ESOTERICISM AND SECRECY IN ALTERNATIVE LITERARY HISTORIES
ESOTERICISM AND SECRECY IN ALTERNATIVE LITERARY HISTORIES

Summary/Abstract: Following the end of WW2, a literary trend called “scholarly esotericism” (“ésotérisme savant”) emerged in the writings of the French historians of culture and literature, designating the tendency to identify and decrypt, in a systematic and objective approach, the sub-textual, esoteric and secret references in the literary texts. Two important landmarks of this sub-domain of the literary history are Robert Amadou and Robert Kanters’ Anthologie littéraire de l’occultisme and Xavier Accart’s Guénon ou le renversement des clartés, dedicated to Guénon’s influence on the French history of literature and of ideas from 1920 to 1970, that is well beyond the Master’s death in 1951. The final aim of these specific intellectual approaches is to construct an alternative, so-called secret literary history, already translated into the Romanian literary studies by two intriguing challenges to the mainstream aesthetic literary history, proposed by Radu Cernătescu (Literatura luciferică [The Luciferian Literature]) and Cornel Ungureanu (O istorie secretă a literaturii române [A Secret History of the Romanian Literature]). The paper intends to analyse the methodology and inner life of these specific literary histories, by relating them to the classical, official histories of literature, as well as to the main patterns of the national and international collective identity.

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