L'oblat qui voulait être roi. George Saintsbury critique

Abstract

This essay rests on a twofold methodological experiment: look at literary criticism in the periodical press through the case of a critic's trajectoire, by means of an external analysis of criticism's effects on his social development, and follow a roundabout way through the case of english literary and intellectual life, whose variety of interesting figures and burgeoning historiography, badly known in France, could allow to understand in a new way the status and the significance of literary criticism and critics in french periodical press at the end of the nineteenth century. George Saintsbury's trajectoire, from Merton College to Edinburgh University, through the grammar schools of Guernsey, the new Oxbridge and London periodicals of the 1860ies, the London political and literary newspapers of the l870ies and the editorship of the politically conservative Saturday Review, offers the opportunity to understand how the job and status of the literary critic contributed towards his intellectual and social position and what kind of cultural authority his critical periodical writing, allowing manyfold strategies and complex social plays, permitted him to obtain, precisely at a time when the role and place of the intellectual field of activities knew an important reordering, entangled in the pressures of University, State and periodical press. Moreover, George Saintsbury 's case allows us to rate the shortcomings of the notion of criticism in itself, to question the reality of its frontiers with literary history, often said to be one of the pillars of the new scientific university discourses about letters un the fin-de-siècle, and then to understand how some forms of discourses about literature, skillfully performed, could be a crucial means for asserting the importance of being a literary statesman, a crucial though informai social figure in english literature and politics around 1900.