The other valuable plus point developed is theoretical. It is the concept of a socio-literary generation, obtained following a corrective carried out on the age groups arbitrarily arrived at according to the company the agents kept. This concept responds to a difficulty specific to social studies, the most reliable categorisation of agents according to their age. It is important to integrate age groups in that they allow a notion of temporality to be introduced into a synchronic periodisation. To take the example of this book, its subject stretches from 1918 to 1940, or 22 years. Taking into account the agents’ differences in age this allows nuances to be introduced, as well as social and aesthetic evolutions during the years studied, and thus avoids taking the period for a united and homogenous block over time, which would be a monumental error. In effect, these evolutions sketched out by age groups in particular enables us to note that, as was stressed earlier, the evolution from the profile of a jurist to that of the petit bourgeois, an evolution which went hand in hand with another shift in aesthetic positioning in relation to Paris, and already noted by Jean-Marie Klinkenberg: that of a centrifugal Belgian literature, transformed by the romantic idea of literature as the child of a nation, of a people, who affirm their independence, towards a centripetal literature, modelled on Paris and oscillating around the nerve centre of francophone literary production.

But how to define these generations of writers? How should they be classified? Instinctively it is often tempting to, by default, establish age groups according to date of birth and thus create decades in which the agents studied are placed. It is thus supposed that the members of the same age group participated in the same events at the same age, which is vital. A writer who was aged 5 in 1914, for example, does not experience a disastrous event such as the First World War in the same way as a writer who was 20 during the same era, and who was likely to be called up to the front.

Nonetheless, this biographical categorisation is purely arbitrary and greatly undermined by certain limitations. For example, certain precocious writers would have tended to mingle with other older writers and in this respect participated in a fashion or aesthetic advances specific to a generation which is not theirs. On the other hand, more experienced people seduced by the enthusiasm and innovation of an inspired youth could keep the company of an age group which is not theirs either and be influenced by an aesthetic which is a priori not theirs as well. To take account of this type of profile whilst taking into account at the same time a relative similarity in terms of investing in external events specific to age groups, Björn-Olav Dozo has thus started from a periodisation by decades in order to divide agents into age groups in order to subsequently establish a corrective enabling him to place agents in an older or a younger age group depending on the company they kept.

These two examples, one with a qualitative deepening of the understanding of the backgrounds of the animators of literary life, flushed out by a statistical approach, and the other the attribution on a case by case basis of a generational situation arbitrarily and quantitatively defined beforehand, perfectly illustrate the researcher’s wishes and methodology. The quantitative, if it is in the present case the fruit of immense and rigorous work, is envisaged as a tool which teaches nothing to those who are not capable of observing the supplied data more intensely. But once one manages to go beyond the rigidity of figures, to take them up in a reality which is at once larger and more precise, they enable a reality up until now sometimes unsuspected to be revealed and systematised. As much for the study of a particular case which is the socio-literary profile of the francophone Belgian writer of the interwar period as for the methodological benefits it provides, the book is about to become a genuine reference work for anybody interested in a sociological field or sub-field in a given place and period, which goes widely beyond the single problematic of the sociology of literature.