Poetics, rhetorics and critical study of literature

A major trend in literature studies during the past twenty-five years has consisted in a rising interest in the rhetorical tradition, an interest connected with a revival of the historic approach of literary phenomena. This new approach, free from the emphasis on national literature that distinctly marked the old methods of literary history, could find a foundation in the concept of literary field, coined by Pierre Bourdieu. The study of meta-discourse which, in modern european culture, circulates in treatises, dialogues and essays on Rhetoric and Poetic, provides priceless information to explain the birth and changes of the literary field.