Ancients, Moderns and the Gothic in Eighteenth-Century Historiography

In his Querelles littéraires (1761), the abbé Augustin-Simon Irailh puts forward a two-volume history of European poetics through the ordering and description of the main literary polemics from Homer to his day. The essay, bearing the secondary title of Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire des révolutions de la République des Lettres, is presented in the preface as a collection of ‘secret’ records of literary history, a humorous Théatre de la vérité in which cultural history appears dramatized through the most conspicuous moments of crisis and disturbance. Focusing on cultural change (the ‘revolutions’ of the Commonwealth of Letters), Irailh gives priority to the inner workings of intellectual history and thus considers literary quarrels as a genre especially suited to reveal the particular insights and motives of literary transformation: ‘Amongst all these disputes, held by one side and the other with so much heat, through this chaos of insults and abuse, among these continual revolutions, the reader can follow the thread of our learning, the progress of taste, the march of the human spirit’. ¹