1 - Introduction: Literature in History

Summary

Writing the history of literature is a paradoxical activity that consists in placing it in historical time and then showing how literature gradually tears itself away from this temporality, creating in its turn its own temporality, one that has gone unperceived until the present day. It is true that there is a temporal imbalance between the world and literature, but it is literary time that allows literature to free itself from political time. In other words, the elaboration of a properly literary temporality is the condition of being able to create a literary history of literature (by contrast with – and by reference to – what Lucien Febvre called the ‘historical history of literature’). Hence the necessity of reestablishing the original historical bond between literature and the world – a bond that, as we have seen, is primarily political and national in nature – in order to show how literature subsequently managed, through a gradual acquisition of autonomy, to escape the ordinary laws of history. By the same token, literature may be defined – without contradiction – both as an object that is irreducible to history and as a historical object, albeit one that enjoys a strictly literary historicity. What I have called the genesis of literary space is this process by which literary freedom is invented, slowly, painfully, and with great difficulty, through endless struggles and rivalries, and against all the extrinsic limitations – political, national, linguistic, commercial, diplomatic – that are imposed upon it.

Pascale Casanova