Imagology

Imagology is a branch of comparative literature. More specifically, it is concerned with "the study of cross-national perceptions and images as expressed in literary discourse“. While it adopts a constructivist perspective on national stereotypes, it does emphasize that these stereotypes may have real social effects. It was developed in the 1950s with practitioners in France, the Netherlands, Belgium and Germany. It never gained much of a foothold in anglophone academia. This may be attributed to imagology's skewed relationship to Edward Said’s influential Orientalism, which is much better known in this context. National stereotypes were long seen as intrinsic properties of ethnic groups. Hippolyte Taine is a major representative of this positivist view. In his Histoire de la littérature anglaise (1863) he held that cultural artefacts are determined by three factors: moment, milieu and race. The voluntarist view of what it means to belong to a nation was expressed by Ernest Renan in his lecture "Qu'est-ce qu'une nation?" (What is a nation?) in 1882. Renan argues that citizens may choose to affiliate themselves to a particular nation. Leerssen terms this view proto-imagological, because national identity was still held to be an independently existing entity. Imagology as the study of literary representations of national stereotypes emerged from the French school of comparative literature. The scholars who founded the Revue de la littérature comparée in 1921 (Paul van Tieghem, Fernand Baldensperger, Paul Hazard) had an historical interest in literature and wanted to go beyond the study of national images as if they were historical facts. Marius-François Guyard dedicated a whole chapter to the subject, called "L’étranger tel qu’on le voit" in his book La Litterature comparée (1951). This chapter analyses novels that represent nations other than the author's own. As the title already suggests, Guyard did not assume that these images reflected national essences, but rather treated them as representations.