"Philosophy of Literature"

t. Filosofia della letteratura; Fr. Philosophie de la littérature; Germ. Philosophie der Literatur; Span. Filosofía de la literatura. Even if the relationship between philosophy and literature seems to be as old as philosophy itself, the definition of philosophy of literature as a field of investigation, which focuses on specific problems and presents a relative methodological unity, is a recent phenomenon. As much as its theoretical antecedents can be found at least in the work of Benedetto Croce and Roman Ingarden (Chen 2017), or, even earlier, in Aristotle and in Hegel (Smadja 2009), except for sporadic appearances (Gallagher 1967), the term “philosophy of literature” only started spreading in the 1980s in the English-language philosophical debate and in the analytical tradition (Danto 1984) based on the application of language analysis to the fictional discourse (Searle 1975). Therefore, this entry will only report the trends, in the contemporary debate, of what openly qualifies as philosophy of literature. In this regard, philosophy of literature aims at reflecting in a systematic way on the status of literary work.