ABSTRACT
In spite of the enormous influence of Eliot, Leavis, and the New Critics, our current perspectives on the study of literature owe perhaps more to Continental Europe than to England and America. The continental European tradition of literary studies that is responsible for this begins in Russia, in the second decade of the twentieth century, in Moscow and St Petersburg. It finds a new home in Prague in the late 1920s, when the political climate in Russia has become too repressive, and travels to France (by way of New York City) after World War II, where it comes to full bloom in the 1960s and begins to draw widespread international attention. It is in France, too, that it provokes a countermovement that achieved its full force in the 1970s and 1980s and that is still the dominant presence in literary – and in cultural – studies.
