Read Anywhere and on Any Device!

Subscribe to Read | $0.00

Join today and start reading your favorite books for Free!

Create Free Account

The Classic: Sainte-Beuve and the Nineteenth-Century Culture Wars

Christopher Prendergast

4.3/5 ( ratings)

Focusing on a moment and a source in nineteenth-century France, Christopher Prendergast takes up a big question that is still with us: What is a classic? The question is, by virtue of its insistent recurrence, itself a classic question. It returns to haunt us. It provided the title of a text for French critic Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve in 1850 , as it did in the twentieth century for T.S. Eliot and John Coetzee. Centring on Sainte-Beuve in his nineteenth-century context, Prendergast's inquiry takes us historically to many places . He also provides an intellectual history that travels across multiple disciplinary territories .

Against this background, The Classic maps the evolution of Sainte-Beuve's thought from an initially cosmopolitan conception of the classic to an increasingly nationalist conception, with a strong emphasis on the heritage of Latinity and France as its principal legatee. This emphasis was taken up by the extreme right in France after Sainte-Beuve's death, in a determined mobilizing of a version of the classic on behalf of a proto-fascist agenda. The final chapter deals with this appropriation and ends with a question of our own 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.

Language: English

Pages: 352

Format: Hardcover

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Release: July 01, 2007

ISBN: 0199215855

ISBN 13: 9780199215850

The Classic: Sainte-Beuve and the Nineteenth-Century Culture Wars

Christopher Prendergast

4.3/5 ( ratings)

Focusing on a moment and a source in nineteenth-century France, Christopher Prendergast takes up a big question that is still with us: What is a classic? The question is, by virtue of its insistent recurrence, itself a classic question. It returns to haunt us. It provided the title of a text for French critic Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve in 1850 , as it did in the twentieth century for T.S. Eliot and John Coetzee. Centring on Sainte-Beuve in his nineteenth-century context, Prendergast's inquiry takes us historically to many places . He also provides an intellectual history that travels across multiple disciplinary territories .

Against this background, The Classic maps the evolution of Sainte-Beuve's thought from an initially cosmopolitan conception of the classic to an increasingly nationalist conception, with a strong emphasis on the heritage of Latinity and France as its principal legatee. This emphasis was taken up by the extreme right in France after Sainte-Beuve's death, in a determined mobilizing of a version of the classic on behalf of a proto-fascist agenda. The final chapter deals with this appropriation and ends with a question of our own 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.

Language: English

Pages: 352

Format: Hardcover

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Release: July 01, 2007

ISBN: 0199215855

ISBN 13: 9780199215850

More books from Christopher Prendergast

Eugénie Grandet

3.8/5 ( ratings)

In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower

4.4/5 ( ratings)

The Guermantes Way

4.3/5 ( ratings)

Sodom and Gomorrah

4.3/5 ( ratings)

Paris and the Nineteenth Century (Writing the City)

3.6/5 ( ratings)

Septembers

3.5/5 ( ratings)

Debating World Literature

2.6/5 ( ratings)

Living and Dying with Marcel Proust

3.8/5 ( ratings)

The Fourteenth of July: And the Taking of the Bastille

3.3/5 ( ratings)

Napoleon and History Painting: Antoine-Jean Gros's La Bataille d'Eylau

3.6/5 ( ratings)

The Triangle of Representation

Cultural Materialism: On Raymond Williams

3.6/5 ( ratings)

Counterfactuals: Paths of the Might have Been

The Prisoner

To Be Unfree: Republicanism and Unfreedom in History, Literature, and Philosophy

Cur Per Soc Theo S 1

Spectacles Of Realism: Gender, Body, Genre

Balzac: Fiction & Melodrama

In Search of Lost Time (Volumes 1-6)

Adventures in Grammarland

Rate this book!

Write a review?