Joseph Campbell
American mythologist, writer and lecturer (1904-1987)
Hippolyte Taine
French critic and historian
Hippolyte Adolphe Tainewas 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.
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About the Hippolyte Taine
Hippolyte Adolphe Tainewas 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. Taine is also remembered for his attempts to provide a scientific account of literature.
Taine had a profound effect on French literature; the 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica asserted that “the tone which pervades the works of Zola, Bourget and Maupassant can be immediately attributed to the influence we call Taine’s.” 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.”