Introduction: Bourdieu and the Literary Field

Pierre Bourdieu’s range as a thinker was extremely wide, and it would misleading to present him primarily as a literary theorist. Trained a philosopher, he became the leading French sociologist of his, and brought under the spotlight of his ‘critical sociology’ whole series of institutional and discursive universes (education, , linguistics, public administration, politics, philosophy, journalism, and others). Far from representing an intellectual dispersal, manifold objects of enquiry allowed him to develop and refine comprehensive theory of social process and power-relations based distinctive concepts such as ‘field’, ‘habitus’, variously conceived of ‘capital’, and ‘illusio’ (all these concepts and others will explicated and assessed in this issue). Yet Bourdieu’s analyses were ever received as neutral descriptions within the fields which analysed. Bourdieu’s abiding agenda was to show how the discursive and institutional logics at work in such fields carried also masked certain social logics that a ‘critical sociology’ could. Coupled with the inveterately combative drive seldom absent Bourdieu’s objectifying analyses—and even setting aside the to which an external analyst is inevitably subject—this explain the resistance which his work recurrently provoked. In respect, Bourdieu’s forays into the world of literary studies and his therein can be seen as part of a wider pattern.