The origins of modern-era literary criticism in the Bohemian lands
cultural capital surrounding the criticized works, or there again denies it to them, thus introducing new differentiations into the emerging literary field, contrasting with older kinds of literary prestige. We can thus endeavour to further integrate them into the common model of the literary field as advocated by literary criticism. Although the literary field of this period was shaped by different kinds of cultural capital than those described by Pierre Bourdieu based on the example of modern literature, some features of his model have proved to be applicable here as well, as studies by Dominic Berlemann and Nobert Christian Wolf confirm. It emerges that ever since the beginning of the period under review the literary field has been characterized by a tension between the interest of the expanding audience capable of generating immediate economic capital and the prestige originally associated with the representational purposes of art, social needs, required moral values and the like.18 Criticism fed this tension, and as the hierarchy of genres and normative poetics passed down from antiquity gradually weakened, it sought new support for them. Hence while classicist theatre in the early 1770s defined itself in terms of “proper taste” against critically repudiated farces, some critics subsequently accumulated the exclusive cultural capital of sentimental drama, prose and bardic poetry through the metaphor of the “sensitive heart”, whereby an imaginary community of the “aesthetic public” was constructed, whose cultural capital was no longer based directly on the categories of morality and public utility (though at the same time it continued to clearly distance itself from purely entertaining and economically-based artistic output). If in the 1770s the conflict between the cultural capital accumulated by criticism and immediate profit (or “entertain ment”) particularly determined the debate over the theatre, from the 1780s onwards it was increasingly prose that articulated this tension. By the middle of the decade, an accusation of money-grubbing was a serious insult for a famous author like 18
For more details see the introduction to this book on p. 43ff.
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