On the Benefit and Harm of Literary History to Life: The Theory of Literary-Historiographic Discourse in the Study of Literature

Abstract

The paper offers a meta-critical review of representative theoretical orientations in considering the tasks and meaning of the history of literature as an academic discipline. Originally conceptualised as a diachronic classification of the literatures of individual languages, which especially came to the fore during the 19th century and the constitution of European nations in the modern sense of the word, literary history has for a long time and in various ways tried to overcome that framework, and achieve the broadest possible universality. This problem proved to be challenging both in the theoretical and practical growth of the literary-historiographical discourse in the 20th century. Also investigate, in a chronological perspective, were a number of other issues, such as periodisation, developmental changes, the reception of literary and artistic texts as well as certain methodological aporias in their historiographical analysis, all with the intention of mapping a possible continuity of critical thinking about the issue at hand. The relation of the history of literature to literary criticism, its typological categorisation, the narrative nature of the literary historiographical construction of the very idea of national, or general literature, are also questions that stood out as crucial. In addition to the significant contributions of world philology to the problems of literary history, attention is also paid to the contribution of Serbian literary theory to that field.