Sociology of literature is a subfield of Sociology of culture

Sociology of culture

The sociology of culture concerns culture—usually understood as sets of cognitive meanings—as it is manifested in society. For Georg Simmel, culture referred to "the cultivation of individuals through the agency of external forms which have been objectified in the course of history".Cultural...

. It studies the social production of literature and its social implications. A notable example is Pierre Bourdieu

Pierre Bourdieu

Pierre Bourdieu was a French sociologist, anthropologist, and philosopher.Starting from the role of economic capital for social positioning, Bourdieu pioneered investigative frameworks and terminologies such as cultural, social, and symbolic capital, and the concepts of habitus, field or location,...

's 1992 Les Règles de L'Art: Genèse et Structure du Champ Littéraire, translated by Susan Emanuel as Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field (Stanford University Press, 1996).

The theory of the novel

A first step into Sociology of Literature was done by Georg Lukács

Georg Lukács

György Lukács was a Hungarian Marxist philosopher and literary critic. He is a founder of the tradition of Western Marxism. He contributed the concept of reification to Marxist philosophy and theory and expanded Karl Marx's theory of class consciousness. Lukács' was also an influential literary...

 with his The Theory of the Novel, first published in German in 1916, in the Zeitschrift fur Aesthetik und Allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft. In 1920 it was republished as a book and strongly influenced the Frankfurt School. Walter Benjamin

Walter Benjamin

Walter Bendix Schönflies Benjamin was a German-Jewish intellectual, who functioned variously as a literary critic, philosopher, sociologist, translator, radio broadcaster and essayist...

 and Leo Löwenthal

Leo Löwenthal

Leo Löwenthal was a German-Jewish sociologist usually associated with the Frankfurt School.-Life:Born in Frankfurt as the son of assimilated Jews , Löwenthal came of age during the turbulent early years of the Weimar Republic...

 were the main scholars continuing the literary studies then. Leo Lowentahl continued his work on literature later in the 50's at Berkeley University, California. The novel is seen by Critical theorists as a mirror of the ideology of bourgeoisie. A second edition of The Theory of the Novel would be published in 1962 having, a strong influence on French structuralism.

The sociology of the novel

In 1964 Lucien Goldmann

Lucien Goldmann

Lucien Goldmann was a French philosopher and sociologist of Jewish-Romanian origin...

, who developed the theory of genetic structuralism, published Pour une Sociologie du Roman translated by Alan Sheridan

Alan Sheridan

-Life:Born Alan Mark Sheridan-Smith, Sheridan read English at St Catharine's College, Cambridge before spending 5 years in Paris as English assistant at Lycée Henri IV and Lycée Condorcet. Returning to London, he briefly worked in publishing before becoming a freelance translator...

 as Towards a Sociology of the Novel (New York: Tavistock Publications, 1987). Instead of a direct reflex of capitalist society, Goldmann sees the Novel as an homology

Homology (sociology)

Homologies are "structural 'resonances'...between the different elements making up a socio-cultural whole." Examples include Alan Lomax's cantometrics, which:...

between literature and society mediated by the writer. In his view, the novel represents the "maximum possible conscience" of a social class or group.

Recent developments

Building on earlier work in the production of culture, reception aesthetics. and cultural capital, sociology of literature during the past few years has concentrated on readers' construction of meaning. New developments include studying the relationship between literature and group identities; concerning institutional and reader-response analysis; reintroducing the role of intentions of the author in literature, reconsidering the role of ethics and morality in literature and developing a clearer understanding of how literature is and is not like other media.

The sociology of literature has also recently taken an interest in the global inequality between First-World and Third-World authors, where the latter tend to be strongly dependent on the editorial decisions of publishers in Paris, London or New York and are often excluded from participation in the global literary market.

The journal New Literary History has devoted a special issue to new approaches to the sociology of literature in Spring 2010.