1. Positions

This chapter examines Pierre Bourdieu’s literary sociology in relation to the intellectual context in which it was produced and its subsequent reception among Anglophone literary scholars. It first considers why Bourdieu’s work on literature has often appeared reductive, deterministic, stylistically difficult, and too closely tied to the particularities of the French literary and intellectual field. Following Bourdieu’s own principle of double historicisation, it approaches these difficulties from two directions: by examining the principal objections raised in the Anglophone reception of his work and by reconstructing the French intellectual space in which his position was formed. Particular attention is given to Bourdieu’s ambivalent engagements with Jean-Paul Sartre, Claude Lévi-Strauss, structuralism, and post-structuralism. An appendix provides a guide to the composition of Les Règles de l’art , identifying the earlier articles and related writings incorporated into its different sections.