Esperando al tiempo Jean-François de la Harpe y la historia de la literatura
- 1 Iemyrhd, Universidad de Salamanca
- Pedro M. Cátedra (dir.)
- Juan Miguel Valero (dir.)
Publisher: Instituto de Estudios Medievales y Renacentistas y de Humanidades Digitales, IEMYRhd ; Universidad de Salamanca
ISBN: 978-84-121557-0-9, 978-84-121557-6-1
Year of publication: 2020
Volume Title: Confluencias dieciochescas. Cartografías del saber en el siglo ilustrado
Volume: 6
Pages: 65-84
Type: Book chapter
Abstract
The french poet and playwright Jean-François de la Harpe (1739-1803), an apostate of the French Revolution, is also remembered for his Lycée ou Cours de littérature ancienne et moderne (1798-1804), which collects the lectures he gave at the Lycée since 1795. Despite La Harpe’s persistence on history to inform his work, his speech seems to exclude it on a recurring basis, by ignoring the category of time, going ahead from Augustus century to the 17th French century in a lack of continuity, consigning to darkness the Middle Ages and the Renaissance literature. Even considering the immediate context of the Revolution, the operation through which he describes events origin will lead him to push time into the background and focus on the ideas that determine events emergence. However, La Harpe’s Lycée, described as a «monument of classical taste», became a guide for historians of literature during the first half of the nineteenth century. What are La Harpe’s views on history in his own work? What allowed the survival of this work, based on genres classification, while historical and subjective parameters were introduced in texts interpretation method? The aim of this article is to try to find an answer to these questions.