An attempt at another history of Albanian literature

How to finally write a history that would belong to literature alone is a question often raised, especially by theorists of the second half of the 20th century. Dissatisfied with histories that, in their view, were also histories of society and ideology, they sought histories of literary forms, poetic structures, rhetorical systems, narrative techniques, etc. Such histories can certainly be written; they may also be approached from other aspects of literature and devoted, for example, to the forms of particular types of lyric poetry, the evolution of vocabulary and the main poetic figures, or the compositional and linguistic changes in narrative units. But to think that such histories are the only ones worthy of being called literary history is the same as treating literature merely as a weaving of words without any relation to other manifestations of human spiritual life, to the social feelings, thought, psychology and morality of a given time and place. As is known, all these aspects, literature among them, are clearly distinct from one another. Yet they cannot exist separately and on their own. Any attempt to view them as "pure", to divide them into sharp and exclusive boundaries, would contradict their nature, the nature that arises together with the universal and constant need of the individual to understand himself, the world and his place in it. From here arose — and since it cannot be undone, the fusion of literature with other manifestations of spiritual life. There was not and cannot be literature detached from man, therefore there was not and cannot be a history of it detached from time and space, conceived and explained separately from the history of society, its way of life, philosophy and psychology.