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This book is the English version of the first part of a work devoted to the history of the idea of literature from the ancient world to the present, published in Romania between 1991 and 1994. This monumental project was formulated in a previous book devoted to the Hermeneutics of the Idea of Literature (Hermeneutica ideii de literatur_, 1987), itself a yet unmatched work on the status, essence, and structure of what Marino calls the idea of literature.The author considers the term "biography" to be methodologically appropriate for the historical tracing of the inner logic of the idea of literature, as well as of its organic and accomplished evolution. Nevertheless, Marino uses not merely an typological view of literature, but also a "historical variant of hermeneutics." His perspective is informed by two concepts of literature: the first is, properly speaking, a familiar pre-concept of literature that is apparent at every step of this work, while the second accommodates that pre-concept within Marino's own history of the idea of literature. At the center of this persuasive and overwhelmingly erudite two-fold investigation, there lies the author's confidence in the priority of the literal sense of a text.
Marino's typological-historical periodization of the biographical identity of literature, has, as its outcome, four groupings, to which correspond the four parts of the book: the Antiquity, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance and Humanism, and Classicism and the Baroque. During the Antiquity, writes Marino, a homogeneous conception of literature emerged, which was characteristic of both Greek and Latin cultures. As a key-value of the studia humanitatis, literature gained a central, privileged position at the expense of orality, a concept that was to inhabit main-trend developments in literary theory for a very long time. What Marino construes as a novel development during the Middle Ages is the slow emergence of a basic literary terminology. The Renaissance and Humanism are given particular consideration with respect to the emergence of the first explicit etymological and lexicographical definitions of literature, as realized through dictionaries and lexicons. An important consequence is the progressive secularization of literature, as exemplified by the rise of the notorious "Republic of letters." The period is credited by Marino with an array of attempts to distinguish between poetry and literature, while the marginalization of 'literature' compared with 'poetry,' becomes more noticeable during the classical and baroque seventeenth century, when the cultural meaning of literature begins to be devalued, to the extent to which the definition of literature is ossified, and taken over by academic discourse.
The second part of the vast project Marino has initiated, an English version of which we are waiting for, covers the last three centuries. We appreciated its results in a systematically settled form in the 1994 Italian translation of the above mentioned companion theoretical work on the hermeneutics of the idea of literature (Teoria della letteratura, Bologna, Il Mulino, 1994). Adrian Marino's Biography of the Idea of Literature is an original work that investigates Western poetics from a widely comparative standpoint, indeed, a fundamental text for students of intercultural literary poetics.
Franca Sinopoli
Università "La Sapienza" (Rome)