By the beginning of the 19th century, prose fiction had moved from a field of questionable entertainment and precarious historicity into the centre of the new literary debate. The traditional task of literary historians, to review the sciences, was referred to professional academic journals. The evaluation of artistic merits and the interpretation of the fictions became the main work of the new literary historians who turned poetry, plays, novels and romances into "literature".[87]
The change in status had been made possible partly by recent generations of authors who had provided such works to be reviewed. The audience was likely to buy what had been discussed and publicly evaluated in order to participate in the ongoing debates. New copyright laws[88] made the new production financially attractive. Early 18th-century authors had been paid for their manuscripts; they basically received a share of the immediate profits expected from a single edition. The new laws allowed long term strategies of literary fame: the publication of small first editions that critics would first have to evaluate before they could expect to find a wider and more permanent circulation. Authors could begin to wait for their breakthroughs with a reasonable chance to make their profits in years to come.
The new public reception created a sphere of up-market works deserving to be read as "literature" whilst it allowed the ongoing fields of fiction to survive and to become the modern mass market of "popular fictions", "trivial literature". The developments resulted temporarily—at the beginning of the 19th century—in a division of three market levels: The old chapbooks survived into the 1820s. The modern trivial market had by that time evolved out of the once prestigious belles lettres. The celebrated great works of literature were on this market the new field that required new marketing platforms and an enormous amount of official and public support. The latter was provided profusely by the new institutions of literary life and national education the continental European nations established in the first half of the 19th century.
What made "literature"—fiction and poetry—such an attractive topic to promote was the impact literary life could win in the modern nations' cultural life.[89] Germany's states embraced the new field of education in the first decades of the 19th century.[90] That nation, which had neither a nationwide religion nor a unifying national political debate, had begun an intensified search for unifying topics a century earlier. The comparatively European decades of the Nine Years War (1689-1697), the War of the Spanish Succession (1701-1714) and the Great Northern War (1700-1721) had left the intellectual elite disenchanted. At the end of the 1720s scholars from Gottsched to Bodmer and Breitinger had turned German-language poetry into a field that the entirety of German-speaking intellectuals could agree on as a common platform. By the 1750s it had become clear that the new debate was to become the essential activity of new "literary" journals and that it would include the modern novel. The events of the French Revolution finally turned the new object of debates into a serious secular alternative to the entire field of exchange that religions and territorial politics had previously dominated.
The change in status had been made possible partly by recent generations of authors who had provided such works to be reviewed. The audience was likely to buy what had been discussed and publicly evaluated in order to participate in the ongoing debates. New copyright laws[88] made the new production financially attractive. Early 18th-century authors had been paid for their manuscripts; they basically received a share of the immediate profits expected from a single edition. The new laws allowed long term strategies of literary fame: the publication of small first editions that critics would first have to evaluate before they could expect to find a wider and more permanent circulation. Authors could begin to wait for their breakthroughs with a reasonable chance to make their profits in years to come.
The new public reception created a sphere of up-market works deserving to be read as "literature" whilst it allowed the ongoing fields of fiction to survive and to become the modern mass market of "popular fictions", "trivial literature". The developments resulted temporarily—at the beginning of the 19th century—in a division of three market levels: The old chapbooks survived into the 1820s. The modern trivial market had by that time evolved out of the once prestigious belles lettres. The celebrated great works of literature were on this market the new field that required new marketing platforms and an enormous amount of official and public support. The latter was provided profusely by the new institutions of literary life and national education the continental European nations established in the first half of the 19th century.
What made "literature"—fiction and poetry—such an attractive topic to promote was the impact literary life could win in the modern nations' cultural life.[89] Germany's states embraced the new field of education in the first decades of the 19th century.[90] That nation, which had neither a nationwide religion nor a unifying national political debate, had begun an intensified search for unifying topics a century earlier. The comparatively European decades of the Nine Years War (1689-1697), the War of the Spanish Succession (1701-1714) and the Great Northern War (1700-1721) had left the intellectual elite disenchanted. At the end of the 1720s scholars from Gottsched to Bodmer and Breitinger had turned German-language poetry into a field that the entirety of German-speaking intellectuals could agree on as a common platform. By the 1750s it had become clear that the new debate was to become the essential activity of new "literary" journals and that it would include the modern novel. The events of the French Revolution finally turned the new object of debates into a serious secular alternative to the entire field of exchange that religions and territorial politics had previously dominated.
The individual German states and France adopted the new subject as part of the national school curriculum during the first decades of the 19th century. Practical reasons spoke for the new field. Whatever one had previously done with religious texts at schools and universities could be done just as well, if not more fascinatingly, with plays, poems and prose fiction. One could interpret these texts, read them to improve one's personality, acquire new ideals and a strengthened sense of morals as a reader of good literature. School education could implement the new text base in a continuation of all the traditional text-oriented classroom and teacher-pupil activities.[91] The idea of a literary Western canon was a novelty and a transfer of the religious canon debates.[92] Entirely new formats of appreciation of "literature" developed: authors were not only discussed in journals and newspapers. They began to give public readings of their latest novels[93] and eventually assumed new roles as public voices. The novelist as an outstanding artist and as an individual could better that the party politician or the religious dignitary dare to assume the role as the national sage, the far sighted judge, the voice of the nation.
New histories of literature were written in order to formulate the fundamental lines of interpretation required by the new canons. They broke with the prior tradition of histories of the sciences and they broke with the traditions of previous histories of poetry. As narrative and interpretative projects they rather resembled Pierre Daniel Huet's 1670 History of Romances. What was different now was the national perspective: histories of literature would discuss the developments of the literary genres for individual nations and languages. The decisive history of German literature that created the model for numerous others, Georg Gottfried Gervinus' Geschichte der poetischen National-Literatur der Deutschen, appeared between 1835 and 1842.[94] The decisive history of English literature was, by contrast, the work of a continental author Hippolyte Taine’s four volume Histoire de la littérature anglaise (1863) arriving in English in 1864. It opened with a look back on the new definition of literature and with a statement of the importance literature, fiction, had gained through the developments:
HISTORY, within a hundred years in Germany, and within sixty years in France, has undergone a transformation owing to a study of literatures. The discovery has been made that a literary work is not a mere play of the imagination, the isolated caprice of an excited brain, but a transcript of contemporary manners and customs and the sign of a particular state of intellect. The conclusion derived from this is that, through literary monuments, we can retrace the way in which men felt and thought many centuries ago. This method has been tried and found successful. We have meditated over these ways of feeling and thinking and have accepted them as facts of prime significance. We have found that they were dependent on most important events, that they explain these, and that these explain them, and that henceforth it was necessary to give them their place in history, and one of the highest.
New histories of literature were written in order to formulate the fundamental lines of interpretation required by the new canons. They broke with the prior tradition of histories of the sciences and they broke with the traditions of previous histories of poetry. As narrative and interpretative projects they rather resembled Pierre Daniel Huet's 1670 History of Romances. What was different now was the national perspective: histories of literature would discuss the developments of the literary genres for individual nations and languages. The decisive history of German literature that created the model for numerous others, Georg Gottfried Gervinus' Geschichte der poetischen National-Literatur der Deutschen, appeared between 1835 and 1842.[94] The decisive history of English literature was, by contrast, the work of a continental author Hippolyte Taine’s four volume Histoire de la littérature anglaise (1863) arriving in English in 1864. It opened with a look back on the new definition of literature and with a statement of the importance literature, fiction, had gained through the developments:
HISTORY, within a hundred years in Germany, and within sixty years in France, has undergone a transformation owing to a study of literatures. The discovery has been made that a literary work is not a mere play of the imagination, the isolated caprice of an excited brain, but a transcript of contemporary manners and customs and the sign of a particular state of intellect. The conclusion derived from this is that, through literary monuments, we can retrace the way in which men felt and thought many centuries ago. This method has been tried and found successful. We have meditated over these ways of feeling and thinking and have accepted them as facts of prime significance. We have found that they were dependent on most important events, that they explain these, and that these explain them, and that henceforth it was necessary to give them their place in history, and one of the highest.
Great Britain had developed a commercial production of the belles lettres, independent from the Dutch and the Parisian trendsetting markets, at the beginning of the 18th century. It had turned Shakespeare into its author of supposedly eternal fame by the 1760s. A rediscovery of the past had followed, with such doubtful discoveries as the Ossian-fragments. Critics discussed fiction in the media.[96] The English word "literature", however, hardly gained its modern meaning as a compound of poetry and fiction before the 1870s. England had traditionally united state and church under one head. It had for the last two centuries enjoyed an open political exchange. Hence, the continental secularisation, the search for new national topics of debate was uninteresting in England. In the USA, a national canon of literary works was impossible until the 1840s: there simply was not a large enough volume of material. Due to these special situations, the market divide between trivial and great literature remained rather indistinct in the English speaking world. The commercial importance of fiction on the book market,[97] its massive distribution through the new 19th century circulating libraries, the journalistic interest in discussing modern authors of plays and fiction, and the reforms of the educational systems of the second half of the 19th century remained incentives for the English speaking countries to follow the continental European path.
Fiction eventually became "literature" in an arrangement of win-win situations. It suited the publishing houses. It suited the modern nations searching for new secular topics. It suited the advocates of improved morals—the new discussions of literature focused on questions of values and morals[98] The 19th-century developments in Europe and the Americas preluded in all these aspects the 20th-century globalisation of Western literary life. It did, however, not culminate in comparable confrontations between "developed" secularised countries and "underdeveloped" religious regimes and downright dictatorships. The 19th-century European and North American implementation of literary life, and of fiction as its privileged platform, found hardly any resistance in the nations affected. They competed with each other as "Kulturnationen", as exporters of Western civilisation, and they shared the institutions that provided, monitored, evaluated and basically organised the new exchange. The new Literary life was rooted in the intellectual life which the early modern “republic of letters”, the “respublica literaria”, the early modern scientific community, had generated in discussions of its own subject "literature", the sciences, since the 16th century.[99] The 19th-century nations adopted the one public debate that had traditionally styled itself as free, democratic, "republican" throughout the last centuries. The material literary critics would discuss was new: a production of art. The discussion itself promised, however, to stay as open as it had always been. To change the topic from the sciences to plays, novels and poems was designed to generate a wider exchange and one of greater impact. The scientific organisation of the entire exchange promised all groups interested a say in the ensuing literary life.
The adoption of modern national literature as an academic subject became with this organisational background one of the first steps in a larger rearrangement of the sciences as disciplines. From the Middle Ages into the 18th century four sciences had been taught at Europe's universities: theology, law, medicine and philosophy. The new system offered natural sciences, sciences of modern technologies, social sciences and the humanities. The latter became the institutional roof of all the discussions of history and culture—a realm new authors of literature would be aware of from now on.
The developments did not lead to stable definitions of terms like "art", "literature" and "culture". They much rather utilised and institutionalised the controversies these words generated. To this day, scholars and critics continue to debate what literature should be, which works are the most important, what defines the true work of art etc. The controversies of "art", "literature" and "culture" define the nations who adopted the new cultural exchange while they serve within these societies as platforms on which all groups can be expected to voice their topics and demands, both in new works of art and in the critical analysis of these works.
What was specific to the 19th-century debate was, in hindsight, its immense interest in fixing personal responsibilities. "Good works are those that will always leave room for new interpretations", is a common statement reflecting the strong link between literature and its public discussion. 19th-century artists would face a choice: to create works of higher quality, pursuing an eternal truth or merely to become mercenaries of present conflicts, functionaries of the commercial market fed by their works. The alternative of claiming one had to create "art for art's sake"[100] also threatened to turn into a battleground over responsibilities. How does one handle art "responsibly"? What are the "demands" of art? Does the author truly act on behalf of art, or is this a cheap excuse for otherwise offensive and irresponsible behavior? Aestheticists, promoters of "art for arts sake" such as Algernon Charles Swinburne and Oscar Wilde, eventually headed the lists of irresponsible authors produced by 19th-century defenders of public morals.
The adoption of modern national literature as an academic subject became with this organisational background one of the first steps in a larger rearrangement of the sciences as disciplines. From the Middle Ages into the 18th century four sciences had been taught at Europe's universities: theology, law, medicine and philosophy. The new system offered natural sciences, sciences of modern technologies, social sciences and the humanities. The latter became the institutional roof of all the discussions of history and culture—a realm new authors of literature would be aware of from now on.
The developments did not lead to stable definitions of terms like "art", "literature" and "culture". They much rather utilised and institutionalised the controversies these words generated. To this day, scholars and critics continue to debate what literature should be, which works are the most important, what defines the true work of art etc. The controversies of "art", "literature" and "culture" define the nations who adopted the new cultural exchange while they serve within these societies as platforms on which all groups can be expected to voice their topics and demands, both in new works of art and in the critical analysis of these works.
What was specific to the 19th-century debate was, in hindsight, its immense interest in fixing personal responsibilities. "Good works are those that will always leave room for new interpretations", is a common statement reflecting the strong link between literature and its public discussion. 19th-century artists would face a choice: to create works of higher quality, pursuing an eternal truth or merely to become mercenaries of present conflicts, functionaries of the commercial market fed by their works. The alternative of claiming one had to create "art for art's sake"[100] also threatened to turn into a battleground over responsibilities. How does one handle art "responsibly"? What are the "demands" of art? Does the author truly act on behalf of art, or is this a cheap excuse for otherwise offensive and irresponsible behavior? Aestheticists, promoters of "art for arts sake" such as Algernon Charles Swinburne and Oscar Wilde, eventually headed the lists of irresponsible authors produced by 19th-century defenders of public morals.
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