Literary Trendology

Trendology is a field of cultural studies devoted to the typology and periodisation of trends in fashion, aesthetic taste, economic cycles, literature and arts. Owing to its wide range of applications and specific nature peculiar to various cultural areas, it is indispensable to draw a clear line of division between literary, artistic, aesthetic, philosophical and economical trendology. By literary trendology in sensu stricto we mean a subdiscipline of literary theory enquiring into literary styles, currents, directions and movements. As its concept might concern also longer eras of literary development such as formations, ages, periods, stages and stadia, its scope of interest should be straitened to short currents not exceeding one decennium.

Approaches to Literary Periodisation

Trends are often interchanged with popular fads, crazes, vogues and fashions as they often share similar aesthetic charge. But they appear as a serious literary phenomenon only if they define a broader collective mainstream of social attitudes and priorities reinforced by a new young ingoing generation of authors. Their quintessence lies in a drift of cultural values advanced by a vanguard of young artists who react sensitively to the interplay of social supply and demand and feel that the extant ruling artistic direction has to be pulled down and counterbalanced by new aesthetic remedies. Trends express intuitive and spontaneous collective mass feelings and as such they cannot be reduced to an intentional premeditated individual product. They are frequently aroused as a response to the turmoil of economic depressions, surf on a subsequent boom and soon expire with its collapse. A plausible hypothesis assumes that waves of literary taste roughly coincide with economic cycles and their duration approximately covers the interval between two subsequent crises.

Literary trends are regularly given utmost heed in current-oriented history but, as a rule, they remain neglected as irrelevant in person-oriented approaches. They were scrutinized intensively by the currents of literary sociology in the mid-1920s and their profound study experienced a new resurrection in the early 1970s. The interwar sociologism in trend-oriented literary history flourished abundantly in Franceand the U.S. The post-war wave of current-oriented or directional literary historiography in the 1970s became prominent especially in Germany and Great Britain.

The contemporary theory of art discusses art trends, art styles and art movements without delimiting a special subdiscipline covering their scope and their analysis. Their classification is very chaotic and lacks systematic taxonomy. Only few taxonomic labels in Kunsthistorie and literary history can rely on program-forming manifestos, most of them lapse away without notice. Their suitable designation mostly appears ex post in later criticism and essayistic writing. This is why historians overcome the lack of fitting terms for various literary groupings by coining ad hoc phrases. They often avoid systemic periodisation by entering chapters such as The Elizabethan Age or The Reign of Louis XIV. Another aid is found in revolutionary turning-points demarking long epochs. Such periphrastic headings of chapters provide only ‘extrinsic periodisation’ that coordinates literary trends with accidental external phenomena such as persons, authors, rulers, dynasties and historical events. A more adequate taxonomy of trends is provided by ‘intrinsic periodisation’ that attempts to dissect undulatory growth curves of autonomous economic, cultural and literary development into discrete phases. It is based on the oscillatory motion that displays properties of recursion, periodical recurrence and spiral cyclicity. Since it remains out of reach and ultra vires, historians resort to the following variety of possible tentative terms and headings:

• sovereigns: The Elizabethan Age, règne de Louis XIV,
• dynasties: The Tudor Period, The House of Plantagenet,
• classics: The Age of Chaucer, The Age of Dryden,
• interpersonal: De Pétrarque à Chaucer (1304-1400),
• movements: Romantismes triomphants, Romantismes réfléchis,
• groups: Pre-Raphaelites, Les Lumières ‘enlighteners’, Neue Sachlichkeit,
• relative boundaries: Vormärz, Nachkriegsliteratur, Gegenwartsliteratur,
• turning-points (Epochenumbrüche): Epochenumbruch 18./19. Jh.,
• regimes: Restaurationszeit, Weimarer Republik,
• centuries: Jahrhundertende, Jahrhundertwende,
• event-oriented periodisation: the Munich Treaty, The Outbreak of Wars,
• directional periodisation according to
• trends: Realism, Naturalism,
• class-oriented social periodisation: the Courtoisie, Bourgeois Satire,
• stadial or epochal periodisation: The Epic of Feudalism,
• crises and periods of stagnation: the Great Depression,
• seven-year to nine-year booms/conjunctures,
• cyclic periodication according to the course of economic cycles.

Historionomy, Stadiology, Periodology, Trendology

The German academic tradition prides itself on profound thoroughness and exhaustive denomination for disciplinary sections of theoretical research. It consistently draws a difference between literary historiography based on a descriptive focus and literary historionomy laying stress on historical laws. The first scholar to introduce the latter concept was Friedrich Stromer von Reichenbach leading a school of ardent followers. They had only few uncertain predecessors among Althegelianer adhering to Hegel’s philosophy of history and some prophets of French positivism. What united them was the acceptable presupposition of lawful growth in the historical and literary process. Its lawful character is now doubted only exceptionally by idealistic historiography regarding literary artworks as intentional creations of isolated authors resembling the omnipotent creator.

The second urgent goal requires that the project of literary trendology should demarcate its field in contradistinction with larger epochs of historical development. Literary trends seldom last longer than ten years and remain embedded in long-lasting periods of several decades or centuries. A convenient term for longer epochs exhibiting regular recursive periodicity was invented by Herbert Cysarz, who coined the concept of periodology. A minuteous classification of aesthetic periods was developed by the Czech literary historian Pavel Bělíček in his two encyclopaedias of poetics and literary theory. He delimited periodology as a branch of literary study analysing the recurrent periodicity of half-century cycles. Their epochs presumably correspond to Kondratieff’s half-centennial periods of market growth and fall into 6 to 9 cycles.

A different treatment was given to longer epochs studied by stadiology. This field of historical research was defined as an auxilliary subdiscipline dealing with four-century formations corresponding to one definite mode of production (Produktionsweise). Such epochs are partitioned into four shorter intervals falling into four one-century subformations and eight miniformations lasting half a century. Their sequences form undulatory waves of cultural prosperity described in ancient myths as bright and dark ages. Stadiology differs from periodology by focusing on non-recurrent processes of cultural growth in formations and stages that follow a linear intensive ascendent growth. According to Immanuel Wallerstein’s World-System Theory its stages are repeated only by extensive progress of civilisation from its ancient centres to the barbarian periphery. On the other hand, periodology concentrates on circular development pursuing a spiral curve segmented into similar sequences of decennial trends. Despite a great deal of correlations between literary, cultural and business cycles there exists much haphazard accidence owing to overwhelming interferences operating between different geographic populations and zones.

A convincing proof of cultural cyclicity may be provided by Table 1 comparing sequences of literary and cultural trends in Britain from the Tudor times up to the present days. A half-centennial Kondratieff wave appears to form a sequence of six to seven short Juglar business cycles lasting from seven to nine years. It starts with an after-war period of classicism beaming with blissful feelings of idyllic prosperity and end with the years of decadent spiritualism expressing the tragic hopeless moods of a wartime slaughter. It represents is a continual wavy process escalating social and economic contradictions from their utopian dissolution by peaceful welfare to the last stage of furious competition in the final period of overpopulation, military warfare, plagues and poverty.

Comparable samples of regular sequences of literary styles can be fitted together by listing the following revivals of classicism designated by abbreviated formulas. Instead of Popean or Drydenian classicism we enumerate their chronological intervals as the following classicism-like trends: Skelton 1508-1516, Howard - Wyatt 1557-1564, Bacon 1614-1623, Dryden 1660-1664, Pope 1708-1714, Johnson 1751-1756, Shelley 1807-1812, Tennyson 1853-1858, Wells 1897-1903, Snow 1947-1952. This chronological series exhibits one conspicuous trait, most revivals occur within a temporal interval lasting about 40-60 years. Their common denominator is that they come after unquiet periods of wars and economic depressions. Their emotional and aesthetic charge is never wholly equal to earlier predecessors, they differ a lot from one another in the aspect of cultural brightness. This is scaled from the degree of shining ‘bright classicism’ in the beginning of golden ages of prosperity to the shadowy ‘matt classicism’ at the outset of dark silver ages of exacerbated religiosity. Bright classicism starts periods of Protestantism and progressive technocratic utopias, while matt classicism opens ages of religious fanaticism and destructive wars.

A similar typological chain can be brought together also by listing revivals of dark spiritualism. The history of English literature offers a comparable series of English hermetic and metaphysical literature outliving in the later progeny of Graveyard Poets, Romanticism and Decadence. This series begins with the printer William Caxton, whose first books mirrored the woes of Tudor wars, and the Protestant polemicist John Knox, whose martyrologies bemoaned the traumata of the Trident epoch. Further followers were found in the dark tragedies of William Shakespeare and Giles Fletcher and in John Donne’s metaphysical poetry. In the mid-17th century they found faithful heirs in Thomas Vaughan and at its end in Sir William Temple. The last links in the chain were represented by Edward Young’s cemetery poems, William Blake, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Gerard Manley Hopkins, William Butler Yeats, Evelyn Waugh and Dylan Thomas. Save for Blake these poets lent their names to dramatic ascents of religious reaction. Such designations do not stand for individual writings but only denote collective trends by means of their spiritual leaders. They lived in times of radical conservative spiritualisation and theocratic tendencies in state administration. Table 2 shows that their series may be classed as a chain of trends illustrating the category of spiritualism, mysticism and hermetic esoterism. Its items may be identified according to their chief representatives and the duration of their taste: Caxton 1481-1490, Knox 1540-1546, Donne 1601-1609, Vaughan 1646-1655, D’Urfey 1692-1700, Gray 1742-1751, Blake 1789-1796, Rossetti 1847-1853, Yeats 1889-1897, Vaugh 1938-1945. The sign ‘Ys’ denotes intervals of time in years elapsed between two revivals.

Table 1. The periodicity of spiritualism and classicism in England

Tragic spiritualism	Decadence	Ys	Idyllic classicism	Florescence	Ys
William Caxton	1481-1490	51	John Skelton	1508-1516	58
John Knox	1546-1555	56	Howard, Wyatt	1557-1565	49
Shakespeare, Donne	1601-1609	53	Francis Bacon	1614-1623	57
Thomas Vaughan	1646-1655	57	John Dryden	1660-1664	46
Thomas d’Urfey	1692-1700	48	Alexander Pope	1708-1714	48
Thomas Gray	1742-1751	51	Samuel Johnson	1751-1756	43
William Blake	1789-1796	47	Percy B. Shelley	1807-1812	56
Dante G. Rossetti	1847-1853	58	Alfred Tennyson	1853-1858	46
William B. Yeats	1889-1897	46	Herbert G. Wells	1897-1903	46
Evelyn Vaugh	1939-1946	50	C. P. Snow	1947-1953	51

The left column of Table 1 lists decadent trends of tragic spiritualism (Romanticism, Symbolism) represented by metaphysical poets such as Donne, Vaughan, Blake, Rossetti or Yeats. Its right column enumerates accessions of classicist poetics whose poets had a fancy for idylls and eclogues. Their names stand for supraindividual currents that have periodically repeated in half-century intervals since Renaissance up to now. Each row defines two opposite currents and each column defines one general trend. In spite of deep-rooted literary traditions all currents on the left can bear the uniform designation of ‘spiritualism’ and imply a genre syndrome of tragics. Currents on the right side fill the generalised concept of classicism and fall into the overall category of classics.

The Taxonomy of Literary Trends

Most literary historians acknowledge the vital import of literary movements for historical development but do not pose the question of their regular periodicity. Natural sciences have made considerable progress by Mendeleyev’s discovery of the periodical table of elements and the same goal awaits also humanities. A simple proof of evenly-segmented periodicity in sequences of styles and currents may be given by arranging timelines of repeated returns of the same literary trend. Cultural and economic cycles last about half a century and their most characteristic phases are the initial period of centralism and the final stage of decay and war conflicts. Political centralism engenders aesthetic classicism while administrative pluralism usually lapses into fits of metaphysical spiritualism.

Years omitted in the survey were covered by sequences of other currents that may be called ‘declensions’ because they bend the curve into a circular or spiral form. Most semi-centennial cycles tend to arrange a characteristic sequence of classicism (or academicism), elegism (or sentimentalism or civilism), formalism (or l’art-pour-l’artism), realism (or humourism), traditionalism (or historicism), spiritualism (or symbolism, allegorism) and heroism (or monumentalism), although in the long run there is a lot of variation in their rendering. Elegism flourished in the Renascence amidst the urban patriciat while sentimentalism was popular among the 18th century bourgeoisie. Heroism thrives during protracted wars while monumentalism is budding when ceasefire promises truce and peace.

Trendology should supply also a convenient taxonomy of trends and their characteristic genre syndromes. Denotations of individual currents can do with labels ending in the suffix -ism (formalism, realism) common in current usage. Terms for the taxon of a general trend, however, call for their simple comprehensible derivations with the suffix -ics. They imply the general philosophical principles of poetics summed up under labels such as ‘classics’, ‘elegics’ or ‘tragics’:

• classics: classicism, normativism, idyllism, utopianism,
• elegics: elegism, sensualism, sentimentalism, intimism, civilism, quotidianism,
• formalistics: formalism, artism, artificialism, abstractivism, panlogism, logicism, geometrism, l’art-pour-l’artism
• realistics: realism, demotism, humourism, humoralism, satirism,
• archaics: traditionalism, archaism, personalism, ritualism, idolatrism, historicism,
• tragics: spiritualism, symbolism, allegorism, esoterism, hermetism, mysticism, theosophism,
• heroics: heroism, monumentalism, militantism, antiquarism.

Periodic sequences of trends may be likened to the circular spectrum of colours: particular trends have firm initial and final boundaries but variations of their generalised taxa may segment the cyclic curve into intervals of different length and position. There exist regular or predominant sequences of trends but their course may be interrupted by repetitions, insertions, contractions or accelerations. In Table 2 there are five gaps between spiritualism and classicism filled by a transitional intermediary trend. Periods of dark spiritualism normally neighbour on trends of classicism because they indicate the final stage of war destruction and its end signals the coming of peace and reconstruction. Some pairs of currents are, however, separated by a gap lasting one decade because there has occurred an intermediary mixed hybrid trend of militant heroism.

Table 2. Parallelism of rightist elites and leftist masses in booms

Politics	Conjuncture	Right	Left
1 left-wing progressivism	edificatory constructivist	paternalism classicism	utopianism communism
2 secularism left centrism	industrial small-scale production	libertinism epicureism hedonism	sentimentalism intimism liberalism
3 right centrism	technological engineering	conformism clericalism	technocratism formalism
4 democratism popular leftism	consumptive popularising mass-oriented	consumerism societalism nihilism	democratism socialism realism
5 secular rightism regressivism	inflative privatising monetarist corporative	traditionalism conservatism corporativism nationalism	ecologism environmentalism antifascism humanrightism
6 clerical rightism	speculative expansive	fundamentalism clerofascism	anarchism syndicalism

An Integral Classification of Cultural Trends

Sequences of currents are neither obligatory nor predetermined, they display high statistic frequency but their alternation varies on account of numerous omissions, contractions, repetitions, retardations and anticipations. It is vital to realise that trends are not fixed entities but exhibit the nature of mathematical vectors. We cannot compare the qualitative and ideational substance in American and Chinese economy, culture and literature but it is possible to prove that after 1945 most post-war countries in the world adopted similar economical, political and cultural tendencies. These tendencies looked as incomparable and incommensurable phenomena because every country commenced at a different starting-point and shaped their expression out of different religious traditions and cultural substance. All trends follow a similar trajectory of a circular, spiral or helical curve that reinforces growth in periodic rotations although they take course in higher and higher evolutionary coordinates.

Bělíček’s description of literary trends counted with their fluctuations but gave them an analytic treatment with the aid of Bachtin’s theory of chronotopes. He decomposed every trend into a diverse series of various manifestations expressing diverse aspects of characteristic place, ideal time, personal type, musical sound and philosophical ideas. Every trend is united by pertinence to one of stable typological paradigm uniting several typical genres and ontological aspects. There cultural patterns can be divided into a temporal -chrony, topological -topy, characterological -typy, measurable -metry, onomatopoeic phony, philosophical -sophy or religious -doxy. For instance, elementary dimensional units peculiar to classicism are characterised by the prefix eu (good, ideal): euchrony (idyllic time), eutopy (blissful sunny island, rural idyll), eumetry (golden cut and the aesthetic ideal of symmetry), euphony (auditive harmony), eutypy (ideal courtier, magistrate or sovereign), eucracy (ideal administrative regime), eusophy (physical materialism), eudoxy (pantheism and illuminated protestantism).

Table 3. An integrated taxonomy of trends in social ideologies

Reign	economy	science	religion	space	time	type	measure	emotion	sound
eucracy	eunomy	eusophy	eudoxy	eutopy	euchrony	eutypy	eumetry	eupathy	euphony
esthocracy	esthonomy	esthosophy	esthodoxy	esthotopy	esthochrony	esthotypy	esthometry	esthopathy	esthophony
technocracy	technonomy	technosophy	technodoxy	technotopy	technochrony	technotypy	technometry	technopathy	technophony
democracy	demonomy	demosophy	demodoxy	demotopy	demochrony	demotypy	demometry	demopathy	demophony
retrocracy	retronomy	retrosophy	retrodoxy	retrotopy	retrochrony	retrotypy	retrometry	retropathy	retrophony
theocracy	theonomy	theosophy	theodoxy	theotopy	theochrony	theotypy	theometry	theopathy	theophony

When classicism expires, people mitigate tough centralism to softer liberalism became infatuated about the Epicurean ideal of the beauty, bliss and lust suggesting the prefix ‘estho-’. After a few years they are obsessed by rapid advances of technology and invocate the deities of industrial technique by a new aesthetic religion calling for the prefix ‘techno-’. Another situation crops up if a great depression signals that the business market reaches the ceiling of maximum growth and it is necessary to reduce industrial capacities. This is a signal for the market and whole society to shift the engine into reverse gear. Such an economic state prescribes hatred to progress and technology heads for a collective return to the ideal of the patriarchal past. It enhances parallel conservative trends suggesting the prefix retro- ‘backward’: retrochrony (traditionalism and escape to the illustrious past), retrotopy (ruralism and cult of cult of rural roots), retrotypy (personality cult and celebrations to great figures of national tradition), retrosophy (philosophical personalism as a foretoken of hagiographical saint worship) and retrodoxy (cults of martyrs and saints).

The output of such attempts at a systematic taxonomy of political, artistic and literary trends can be illustrated by chronological timelines of English literature since the 16th century given in the paper English Literature in Trends . Its periodisation was elaborated by methods of statistic trendometry described in the material The trendometric timeline of English literature. They confirm the regular alternation of trends due to the Vilfredo Pareto’s circulation of elites (circolazione delle elite) and admit also a large number of irregular trends disrupting the usual order. Their results predefine a convenient periodisation for chapters of compendia of English literary history but may serve also as a starting point for historical surveys of English artistic and philosophical development. Such explorations may lead to a systematic calibration of categories applied in most humanities and bring a similar import to their studies as Mendeleev’s periodic tables of chemical elements for modern natural sciences.

References

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