Bourdieu and the Sociology of Literature

Although the sociology of literature is the latest branch of the general sociology, there has been a world-wide aspire to introduce and study this field and its various divisions such as sociology of literary tastes, sociology of literary creation, sociology of novel, sociology of books and sociology of reading. In Iran this area of study is recent and the numbers of researches carried out in it are limited.Pierre Bourdieu (1930-2002), French sociologist and critics, is one of the greatest figures in the sociology of literature whose point of views seem to be less known in Iran, as compared to the ideas of other literary sociologists such as Lukacs, Goldmann, Gramsci, and Bakhtin. Bourdieu believes that the people's taste for literature and art is influenced by their various social backgrounds including family relations, educational systems, literary and artistic institutions, and social stratifications. This article tends to provide the reader with a general introduction on the sociology of literature. At first the main concepts of Bourdieu's views such as "field", "habitus", and "literary taste" are discussed; then the ways through which these concepts are related to one another will be explained on the basis of Bourdieu's approach to sociology of literature.