The Young Poland movement and les règles de l’art : the concept of the 1890-1918 literary period and Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of the literary field

This article presents a reappraisal of the concept of the 1890–1918 literary period from the perspective of sociology of literature, and in particular Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of literary field (le champ littéraire), set out in his Les règles de l’art (1992). It goes without saying that the turn of the 19th century saw the emergence of a modernist movement, or, an autonomous literary field, dedicated to ‘pure’ art and literature, divorced from any social obligations. Within the Bourdieuesque perspective the dynamics of the literary field can be examined from a number of perspectives with the aim of assessing the success or failure of its strategies of consecration (i.e. the building of legitimacy and prestige), the habitus of its key figures, or its role as a space of mediation between external forces (les logiques externs) and the autonomy of literary production. The ultimate aim of conducting all those probes is to validate the claim that the 1890–1910 modernist literary field was indeed autonomous. In fact, its emergence in Poland bore a marked resemblance to the developments in mid-19th century French literature, as described by Bourdieu. The peculiar character of the Polish literary field resulted mainly from the one external factor, Poland’s political status until the declaration of independence in 1918