activity of the faceless crowd of readers as well as of the famous élite of writers’. Literary history would relate literature to the social, political, moral, and intellectual life of the nation (Lanson's literary history explicitly aimed to serve the patrie) and, beyond the nation, to other European literatures and cultures (comparative literature was in France a by-product of literary history). Such a comprehensive programme appealed to Marxists and was approved by Plekhanov in an article of 1897. Finally, as it related to criticism, literary history was not expected to reduce works of literature to archival documents, but also to generate a proper evaluative discourse and explain why certain works, which we call classics, still affect us and become, so to speak, immortal, while others do not survive their own times. For Lanson, the insistence on historical relativity did not preclude an enquiry into the permanence of emotion and taste. The object of literary history, he wrote, was not to dismiss impression and sympathy, but to reduce the ‘element of personal sentiment in our knowledge to an indispensable and legitimate minimum, while still granting it all its value’.
As a result of this extremely ambitious and probably Utopian programme, literary history always remained a hybrid and ambiguous field of research. It soon became limited to and identified with the search for sources and the tracking of influences. Sources and influences superficially reconcile the concern for originality and the ideology of causality, as they apparently resolve individual facts into social sequences, but literary historians were often accused of being content with accumulating dates and facts around texts. Our analyses, Lanson said, are ‘approaches to genius’, thus conceiving genius as the irreducible residue of historical and generic determinism. The intellectualist notion of the human mind and of aesthetic creation that literary history perpetuated was in conformity with associationist psychology at the very time when psychoanalysis called for a new type of understanding.
2. Attacks on Literary History
Initially ridiculed on political grounds by the reactionary circles of the Action Française, who saw it as an imitation of German erudition and a rejection of the classical humanities, literary history was soon censured both by social historians and creative writers. The former, like Lucien Febvre, argued that it was not acceptable cultural history, and that Lanson's admirable project of an ‘histoire provinciale de la vie littéraire en France’, forgotten by his disciples, remained a dream. The creators, like Péguy or Proust, reacted against the misconception of individuality and the reduction of the essentiel plurality of meaning in literature to the historical sense or the sense of the author. But the strongest attacks came in the 1960s from ‘la nouvelle critique’.
This sought to ground literary studies on renewed paradigms borrowed from the social sciences—e.g. psychoanalysis, linguistics, Marxism—that had replaced history and challenged the principle of the rational and historical intelligibility of literary meaning. After Barthes published Sur Racine (1963), exposing the myth of the classical Racine by reference to psychoanalytic anthropology, Raymond Picard, author of La Carrière de Jean Racine (1956) and representative of the Lansonian Sorbonne, launched a vigorous counter-attack in Nouvelle critique ou nouvelle imposture (1965). Barthes claimed that literature was utterly foreign to history and that, if a vast social history of literary life was indeed desirable, according to the excellent programme set by Lanson and later revived by Febvre and the historians of Annales, it would be irrelevant to the meaning of literature. The ‘nouvelle critique’ of the 1960s and 1970s brought back into the foreground allegory, as a model of the hermeneutics of the hidden, and rhetoric, as a paradigm of inquiry into forms and techniques, both of which were approaches that literary history had repudiated. Paradoxically, however, the critique of traditional literary history as a veiled ideology consolidated, in its return from the text as document to the text as monument, literary history's main ideological legacy, the canon of authorized great books. Meanwhile the German scholar Hans Robert Jauss set out to replace a history of literature written from the point of view of its production with an ‘aesthetics of reception’; this implied a new attempt to combine history and literature through the study of public and private reading. But the history of reading, which is consistent with Lanson's programme, still remains a theoretical project more than a practical realization.
3. A Return to Literary History
After the initial popularity of ‘la nouvelle critique’ had declined, there was a return to literary history in the 1980s. This could be explained by saying that its hold on French education was so powerful that its institutional domination was never seriously threatened, and that, after an interlude, literary studies returned easily to the type of erudition that had served them between the 1890s and the 1960s. But the literary history of the end of the 20th c. is not exactly the old literary history of Lanson. It has taken up the challenge of ‘la nouvelle critique’ and registered the change of historical paradigm since positivism, in particular the dispute about the notion of fact—e.g. literary fact—as independent from the mentality of the historian. Today a history of literature cannot, for instance, take for granted the Romantic periodization of centuries conceived as living entities, or the canon of great works handed down by tradition. If the revision of the canon has never been radical—though it has rehabilitated Baroque poetry, long dismissed under the evolutionist label of ‘preclassicism’, and 18th-c. novels, especially those by women—it has demonstrated a willingness to observe the larger literary production of any period, including popular and so-called marginal or para-literature. The long-awaited enterprise of a vast social history of literary life has also been seriously undertaken. Such collective works as Henri-Jean Martin and Roger Chartier's Histoire de l'édition française (1983-6) have introduced the quantitative tools of statistics into literary history, and more attention has been given to literary institutions by sociologists of literature. But such descriptions of literature as a social activity leave aside such questions as what constitutes a text as literary, and whether its ‘literarity’ can be constructed as a historical object.
Even textual criticism has been modified by modern hermeneutics, and ‘literary genetics’ has attempted to move critical editions and the inevitable source studies away from associationist psychology and the attempt to isolate the so-called residue of genius. The focus is now on the production of the text itself rather than on its raw materials. A critical edition, the epitome of literary history encompassing all that is necessary for the comprehension of a given text, now looks quite different—e.g. Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu in the new Pléiade edition (1987-9). It includes drafts which stress the process rather than the product, at the risk of dissolving the notion of ‘definitive’ text just as that of canon can be lost in social history. Literary history has become more complex as a result of ‘la nouvelle critique’. This does not mean that there exists such a discipline as a ‘new literary history’, but that the historical understanding of literary phenomena remains one of the indispensable paths to the study of the literature. [See Criticism.]
[Antoine Compagnon]
Bibliography
- G. Lanson, Essais de méthode, de critique et d'histoire littéraire (1965)
- C. Cristin, Aux origines de l'histoire littéraire (1973)
- A. Compagnon, La Troisième République des lettres (1983)
- C. Moisan, L'Histoire littéraire (1990)
