Anxious Influencers – Reading the Nineteenth Century in 2021

ABSTRACT Looking at the conditions of academic work in nineteenth-century French literature as well as the foundations of the discipline of literary studies, this article argues that the study of literature in an historical context allows for a flexibility in conceptual frameworks. Readings attentive to the anxiety of overinterpreting the past, creating the possibility for us to compare the differences between historical ways of ordering perception, that is to say how new concepts emerge from textual forms. Works written around the events of July 1830, Hugo’s Notre-Dame de Paris, Stendhal’s Le Rouge et le Noir, and Sand’s Indiana serve as a case study.