Literary History and the Concept of Literary Field

Abstract

The article is a contribution to the current debate on the prospects of literary history. It seeks a balance between control over the diversity of its subject area and preservation of various literary historical paradigms (and the complexity of the literary field arising from this diversity). It proposes a model that describes individual phenomena from four different viewpoints (cultural studies, sociology, media theory, and literary theory), and it defines the results of these descriptions (concepts of identity, social structures, media, and literary conventions) with regard to their interrelatedness. The applicability of the model is exemplified through sketches of four periods from European literary history: the Middle Ages, the early modern period, modernism, and late modernism. – Since the twelfth century, European cultural space has been marked by continuing intensification of the diversity, dynamism, complexity, and mobility of social structures and cultural traditions. At first sight it seems that the basis for the continuing changes in the paradigmatic levels of the literary field is created in a similar way. However, closer analysis shows that these processes have their own dynamics, dependent on the logic of their interrelatedness. It is this logic that shapes the typical organization and autonomy of the literary field, which are dependent on the interplay of the following factors: the degree of individualization, the formation of literary roles and institutions, the situation of written culture, and the selectivity of literary conventions. At the most general level, a comparison of the periods presented shows that the autonomy of the literary field was the weakest in the Middle Ages (due to the predominant tendency towards the formation of collective identities, weak literary roles and institutions, the marginal situation of written culture, and the pragmatic nature of literary conventions). It was slightly stronger in the early modern period (due to tensions between the strengthening of personal identities and the mechanisms of collectivization, the rise of written culture, and a wide range of literary conventions), the strongest in modernism (due to the emphatic concept of the subject, the formation of the literary market on the basis of the distinction between canonized and popular culture, the predominant status of written culture, and the selectivity of literary conventions of fictionality and polysemy), and it weakened again in postmodernism (due to “patchwork identities,” the instability of value hierarchies, the leading role of the new media, and limited selectivity of the convention of fictionality).