Sainte-Beuve et la critique romantique

The figure of Sainte-Beuve remains attached to a critical way which uses the literary work to make the portrait of the man or the woman who produced it. This form of criticism was born at the end of the eighteenth century, when Rousseau’s thesis was imposed in the literary field that all work refers to the context of its production, and particularly to its author. Classical cri-ticism, on the contrary, did not shed any light on the origins of the works but was content to exclude from the literary field works which did not cor-respond to the rules of rhetoric. Sainte-Beuve is in the nineteenth century the most eminent representative of the new criticism which postulates that every author makes himself known in his works. Today, this conception of literature is still ours, and the reproaches that can be made against Sainte-Beuve’s analyzes illustrate the limits and the aporias of our « modernity ».