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Introduction: The Politics of French Literary History

The politics underlying scholarly interpretations of literature as well as the public reception of literary texts has always been a central, if at times repressed, issue in the production of literary history. This is nothing new, but it demands constant attention and review if it is to remain present in the minds and works of those who produce that history. This volume of essays revisits a selection of literary sites, famous, infamous and less known, in an attempt to define—and in some cases reassign—the political contexts surrounding the production of French literary history in the twentieth century. When we first discussed a special issue on the topic of politics and literary history, we thought of its most obvious manifestations—the politics of canon formation and the problems associated with producing a narrative of literature’s history. We thought of Denis Hollier’s A New History of French Literature, which since its publication in 1989, had served as a model for writing a literary history that acknowledges the perseverance of the notion of a national literature, while attempting to move beyond it. We wondered if, in the more than ten years since its publication, the effects of globalization and the increasing importance of gender and post-colonial theory might change the way the book was conceived and organized. We also felt that the special issue should address changes in the field of French studies, both in the United States and in France. How do new theoretical paradigms compete with and influence the discipline and departments of French Studies? Does the current captivation with the notion of “globalization” imply the end of national literature departments, to be replaced by interdisciplinary and generic “area studies” programs? If so, has the discipline of French language and literature contributed in some way to its own decline? Alongside these broad concerns of the discipline and its institutions, we wanted this special issue to treat specific authors and their literary production. Politics, in the case of the individual writer, can be read both externally and internally. On the one hand, writers are implicated in the political periods through which they live; it is a commonplace of literary history that they are revered or despised according to their “fit” with prevailing political attitudes and regimes. But to what extent do writers themselves adjust that “fit,” reinventing themselves