Why did Hippolyte Taine’s literary method emphasize biography and history?

Hippolyte Taine’s literary method emphasized biography and history because he sought to apply the scientific method to the study of the humanities. Influenced by positivism, Taine believed that any work of art or literature was a product of specific, discoverable causal forces.21

By examining the facts of an author's life and personality, Taine aimed to identify the faculté maîtresse—the predominant characteristic that determined the writer's work. He argued that this individual psychology could be further explained by three primary conditioning factors:2

• Race: The inherited temperament or disposition of a people.12
• Milieu: The social, political, and geographical environment that modifies that disposition.12
• Moment: The momentum of past and present cultural traditions.12

Ultimately, Taine was less interested in literature as an aesthetic end in itself than in using it as a document to understand historical causation and human psychology. His approach treated the writer as a subject for scientific inquiry, viewing literature as a means to reveal the physiological and psychological determinants of human behavior.2