Hippolyte Taine

Hippolyte Taine
Born
Hippolyte Adolphe Taine

(1828-04-21)21 April 1828
Vouziers, France
Died5 March 1893(1893-03-05) (aged 64)
Paris, France
NationalityFrench
Academic background
Alma materÉcole Normale Supérieure
Academic work
School or traditionConservatism
Naturalism
Positivism
Main interestsPhilosophy of art
History of France
Political philosophy
Signature

Hippolyte Adolphe Taine[a] (21 April 1828 – 5 March 1893) was a French historian, critic and philosopher. He was the chief theoretical influence on French naturalism, a major proponent of sociological positivism and one of the first practitioners of historicist criticism. Literary historicism as a critical movement has been said to originate with him.[2] Taine is also remembered for his attempts to provide a scientific account of literature.

Taine had a profound effect on French literature; Maurice Baring wrote in the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica that "the tone which pervades the works of Zola, Bourget and Maupassant can be immediately attributed to the influence we call Taine's."[3] Out of the trauma of 1871, Taine has been said by one scholar to have "forged the architectural structure of modern French right-wing historiography."[4]

  1. ^ "Taine". Dictionary.com Unabridged (Online). n.d.
  2. ^ Kelly, R. Gordon (1974). "Literature and the Historian". American Quarterly. 26 (2): 141–159. doi:10.2307/2712232. JSTOR 2712232.
  3. ^ Baring, Maurice (1911). "Taine, Hippolyte Adolphe" . In Chisholm, Hugh (ed.). Encyclopædia Britannica. Vol. 26 (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. pp. 360–363.
  4. ^ Susanna Barrows. Distorting Mirrors: Visions of the Crowd in Late Nineteenth-century France. New Haven: Yale U, 1981, p.83


Cite error: There are <ref group=lower-alpha> tags or {{efn}} templates on this page, but the references will not show without a {{reflist|group=lower-alpha}} template or {{notelist}} template (see the help page).


© MMXXIII Rich X Search. We shall prevail. All rights reserved. Rich X Search