The Changing Vocabulary of Literature: On the Migration and Transformation of Literary Concepts in Europe (1900–1950) – an Introduction

Abstract

The central premise of the series of essays presented here is that a full understanding of the wide range of factors in literary change should take into account and carefully analyze the interaction between transformations of literary repertoires on the one hand and contemporary conceptual meta-languages on the other. Therefore, each essay offers a comprehensive reflection on a set of terms or concepts that played a key role in literary discourse in the first half of the 20th century. Our initial list included notions such as rhetoric, revolution, image, poesie pure, abstraction, nobility, Kulturpessimismus, middlebrow, life, the organic, group, ecriture automatique, international, technique. Some of these are new coinages, specifically conceived to describe new literary phenomena, yet most are general notions with long histories, firmly rooted in everyday language and relevant to very diverse cultural and social domains. Nevertheless, our primary aim was to map the specific meanings these terms acquired in the literary field between roughly 1900 and 1950; precisely the fact that they are so broad and deeply rooted that makes them interesting cases for the re-articulation of literary vocabularies. The focus is on how these concepts function as building blocks within broader meta-literary discourses that try to describe, interpret, and evaluate phenomena of change in the period that is usually associated with modernist literature. The concepts are not primarily interpreted as components of elaborate and consistent (philosophical, social, artistic) theories, but as parts of a more or less widespread and a more or less elusive literary doxa, discussed by and/or shared by different participants in the process of literary communication (writers, critics, literary historians, publishers, readers, etc.), and contributing to the idea (or, more accurate: the various and often conflicting ideas) of literature at a given moment in history.