One of the most difficult and uncertain areas of research offered the historian of literature today is the attempt to define as a corpus and an object of literary and/or historical analysis. The various efforts of the past few years usually remain torn between a unitary presupposition that seems to be the only acceptable political-historical way of justifying the body of European literature and an irreducibly composite reality that is not amenable to the representations of Europe as reduced to this superficial unity. If we are to reflect on the modalities and specificities of such a historical undertaking and shake off political models and representations, it seems to me that we need to work from another hypothesis. One of the few trans-historical features that constitutes Europe, in effect, one of the only forms of both political and cultural unity that makes of Europe a coherent whole, is none other than the conflicts3 and competitions that pitted Europe paradoxically through these struggles. This upside-down history would trace the models and counter-models, the powers and dependences, the impositions and the resistances, the linguistic rivalries, the literary devices and genres regarded as weapons in these specific, perpetual and merciless struggles. It would be the history of literary antagonisms, battles and revolts.
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Article provided by Cambridge University Press in its journal European Review.
Volume (Year): 17 (2009) Issue (Month): 01 (February) Pages: 121-132 Download reference. The following formats are available: HTML
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