ABSTRACT
The development of a historical sociology of literary forms and functions-understood, here, as comprising both uses and effectsrequires that answers be found to at least two questions. First: how are the relations between literary forms and functions to be viewed? And second: how are the tasks of synchronic and diachronic analysis to be conceived? It also requires that the answers to these questions should be co-ordinated so as to produce a coherent articulation of the relations between the formal and the functional and the synchronic and diachronic components of analysis.
