History of English Literature (Taine book)

Bust of Hippolyte Taine at Vouziers, Ardennes

Histoire de la Littérature Anglaise (1864) is a work of literary criticism by the French historian Hippolyte Taine, translated into English by Henri van Laun as History of English Literature (1871). S. E. Hyman called it "still the best history of english literature we have, an almost miraculous feat for a foreign critic," and concluded: "Taine's History of English Literature remains to this day the great triumph of sociological criticism."

The book was prefaced by an introduction in which Taine's determinist views were developed in the most uncompromising fashion. This work is a manifesto in favor of scientistic history. In his preface, he affirms that the examination of documents, in particular literary texts, makes it possible to reconstitute the "interior man" which corresponds to the "elementary mental state" of each period of a given culture. For him, history belongs to the field of experimentation as well as the physiology. One must be able to apply to it the same methods as to the natural sciences.

The events in history would thus be determined by laws equivalent to those of the natural world and each historical fact would depend on three conditions: the environment (geography, climate); the race (physical state of man: his body and his place in the biological evolution); the moment (state of intellectual advance of man). It is possible to set up an experimental method to study them, as in medicine (see Claude Bernard) where there is not only the study of symptoms, but also laboratory work with physical and chemical experiments on living animals to better understand man and his diseases and to test the reactions of organisms to different chemical substances.

In 1864 Taine sent this work to the Academie française in order to compete for the Prix Bordin. Alfred de Falloux and Félix Dupanloup attacked Taine with violence; he was warmly defended by Guizot: finally, after three days of discussion, it was decided that as the prize could not be awarded to Taine, it should not be awarded at all.

Further reading

• Chasles, Philarète. (1877). "Taine: Histoire de la Littérature Anglaise." In: Mémoires, Vol. 2. Paris: Charpentier, pp. 257–73.
• Gautier, Léon (1865). Études Littéraires pour la Défense de l'Église. Paris: Poussielgue et Fils.
• Léger, François (1994). "Taine et l'Angleterre," Commentaire, No. 66, pp. 369–75.
• Nordmann, Jean-Thomas (1992). Taine et la Critique Scientifique. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.
• Trautmann-Waller, Céline (2015). "La Critique Scientifique de Taine: Une Völkerpsychologie à la Française", Romanistische Zeitschrift für Literaturgeschichte = Cahiers d’Histoire des Littératures Romanes, Vol. XXXIX, No. 1/2, pp. 45–62.

External links

• History of English Literature at Hathi Trust