The Classic: Sainte-Beuve and the Nineteenth-Century Culture Wars

by Christopher Prendergast

Focusing on a moment and a source in nineteenth-century 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 Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve in 1850 ("Qu'est-ce qu'un classique?"), as it did in the twentieth century for T.S. Eliot and John Coetzee. Centring...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0199215855
• ISBN13: 9780199215850
• Release Date: February 2008
• Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
• Length: 328 Pages
• Weight: 1.40 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 6.4" x 9.3"