Sociology of literature
Karl Marx's theory of ideology has been directed at literature by Pierre Macherey, Terry Eagleton and Fredric Jameson.
Emile Durkheim's view of sociology as the study of externally defined social facts was redirected towards literature by Robert Escarpit.
An important first step in the sociology of literature was taken by Georg Lukács's The Theory of the Novel, first published in German in 1916, in the Zeitschrift fur Aesthetik und Allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft.
Lukács's second distinctive contribution to the sociology of literature was The Historical Novel, written in German but first published in Russian in 1937, which appeared in English translation in 1962.
Here, Lukács argued that the early 19th century historical novel's central achievement was to represent realistically the differences between pre-capitalist past and capitalist present.
Founded in 1923, the Institute for Social Research at the University of Frankfurt developed a distinctive kind of 'critical sociology' indebted to Marx, Weber and Freud.
Leading Frankfurt School critics who worked on literature included Adorno, Walter Benjamin and Leo Löwenthal.
Habermas's first major work, Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit was published in German in 1962, and in English translation as The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere in 1989.
Robert Escarpit held the position of Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Bordeaux and founded the Centre for the Sociology of Literary Facts.
In Durkheimian fashion, Escarpit aimed to concern himself only with the externally defined "social facts" of literature, especially those registered in the book trade.
He extended the definition of literature to include all "non-functional" writing and also insisted that literary success resulted from "a convergence of intentions between author and reader".
[8] Lewis Coser in the United States and Peter H. Mann in Britain carried out analogously empirical studies of the sociology of the book trade.
But it is deeply sociological in character - Annales history was determinedly social scientific - and provides a systematic account of the long-run development of the European book trade (it covers the period from 1450 to 1800).
Le Dieu caché, his study of Blaise Pascal and Jean Racine, was published in French in 1955 and in English translation as The Hidden God in 1964.
It identified 'structural homologies' between the Jansenist 'tragic vision', the textual structures of Pascal's Pensées and Racine's plays, and the social position of the seventeenth-century 'noblesse de robe'.
In 1964 Goldmann published Pour une Sociologie du Roman translated by Alan Sheridan as Towards a Sociology of the Novel in 1974.
The period between the First and Second World Wars witnesses a temporary experiment with the community as collective hero: Goldmann's example is André Malraux.
Goldmann's sociology of literature remains significant in itself and as a source of inspiration, both positive and negative, to the kind of 'sociocriticism' developed by Edmond Cros, Pierre Zima and their co-workers in France and Canada.
[10] The philosopher Louis Althusser elaborated on this notion in the early 1970s, arguing that ideology functions so as to constitute biological individuals as social 'subjects' by representing their imaginary relation to their real conditions of existence.
[16] Flaubert's distinctive achievement in L'Éducation sentimentale was, in Bourdieu's account, to have understood and defined the rules of modern autonomous art.
One of the earliest English-language contributions to the sociology of literature is The Rise of the Novel (1957) by Ian Watt, Professor of English at Stanford University.
Although Williams's interests ranged widely across the whole field of literary and cultural studies, his major work was concentrated on literature and drama.
Applying Immanuel Wallerstein's world-systems theory to literature, Moretti argued, in Atlas of the European Novel (1998), that the nineteenth-century literary economy had comprised 'three Europes', with France and Britain at the core, most countries in the periphery and a variable semiperiphery located in between.
Measured by the volume of translations in national bibliographies, he found that French novelists were more successful in the Catholic South and British in the Protestant North, but that the whole continent nonetheless read the leading figures from both.
