ABSTRACT
It is therefore no coincidence that many historians of literature by now are attracted to Pierre Bourdieu's plea for a renewed interest in a sociology of I iterature and h is concept of the 'field,.J If one is interested in how texts were and are appreciated by contemporaries and how writers and poets managed and manage to be writers and poets, such notions are certainly helpful in discussing the role of authorship, patronage, cultural poetics, etc. An appealing feature of Bourdieu's field theory is that in principle its basic framework can be 'value-free': that is, more or less objective. No one will try to argue that there is such a thing as a genuinely and totally objective methodology. Scholarship is by definition an act of interpretation and, especially when studying literature, the qualification 'objective' seems somewhat absurd. Even so, an inevitable degree of subjectivity need not be problematic, as long as one is clear about one's choices.
