The Life of Literature Beyond the Page - Between Definition, Context, and Reception

 

The question of what constitutes literary history already presupposes a prior and more fundamental problem: what is literature? To write the history of something, one must first define its object. Yet the definition of literature is elusive, historically variable, and deeply tied to questions of value, culture, and interpretation. As Terry Eagleton famously observed, literature is not a fixed category but a function of “subjective and social valuation.” What one age or culture considers literature, another may regard as mere writing, and vice versa.

Etymologically, the term literature derives from the Latin litterae—meaning “letters” or “all that is written.” Taken literally, this would make every written text part of literature, from epic poetry to telephone directories. Such a view, however, would exclude orally transmitted works that predate writing, such as Homer’s Iliad, which existed for centuries in oral form before being transcribed in the eighth century BCE. Folk songs, troubadour lyrics, and even medieval romances share this oral dimension. At the same time, avant-garde movements of the twentieth century—such as André Breton’s Poèmes surréalistes or Peter Handke’s experimental Aufstellung des 1. FC Nürnberg—have provocatively blurred the boundaries between utilitarian text and poetic expression. A telephone book, arranged as a Fibonacci sequence, may become poetry by means of formal intention and context. Charles Baudelaire’s decision to reorder the poems in the second edition of Les Fleurs du Mal likewise shows how meaning and interpretation are shaped by structure and sequence rather than content alone.

Historically, the concept of literature has undergone profound shifts. In the eighteenth century, the French expression avoir de la littérature originally meant “to have education” or “to be learned.” Only later, with c’est de la littérature, did the term come to designate a distinct artistic field. Literature thus became not a sign of cultivation but an object of study in its own right—a transformation that laid the groundwork for modern literary scholarship.

Defining what distinguishes literature from other forms of writing remains equally complex. On the surface, there are external markers: the paratext—titles, covers, genre labels—guides readers’ expectations and shapes their aesthetic attitude. A reader opening a book labeled novel expects fiction, not factual reportage. More subtle are the text-internal features: poetic language often departs from everyday usage through rhythm, sound, and rhetorical devices. Yet linguistic conventions themselves shift over time and context, so such criteria are never absolute. Roman Jakobson proposed self-reflexivity—language that draws attention to its own form—as a defining trait of the literary. Still, literature must always be seen in relation to its outside—the broader corpus of texts, traditions, and expectations against which it defines itself. Through defamiliarization or de-automatization, as the Russian Formalists called it, literature renews perception by breaking with convention.

Fictionality is another crucial, though not exclusive, marker. In narrative forms, it distinguishes imaginative worlds from factual discourse. On the stage, this takes the form of de-pragmatization: objects and actions are stripped of their everyday functions and acquire symbolic meaning. When Hamlet dies, the actor does not; the death is aesthetic, not literal. Such features—fictionality, de-pragmatization, self-reflexivity—transcend specific genres but together define literature’s autonomy as an art form. Only in the mid-nineteenth century did this autonomy become fully established; before that, literature often served explicit social or political purposes, as in Molière’s courtly plays that praised the monarchy.

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The Construction of Literary Periods

If literature itself resists stable definition, the notion of literary epochs is no less problematic. As Niklas Luhmann argued in 1985, epochs are not physical realities but constructs of observation—ways of organizing the temporal continuum into meaningful segments. Historians retrospectively identify turning points to mark “before” and “after,” but such demarcations depend on interpretation. Epoch boundaries are therefore fluid, not fixed, and exist only through theoretical reconstruction.

Norbert Titzmann (1983) suggested that an epoch must be defined not arbitrarily but by identifying relatively invariant features shared by a group of works. Similarly, Jasinowski (1937) described epochs as ideal-typical constructs—heuristic models open to reinterpretation. Transitional figures such as Dante exemplify this permeability: simultaneously the heir of Virgil and medieval tradition, the culmination of scholastic poetics, and the forerunner of Renaissance humanism. Each classification is plausible, none exhaustive.

Victor Shklovsky placed this phenomenon within the logic of literary evolution: new forms arise not to express new content, but to distinguish themselves from earlier forms. Literature develops through difference. Robert Jauß later extended this insight—literature arises out of literature, art out of art—yet it remains inseparable from its historical context. Each work is both a reaction to and a product of its time.

Hans Robert Jauß and the Aesthetics of Reception

In his 1967 inaugural lecture at the University of Konstanz, Hans Robert Jauß famously called for a “revolution of literary history.” His Aesthetics of Reception proposed that the meaning and historical function of a work can be understood only through its readers. Every reader approaches a text with a particular horizon of expectations formed by prior reading, cultural norms, and historical context. There is, therefore, no “innocent” reading; interpretation is always mediated by tradition.

Different theoretical paradigms assign the reader different roles. In Marxist criticism, the reader’s position is determined by class and material conditions, so literature becomes evidence of social struggle. In Formalism, by contrast, the reader is an analytical subject who reconstructs the aesthetic system of the text. For Jauß, these dimensions—historical and aesthetic—must be integrated: the reader is both interpreter and participant in history. Every author is first a reader; literature emerges in dialogue with prior texts. Meaning does not belong to the author but is realized in reception. A work unread is not literature at all. Thus, the reader is the history-making element of literature.

Jauß attacked the “historical objectivism” of nineteenth-century scholarship, which treated each epoch as a closed and self-sufficient entity. Instead, he sought to reconstruct the continuities and transitions that shape literary evolution. The key to this reconstruction lies in reception: why does literature look the way it does today?

For Jauß, aesthetic distance—the gap between a work and the audience’s expectations—measures literary value. The greater the distance, the more innovative the work. This can be observed through contemporary reactions: reviews, correspondence, sales, performances. Reconstructing the expectations of an initial audience provides insight into the historical situation of a text, while acknowledging that modern readers encounter it differently—a phenomenon Jauß called the hermeneutic difference between past and present.

He identified 1857 as a pivotal year in French literary history: the censorship trials of Flaubert’s Madame Bovary and Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal signaled a shift in aesthetic norms. Flaubert’s use of internal focalization—eschewing an omniscient narrator—confused the prosecution, which mistook narrative technique for moral endorsement. In Baudelaire’s case, the dual articulation of the lyrical “I” challenged conventional notions of morality and selfhood. Thus, 1857 became a revolutionary moment in literary form and moral perception alike.

Literature, Society, and Historical Function

Although literature develops through internal differentiation, it remains embedded in broader social processes. It both reflects and shapes collective values and moral codes. Texts structure our perception of reality and, in doing so, participate in the formation of social consciousness. Literary history, therefore, cannot be isolated from general history; it is a dialogue between art and society.

Medieval and Renaissance Temporalities

Time itself is not a neutral background in literature but a semantic construct. Antiquity imagined cyclical ages of the world, while Christian medieval thought organized history around the central event of Christ’s sacrifice. Medieval historiography was thus theological rather than progressive: the Incarnation marked a unique, irreversible turning point after which no further “progress” was possible. Humanity lived sub lege—under divine law—awaiting redemption.

The Renaissance, by contrast, reoriented history toward the rediscovery of antiquity, casting the Middle Ages as a period of decline. Yet the two epochs exist in dialectical relation: the Renaissance made the “Middle Ages” conceptually possible by defining itself against them. As Burghart Haug put it, “the dwarfs stand on the shoulders of giants.” The past becomes the foundation of renewal—a dynamic that continues throughout literary history.

World enough and time

Literary history, then, is not a chronology of fixed periods or autonomous works but a dynamic interplay between texts, readers, and social contexts. Literature is defined neither by form nor by content alone, but by the shifting frameworks through which societies value, interpret, and transform written expression. Its history is the history of these frameworks: of changing expectations, aesthetic revolutions, and acts of reading that continuously re-create the meaning of the literary.

As Jauß reminds us, there is no creatio ex nihilo in art. Every new work is born of earlier works, every reader a potential author, and every act of reading a small moment in the unfolding history of literature itself.