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

by Christopher Prendergast

Book Details

Format Hardback or Cased Book
ISBN-10 0199215855
ISBN-13 9780199215850
Publisher Oxford University Press
Imprint Oxford University Press
Country of Manufacture GB
Country of Publication GB
Publication Date Jun 21st, 2007
Print length 328 Pages
Weight 658 grams
Dimensions 24.00 x 16.50 x 2.60 cms
Product Classification: Literary studies: c 1800 to c 1900 European history Modern history to 20th century: c 1700 to c 1900
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Focusing on a moment and a source in 19th-century France, Christopher Prendergast takes up a big question that is still with us: What is a classic? His enquiry, which centres on the French critic Sainte-Beuve (1804-69), who asked the question ''Qu''est-ce qu''un classique?'' in an essay of 1850, takes us on a tour of the history of the ''classic'' that provides insights into and beyond the ''culture wars'' of the 19th century.
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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