Riletture teoriche III

Abstract

This article is a kind of deferred review of a comment made in the debates on the “reform” of the field of literary historiography, published in the Romanic Review from 1926 to 1929. As a lively international forum edited by Philippe Adrien Van Tieghem, Paul’s son – who was the author of the renowned 1903 “manual”, Littérature comparée –, it also compared the “new methodological tendencies” discussed by eminent scholars, such as Spingarn, Magendie, Mornet, and Paul Van Tieghem, among others. Moving on to more recent times, the year of Francesco De Sanctis’s bicentenary is an occasion to reopen a discussion – which occurs periodically – on the nature and function of an approach to literary studies that is widespread from the didactic point of view.