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Books > History > World history > 1750 to 1900
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The Classic - Sainte-Beuve and the Nineteenth-Century Culture Wars (Hardcover)
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The Classic - Sainte-Beuve and the Nineteenth-Century Culture Wars (Hardcover)
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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 ("Qu'est-ce qu'un classique?"), 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 (antiquity, the middle
ages, the seventeenth and eighteenth as well as the nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries). He 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, The Classic 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.
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.
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