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Sainte-Beuve and the nineteenth-century culture wars
"Focusing on a moment and a source in the 19th century, this book ponders the question: what is a classic? This question is, by virtue of its insistent recurrence, itself a classic question that returns to haunt us. It provided the title of a text for French critic Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve in 1850 (‘Qu'est-ce qu'un classique?'), as it did in the 20th century for T.S. Eliot and John Coetzee. Centring on Sainte-Beuve in his 19th-century context, this book's inquiry takes us historically to many places (antiquity, the middle ages, the 17th and 18th as well as the 19th and early 20th centuries). The book also provides an intellectual history that travels across multiple disciplinary territories (in addition to literary criticism and literary history, classical studies, comparative philology, historiography and political thought). Against this background, this book maps the evolution of Sainte-Beuve's thought from an initially cosmopolitan conception of the classic (close in spirit to Goethe's notion of Weltliteratur) to an increasingly nationalist conception, with a strong emphasis on the heritage of Latinity and France as its principal legatee. The final chapter deals with this appropriation and ends with a question about Sainte-Beuve's original question: in the light of this bleak history, perhaps the time has come to dispense with the term ‘classic' altogether"--
Focusing on a moment and a source in 19th century France, the author takes up a big question that is still with us, What is a classic? His enquiry, which centres on the French critic Sainte-Beave takes us on a tour of the history of the 'classic' that provides insights into and beyond the 'culture wars' of the 19th century.
Introduction : The profession of criticism -- The view from Montserrat -- Classic and nation -- Latinity and the second renaissance -- Homer or Virgil? -- Origins and the Middle Ages -- Romans, Gauls, and Franks -- Literature and democracy -- The foundations of culture -- The modern classic -- Postscript : The good Frenchman.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Oxford ; New York : Oxford Univ. Press, ©2007