The sociology of literature is a subfield of the sociology of culture. It studies the social production of literature and its social implications. A notable example is Pierre Bourdieu's 1992 Les Règles de L'Art: Genèse et Structure du Champ Littéraire, translated by Susan Emanuel as Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field (1996).
Classical sociology
None of the 'founding fathers' of sociology produced a detailed study of literature, but they did develop ideas that were subsequently applied to literature by others. Karl Marx's theory of ideology has been directed at literature by Pierre Macherey, Terry Eagleton and Fredric Jameson. Max Weber's theory of modernity as cultural rationalisation, which he applied to music, was later applied to all the arts, literature included, by Frankfurt School writers such as Theodor Adorno and Jürgen Habermas. Emile Durkheim's view of sociology as the study of externally defined social facts was redirected towards literature by Robert Escarpit. Bourdieu's work is clearly indebted to Marx, Weber and Durkheim.
Lukács and the theory of the novel
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. In 1920 it was republished in book form and this version strongly influenced the Frankfurt School. A second edition, published in 1962, was similarly influential on French structuralism. The Theory of the Novel argued that, whilst the classical epic poem had given form to a totality of life pregiven in reality by the social integration of classical civilisation, the modern novel had become 'the epic of an age in which the extensive totality of life is no longer directly given'.Lukács, G. (1971). The Theory of the Novel: A Historico-Philosophical Essay of the Forms of Great Epic Literature, trans. A. Bostock, London: Merlin Press, p. 56. The novel form is therefore organised around the problematic hero in pursuit of problematic values within a problematic world.
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. This was not a matter of individual talent, but of collective historical experience, because the French Revolution and the revolutionary and Napoleonic wars had made history for the first time a mass experience.Lukács, G. (1962). The Historical Novel, trans. H. and S. Mitchell, London: Merlin Press, p. 20. He went on to argue that the success of the 1848 revolutions led to the decline of the historical novel into 'decorative monumentalization' and the 'making private of history'.Lukács, G. (1962). The Historical Novel, trans. H. and S. Mitchell, London: Merlin Press, p. 237. The key figures in the historical novel were thus those of the early 19th century, especially Sir Walter Scott.
Lukács was an important influence on Lucien Goldmann's Towards a Sociology of the Novel, Alan Swingewood's discussion of the sociology of the novel in Part 3 of Laurenson and Swingewood's The Sociology of Literature and Franco Moretti's Signs Taken for Wonders.
The Frankfurt School
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. Adorno's Notes to Literature, Benjamin's The Origin of German Tragic Drama and Löwentahl's Literature and the Image of Man were each influential studies in the sociology of literature. Löwenthal continued this work at the University of California, Berkeley, during the 1950s.
Adorno's Notes to Literature is a collection of essays, the most influential of which is probably 'On Lyric Poetry and Society'. It argued that poetic thought is a reaction against the commodification and reification of modern life, citing Goethe and Baudelaire as examples.Adorno, T.W. (1991). Notes to Literature, Vol. 1, trans. S.W. Nicholson, New York: Columbia University Press, pp. 37-54. Benjamin's The Origin of German Tragic Drama argued that the extreme 'sovereign violence' of the 16th and 17th century German 'Trauerspiel' (literally mourning play, less literally tragedy) playwrights expressed the historical realities of princely power far better than had classical tragedy.
Habermas succeeded Adorno to the Chair of Sociology and Philosophy at Frankfurt. 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. It attempted to explain the socio-historical emergence of middle-class public opinion in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Developing a new kind of institutional sociology of literature, it argued that the public sphere had been organised around literary salons in France, learned and literary societies in Germany, and coffee houses in England. These institutions sustained the early novel, newspaper and periodical press.
The sociology of the avant-garde
Peter Bürger was Professor of French and Comparative Literature at the University of Bremen. His Theorie der Avantgarde was published in German in 1974 and in English translation in 1984. Like Habermas, Bürger was interested in the institutional sociology of literature and art. He postulated a historical typology of aesthetic social relations, measured along three main axes, the function of the artwork, its mode of production and its mode of reception.Bürger, P. (1984). Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. M. Shaw, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, pp. 48-49. This gave him three main kinds of art, sacral, courtly and bourgeois. Bourgeois art, he argued, had as its function individual self-understanding and was produced and received individually. It became a celebration in form of the liberation of art from religion, the court and, eventually, even the bourgeoisie. Modernist art was thus an autonomous social 'institution', the preserve of an increasingly autonomous intellectual class. The 'historical avant-garde' of the inter-war years developed as a movement within and against modernism, he concluded, as an ultimately unsuccessful revolt against precisely this autonomy.Bürger, P. (1984). Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. M. Shaw, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, p. 22.
Habermas adopts a very similar approach in his own account of the avant-garde.
The sociology of the book trade
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. His works included The Sociology of Literature, () published in French in 1958 and in English translation in 1971, and The Book Revolution (), published in French in 1965 and in English in 1966. In Durkheimian fashion, Escarpit aimed to concern himself only with the externally defined "social facts" of literature, especially those registered in the book trade.Escarpit, R. (1971). The Sociology of Literature, trans. E. Pick, London: Cass, p. 18. His focus fell on the "community of writers", understood in aggregate as "generations" and "teams". 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".Escarpit, R. (1971). The Sociology of Literature, trans. E. Pick, London: Cass, p. 83.
Lewis Coser in the United States and Peter H. Mann in Britain carried out analogously empirical studies of the sociology of the book trade.
Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin's L'Apparition du livre, first published in French 1958 and in English translation as The Coming of the Book in 1976, is - strictly speaking - a work of social history (Febvre was a leading figure in the Annales school of historiography). 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).
Genetic structuralism Lucien Goldmann was Director of Studies at the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences in Paris and founding Director of the Centre for the Sociology of Literature at the Free University of Brussels. Like Escarpit, Goldmann was influenced by Durkheim: hence, his definition of the subject matter of sociology as the 'study of the facts of consciousness'.Goldmann, L. (1970). The Human Sciences and Philosophy, trans. H.V. White and R. Anchor, London: Jonathan Cape, p.36. But he was also interested in developing a sociology of the text. The central task of the literary sociologist, he argued, was to bring out the objective meaning of the literary work by placing it in its historical context, studied as a whole.
Goldmann defined the creating subject as transindividual, that is, as an instance of Durkheim's 'collective consciousness'. Following Marx and Lukács, however, Goldmann also assumed that group consciousness was normally class consciousness. The mediating agency between a social class and the work of literature then became the 'world vision', which binds the individual members of a social class together. 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'. Goldmann's structuralism was 'genetic' because it sought to trace the genesis of literary structures in extra-literary phenomena.
In 1964 Goldmann published Pour une Sociologie du Roman translated by Alan Sheridan as Towards a Sociology of the Novel in 1974. Like Lukács, Goldmann sees the novel as revolving around the problematic hero's search for authentic values in a degraded society. But Goldmann also postulates a 'rigorous homology' between the literary form of the novel and the economic form of the commodity. The early novel, he argues, is concerned with individual biography and the problematic hero, but, as competitive capitalism evolves into monopoly capitalism, the problematic hero progressively disappears. 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. But the main line of development is characterised by the effort to write the novel of 'the absence of subjects'. Here, Goldmann's example is the nouveau roman of Alain Robbe-Grillet and Nathalie Sarraute.
Andrew Milner's John Milton and the English Revolution (1981) is essentially an application of Goldmann's genetic structuralism to the study of seventeenth-century English literature.
Sociocriticism
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.
Neo-Marxian ideology critique