theoryofliteratu00inwell

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Theory of Literature
changed Northern readers' attitudes toward Mrs. Stowe's war?
How have Hemingway and Faulkner affected their readers?
How great was the influence of literature on the rise of modern
nationalism? Certainly the historical novels of Walter Scott in
Scotland, of Henryk Sienkiewicz in Poland, of Alois Jirasek in
Czechoslovakia, have done something very definite to increase
national pride and a common memory of historical events.
We can hypothesize— plausibly, no doubt—that the young
are more directly and powerfully influenced by their reading
than the old, that inexperienced readers take literature more
naively as transcript rather than interpretation of life, that those
whose books are few take them in more utter seriousness than do
wide and professional readers. Can we advance beyond such
conjecture? Can we make use of questionnaires and any other
mode of sociological enquiry? No exact objectivity is obtainable,
for the attempt at case histories will depend upon the memories
and the analytic powers of the interrogated, and their testimonies
will need codification and evaluation by a fallible mind. But the
question, "How does literature affect its audience?" is an em-
pirical one, to be answered, if at all, by the appeal to experience;
and, since we are thinking of literature in the broadest sense, and
society in the broadest, the appeal must be made to the experi-
ence not of the connoisseur alone but to that of the human race.
We have scarcely begun to study such questions. 19
Much the most common approach to the relations of literature
and society is the study of works of literature as social documents,
as assumed pictures of social reality. Nor can it be doubted that
some kind of social picture can be abstracted from literature.
Indeed, this has been one of the earliest uses to which literature
has been put by systematic students. Thomas Warton, the first
real historian of English poetry, argued that literature has the
"peculiar merit of faithfully recording the features of the times,
and of preserving the most picturesque and expressive represen-
20
tation of manners" j and to him and many of his antiquarian
successors, literature was primarily a treasury of costumes and
customs, a source book for the history of civilization, especially
of chivalry and its decline. As for modern readers, many of them
derive their chief impressions of foreign societies from the read-