This article focuses on the conceptual tools and empirical examples found in Bourdieu's work and in research inspired by his field theory on literature in a worldwide perspective. To account for Bourdieu‘s theoretical research, I will situate it in the space of contemporary approaches to culture and underline how some developments of his theory have been stimulated by other frameworks. As the history of science shows, the dialogue between seemingly distant disciplinary areas is a key condition for progress in knowledge,and the formulation of new laws is generally a result of the effort to explain and reconcile different existing theories.

Anglophone scholars have contributed decisively to questioning the premisses and methods of literary history. Cultural studies, for instance, has promoted an anti-disciplinary way of thinking.This attitude risks slipping into eclecticism and impressionism, but it helps scholars to go beyond mental boundaries, which constitute an obstacle to cognitive progress. Labels such as ‘imagined community’, ‘cosmopolitanism’, ‘world literature’,‘postcolonial’ and ‘diaspora’ studies, or ‘transnationalism’, are responses to the need for a rejection of national perspectives and elaboration of new theoretical tools. They have also questioned the classical Marxist approach to society and culture: it is not enough to consider class position, since many other social differences—ethnicity, religion, politics, language, gender and so on—can play an important role.