The Symbolist Novel as Transnational Capital

Abstract

Pierre Bourdieu’s omission of the Symbolist novel from his analysis of the nineteenth-century French literary field can be attributed to its hybrid status as a sub-genre, encompassing texts that combine the symbolic capital of poetry with the potential economic capital of prose. The Symbolist novel exemplifies the type of transnational literary form described by Pascale Casanova, spreading quickly from France into Belgium and beyond. Taking André Gide’s first novel Les Cahiers d’André Walter [The Notebooks of André Walter] (1891) as an example, this essay proposes a further correlation between the concept of capital and the retention of the realist chronotope, arguing that the acquisition of capital depends not only on literary innovation but also on a link to a recognisable milieu or ‘real-world’ referent.