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No °New" Sociology ^ibïcirÿ" 4 SOCIOLOGY OF LITERATURE \ t by" Translated Ernest ^Pick c new With a introduction by Blâdbury ' Malcolm <3 cBryanWilson Second ^Editio SOCIOLOGY OF LITERATU RE ROBERT ESCARPEE Translated by ERNEST PICK With a new introduction by Malcolm Bradbury and Bryan Wilson SECOND EDITION Professor Robert Escarpit’s Sociology of Literature first appeared in France in 1958 and has now become a classic early statement in the important, expanding field of the sociology of literature. Its main aim is to look at literature by exploring and analyzing the “specificity of the literary fact”. It is a documentary study reaching over extensive historical data and discussing the emergence of “literature” (as opposed to writing) in terms of its writers, publishers and readers— or, in other words, production, distribution and consumption. These three elements form a “circuit of inter-relationship” of a complex psychological, moral, aesthetic, political and economic nature, out of which the idea of literature derives. With substantial documenta- tion and illuminating analysis, M. Escarpit explores that circuit in detail. Looking at the production of literature, he considers such factors as demography and economics and the way these shape the formation of literary communities at partic- ular times. In considering its distribution, he explores the publisher and the bookshop and the means by which a ‘culture circuit’ is established. Finally, examining the audience, he considers the ways in which serious literature depends upon or derives from non- functional reading. The long introduction by Professor Malcolm Bradbury, a literary critic, author of The Social Context ofModern English Literature and Dr. , Bryan Wilson, Fellow of All Souls College, Reader in Sociology in the University of Oxford, and author of Religion in a Secular Society discusses the importance of M. , Escarpit’s book, and extends his examples, many of them French, with comparable material from English literary history and society. ISBN 0 7146 2729 1 JACKET DESIGN BY C C1VIV/V I <&®eeeu» M®®«g umwiDu BOSTON PUBL1 LIBRARY Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2017 with funding from Kahle/Austin Foundation https://archive.org/details/sociologyofliterOOesca NEW SOCIOLOGY LIBRARY No. 4 General Editor Professor NORBERT ELIAS : Department of Sociology, University of Leicester Sociology of Literatu Sociology of Literature By Robert Escarpit Translated by Ernest Pick SECOND EDITION With a new introduction by MALCOLM BRADBURY Professor School of English and American Studies, University of East Anglia BRYAN WILSON and Dr. All Souls College, Oxford FRANK CASS & CO. LTD. 971 1 Published by FRANK CASS AND COMPANY LIMITED 67 Great Russell Street, London WC1B 3BT by arrangement with Presses Universitaires de France New introduction Copyright © 1971 M. Bradbury and B. Wilson First French edition 1958 First English edition 1965 Second English edition 1971 ISBN 0 7146 2729 1 Printed in Great Britain by Biddles Ltd., Guildford, Surrey INTRODUCTION i Robert Escarpit’s Sociology of Literature first appeared in France in 1958 and was an early statement in a line of enquiry that has become more and more important over the last fifteen years. There are various reasons why, in our time, two disciplines that have — thought of themselves as distinct and separate literary study and — sociology should attempt to explore common ground. One obvious reason is the growing predominance of sociology in all our think- ing. Sociology has been the remarkable growth-subject of the postwar years; and the apparent scale of its pretensions, its seeming capability to account for a large number of social and human manifestations, has proved remarkably attractive to those seeking new intellectual syntheses. In a time of increasing relativism and increasing social change, it appears to offer, if not solutions, then at least ‘objective’ and ranging perceptions which let us see old experience with new eyes. It has been not only the great synthetic discipline of the postwar period; it has also been in certain respects the discipline which has most fully echoed and perhaps promoted the gfowing disenchantment of men in a democratic-egalitarian society with the rules, traditions and modus operandi of society in the past. It has been a discipline which has encouraged us to see that things apparently magisterial and eternal (like literature itself) are products of social funding and subject to social change. It has helped to support the growing feeling that the valid expressive culture of a society lies not simply in its magisterial works, but in less elevated, less art-conscious forms as well. It has encouraged concern with the general expression of creativity within society of which the serious literature can be seen as but one form. In short, interest in a sociological approach to literature has been part of a growing interest in the broad cultural stock of society at all its — levels an interest, of course, by no means new in literary criticism or intellectual discussion of the arts, but one which sociology can expand. But literary study and sociology are both distinct disciplines with strikingly different premises and methods, and the development of an effective debate in the field of literature-and-sociology was inevitably slow. Interesting works in the area have been produced; but there are certain reasons why difficulty is bound to 5 6 NEW INTRODUCTION occur. One of these reasons is understanda—ble methodological suspicion on the part of many literary critics or perhaps rather a note of puzzled enquiry: in what way do perceptions derived from considering literature as a social manifestation aid in their two main activities of elucidation and evaluation? The other is the relatively small place given to literary and cultural experience in most of the models of society which have been produced by modern sociologists. Many of them have regarded the arts and culture generally as an entirely derivative part of the superstructure of society. Despite a growing awareness among sociologists that in post-industrial society leisure becomes a significant area of social concern, nevertheless the increasingly scientistic approach of the discipline and its somewhat superior attitude toward humane studies has left the field of the sociology of literature a rather neglected area, thought to be of only marginal importance. Fortunately there are signs that at least a few contemporary sociologists do not see their discipline as inevitably opposed to cultural values as such (even though they still endorse a generally value-neutral attitude to their own work) and the sociology of literature now enjoys some slightly greater acceptibility 1 . From these two directions, then, the challenge to the traditional — approach to literature to what Robert Escarpit calls the “classical framework of the man and his work” within which literature is — usually seen and discussed has developed, and has developed quite variously. Robert Escarpit calls his book Sociology of Literature. The title is encouraging, even though we can now see that it is too grand. There are now several sociologies of literature, of which — M. Escarpit’s kind is one though an early and a very thorough- going one. In England we have seen the development of another, that kind of culture-and-society approach which grows out of the preoccupation of a long line of English writers and critics with the overall state of cultural affairs and with the quality of life in society generally. The modern carriers of this tradition are critics like Richard Hoggart and Raymond Williams, who have produced remarkable work from a much more positively literary approach than that of Escarpit, and who have added new dimensions to the field. There has also been an important contribution from a neo- sociological approach which has been concerned, much more than M. Escarpit is, with the content of literature, its nature, its struc- ture, its artistic complexity. That these things can be seen profitably as in some sense social derivatives has been made clear in books like Leo Lowenthal’s Literature and the Image of Man, which, written by a sociologist, proposes that “All literary materials, in- cluding those hitherto considered beyond the province of the