History of English Literature

Abstract

Hippolyte Taine (1828–93) was a French critic and intellectual historian who wrote on the philosophy of art from ancient Greece and published a controversial History of English Literature (translation 1871; original 1864). Stretching from Saxon England to the work of his contemporaries Charles Dickens and John Stuart Mill, Taine tells a unifying story from the vantage-point of an author outside the English tradition. The following extract is taken from his introduction, a sweeping anthropological prelude which theorises comparative cultural development and concludes by explaining the convergence of his method of analysis and the subject of English literary history. Taine was the leading critic of his day in France; influenced by Hegel and ideas of evolutionary development, he saw literature as closely linked to art, religion, and philosophy, each being an expression of an unfolding national culture whose civilizing process had its roots in the ‘primitive’ character of a people and the environment (‘sky and soil’). Such a vision of history grounded its concept of the nation in an idea of an ethnically homogeneous populous, implicitly drawing upon, and thereby reinforcing, ideas of race and racial difference that emerged in the last third of the nineteenth century as part of an ideological matrix of nationalism, empire, and biology. For Taine and other Darwinist late-Victorian cultural critics, artistic achievement became part of that matrix, too.

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