Interest in the relationship between literature and society is hardly a new phenomenon. We still read and refer to the ancient Greeks in this regard. In The Republic, for example, Plato presages both Mme. de Staël's treatise of 1800, which was the first to discuss cross-national differences in literature, and later notions of literary reflection with his idea of imitation. What is new, however, is the relative legitimacy of the study of literature within the discipline of sociology. This is due both to the increasing interest in culture in sociology after years of marginalization (Calhoun 1989) and to the increasing influence of cultural studies on sociology and throughout the academy.
A broader interest in and acceptance of cultural sociology has meant that the types of research questions and methods common to sociological studies of literature are now more widely accepted within the field. Sociology has extended its methodological boundaries in response to both attacks on the dominance of positivism and the rising power of alternative stances suggested by postmodernism. At the same time, changes in the goals, and sometimes the methods, of studying literature sociologically have moved the area closer to what is still the mainstream of the discipline. Thus the sociology of literature has benefited from a twofold movement in which (1) sociology as a discipline has become more interested in and accepting of research questions pertaining to meaning (cf. Wuthnow 1987, however, for a particularly strong attack on meaning from within the culture camp) and employing qualitative methods; and (2) the sociology of literature has evolved in the direction of more mainstream sociological areas through the merging of quantitative with qualitative methods and of empirical with hermeneutic research questions.