
Title

The Classic: SainteBeuve and the NineteenthCentury Culture Wars,Used
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Focusing on a moment and a source in nineteenthcentury France, Christopher Prendergast takes up a big question that is still with us: What is a classic? The question is, by virtue of its insistent recurrence, itself a classic question. It returns to haunt us. It provided the title of a text for French critic CharlesAugustin SainteBeuve in 1850 ('Qu'estce qu'un classique?'), as it did in the twentieth century for T.S. Eliot and John Coetzee. Centring on SainteBeuve in his nineteenthcentury context, Prendergast's inquiry takes us historically to many places (antiquity, the middle ages, the seventeenth and eighteenth as well as the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries). He also provides an intellectual history that travels across multiple disciplinary territories (in addition to literary criticism and literary history, classical studies, comparative philology, historiography and political thought).Against this background, The Classic maps the evolution of SainteBeuve's thought from an initially cosmopolitan conception of the classic (close in spirit to Goethe's notion of Weltliteratur) to an increasingly nationalist conception, with a strong emphasis on the heritage of Latinity and France as its principal legatee. This emphasis was taken up by the extreme right in France after SainteBeuve's death, in a determined mobilizing of a version of the 'classic' on behalf of a protofascist agenda. The final chapter deals with this appropriation and ends with a question of our own about SainteBeuve's original question: in the light of this bleak history, perhaps the time has come to dispense with the term 'classic' altogether.
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We provide a 2-year limited warranty, from the date of purchase for all our products.
If you believe you have received a defective product, or are experiencing any problems with your product, please contact us.
This warranty strictly does not cover damages that arose from negligence, misuse, wear and tear, or not in accordance with product instructions (dropping the product, etc.).
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