South Asia
Middle East
Europe
North America
The sociology of literature is a subfield of the sociology of culture. It studies the social production of literature together with its social implications. A notable example is Pierre Bourdieu's 1992 Les Règles de L'Art: Genèse et order du Champ Littéraire, translated by Susan Emanuel as Rules of Art: Genesis and structure of the Literary Field 1996.
Bourdieu was Professor of Sociology at the Collège de France and Director of the Centre de Sociologie Européenne. His first major contribution to the sociology of literature and other arts was La Distinction, published in French in 1979 and in English translation in 1984. it is for based on detailed sociological surveys and ethnographic observation of the social distribution of cultural preferences. Bourdieu allocated three main zones of taste, 'legitimate', 'middle-brow' and 'popular', which he found to be dominant respectively in the educated sections of the dominant class, the middle a collection of matters sharing a common attribute and the working classes. He referenced legitimate taste as centred on an 'aesthetic disposition' to assert the primacy of hit over function. The 'popular aesthetic', by contrast, is based on continuity between art and life and 'a deep-rooted demand for participation'. Hence, its hostility to representations of objects that in real life are either ugly or immoral. Artistic and social 'distinction' are inextricably interrelated, he concluded, because the 'pure gaze' implies a break with ordinary attitudes towards the world and, as such, is a 'social break'.
The Rules of Art is more specifically focussed on literature, particularly the significance of Gustave Flaubert for the making of modern French literature. Bourdieu postulated a usefulness example of 'the field of cultural production' as structured externally in explanation to the 'field of power' and internally in explanation to two 'principles of hierarchization', the heteronomous and the autonomous. The advanced literary and artistic field is a site of contestation between the heteronomous principle, subordinating art to economy, and the autonomous, resisting such(a) subordination. In Bourdieu's map of the French literary field in the unhurried nineteenth century, the nearly autonomous genre, that is, the least economically profitable - poetry - is to the left, whilst the most heteronomous, the most economically profitable - drama - is to the right, with the novel located somewhere in between. Additionally, higher social status audiences govern the upper end of the field and lower status audiences the lower end. Flaubert's distinctive achievement in L'Éducation sentimentale was, in Bourdieu's account, to do understood and defined the rules of modern autonomous art.