The eighteenth-century literary field in Western Europe: The interdependence of material and symbolic production and consumption

Abstract

The papers of this special issue are introduced as intances of a field-theoretic approach as articulated initially in Bourdieu's institutional analysis of the literary field. This approach is presented as a sound alternative to traditional literary history and its insufficiently relational view of historiography and of the cultural object. In addition, it is situated critically with respect to book history and previous institutional analyses in a historical perspective. It focuses on the development of a literary field in eighteenth-century Western Europe, at a time when the term ‘literature’ meant something quite different from what it means nowadays. In the cultural-sociological perspective advocated here, one must take account of the interdependency of material and symbolic production and consumption. Therefore, an approach is needed which integrates institutional analysis with an examination of the impact of conceptions of literature, that is, sets of normative ideas on the nature and function of literature. These conceptions affect the practices of all agents in the field, irrespective of whether they focus on symbolic or material production, or even on consumption.