Literary History/Cultural History

This chapter examines the relationships between literary studies and history, from the first great bibliographic repertoires published at the end of the 16th century up to the emergence of cultural history at the end of the 20th century. It refers to the different historical dimensions of literature as specific “times”, and defines its relationship with history as “multi-temporal”. They are located at the crossroads between several series of realities which each have their own chronology. That is true of the history of forms, of language, and of the subsequent reception which characterizes all artistic productions, and of the real (political, economic, etc.) context of their production. In this sense, “multi-temporality” is the very object of the academic discipline that we call literary history.