The Passion of Charles Péguy: Literature, Modernity, and the Crisis of Historicism

In many ways, the development of twentieth-century literary criticism and theory can be seen as a prolonged struggle against the pervading influence of nineteenth-century positivist historicism. Anglo-American New Criticism and later French Post-structuralism and Deconstruction are the best-known instances of this conflict. Less widely known, but no less important to contemporary literary studies, are Charles Péguy's earlier debates with French academic historicism in the years leading up to World War One. First examined by Antoine Compagnon in his ground-breaking work La Troisième République des lettres in 1983, it is a period in French literary and cultural history that remains, some thirty years later, largely untreated in English. This book thus addresses an important, albeit relatively unexplored, moment in the development of twentieth-century literary history and theory. By way of Péguy's foundational polemics with modernity and his role in the related 'crisis of historicism', we gain a better understanding of the critical basis from which similar anti-positivist and anti-historicist critiques were later enacted on both sides of the Atlantic. In situating Péguy's passions and polemics within the larger cultural and historical context, Glenn H. Roe invites us to reconsider and re-evaluate Péguy's place among twentieth-century literary figures. Beyond its literary-critical aspects, The Passion of Charles Péguy provides a general view of early twentieth-century debates related to the role of literary studies in modern society, the reform of the French educational system, and the formation of literary history as an academic discipline in both France and abroad.

Table of Contents:
Introduction 1: The Metaphysics of Modern History 2: The End of the Affair 3: Chronicler of Heroes and Saints 4: Against Lanson 5: A Philosophy of Hope Conclusion Bibliography

About the Author :
Glenn H. Roe is a Lecturer in Literary Studies and Digital Humanities at the Australian National University. He received his Ph.D. with honours in French literature from the University of Chicago before taking up a Mellon Fellowship in Digital Humanities at the University of Oxford. He has published and presented widely on modern French literary, intellectual, and book history, the Encyclopédie of Diderot and d'Alembert, and new computational approaches and digital methods for humanities scholarship.

Review :
After [Peguy] ... had produced his art, his life was essentially complete. To save his beloved France, he volunteered for the First World War and was killed at the age of 41 while rallying his troups during preliminary skirmishes for the Battle of the Marne. His real and protracted battle, however, was already finished, and it is Roe's achievement to have restored a sense of how intense, bitter, and costly this battle was. Written in polished English, Roes study serves as a careful and detailed account focusing largely on Péguys polemical works. Indeed, it provides just about the best exposition of this work in English yet written.