Hippolyte Taine: The Sociological Approach To The Study Of Literature

“A literary work was no mere individual play of imagination, …. but a transcript of contemporary manners, a manifestation of a certain kind of mind.”

- Hippolyte Taine, History of English Literature, Vol. I: 1. The sociological approach to the study of literature has a long and distinguished history extracting the bulk of attention both from the territory of readers and critics engrossed in a relentless pursuit of understanding as well as interpreting literature on its own terms. While looking back through the annals of history, we witness several scholars and intellectuals from Plato down to the present day who have considered different sociological perspectives of literary study in one way or the other. Behind this affinity has remained

The nineteenth century French historian Hippolyte Adolphe Taine (1828-1893) is often considered the first modern ‘sociologist of literature’ who endeavours to systematize this approach by way of formulating a scientific precision in the process. Taine has been a stern believer of the notion that literature, regardless of the genre, has a reciprocal relationship with society. This perception is very much explicit in his History of English Literature (1863) – widely recognized as one of the landmark texts of the century. To comprehend and analyze literature in the context of sociological perspective, Taine in his study attempts to device a precise universal criterion. As he deciphers, literature, far from being dubbed as the mere reflection of personality, should be considered the collective expression of the societal set-up embodying the spirit of the age at large. In order to conceive this embodiment, Taine culls out the role three formative factors: ‘race, milieu and moment’. In a nutshell, by ‘race’ he suggests the “innate and hereditary dispositions which man brings with him into the world” . It entails a sense of nationality to be found in literary productions. In other words, it controls the collective disposition that governs everyone without their knowledge or consent. Likewise, ‘milieu’ is the particular circumstance that distorts or develops the disposition mentioned erstwhile. And finally, ‘moment’ is the momentum of the past and present traditions. In this paper we will attempt to unveil these elements at work behind the poems of Thomas Wyatt by alluding to and focusing on a select few