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For decades, it has been a well-established trope to speak of the sociology of literature as an incoherent, dispersed, or even nonexistent (a “nonfield”) cluster of research activities. The reasons are historical and a bit paradoxical. In the nineteenth century, emerging sociology bore common features with literary fiction, as they both strove to provide guidance in the world of growing social complexity. When sociology gradually earned more legitimacy by mimicking natural sciences, the culture of belles-lettres was left with the position of a research object. However, because literature had never lost its symbolic status, sociologists in the twentieth century often sought alliances with humanities to tackle dimensions traditionally approached by philosophy, linguistics, and literary scholarship. Countless inquiries of the literature-and-society relationship, of which only a fraction was explicitly labeled the sociology of literature, eventually created an optical illusion of the discipline’s absence.