2007-08 BM1: Session 3

Back to 2007-08 BM1 Introduction to the Critical and Scholarly Discussion of Literature, Part 1

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• Though we can assume that all periods and languages produced works we may read as literature - the bodies of works we put together as the different national literatures are a comparatively new invention.
• What we understand as "literary materials" did not form the same context before the 1750s.
• The discussion of "literature" grew from the 15th into the 18th century as a discussion of scientific works
• Those who discussed the sciences popularised their debate by turning it into a debate of poetical and fictional works between 1750 and 1850.
• Alternative fields of materials - "poetry" and the "belles lettres" and modes of their evaluation were declared inappropriate and delegitimised by our modern discussion of literary works.
• If you do written work on the university level

• Be careful to assume that contexts and traditions you find explained in histories of literature were also known to those who wrote and consumed these literary works before the 1750s.
• Do assume that entirely different contexts existed wherever we see something as literature of the past - contexts such as that of

• the "belles lettres" - the market of fashionable books read all over Europe (a context existing between 1600-1800),
• poetry - the field of works in verse including prose comedy and (between 1600 and 1800) also the opera,
• histories - both true and fictional, serious and scandalous including romances and novels before the 1750s.