Towards a Multilingual Literary History: Lessons from a conflict environment

2019 ◽  
Vol 53 (06) ◽  
pp. 1816-1848
Author(s):  
ANNEMARI DE SILVA
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Institutional Changes ◽  
Future Directions ◽  
Naturally Occurring ◽  
History Of ◽  
Research Questions ◽  
Literary Histories ◽  
Multilingual Research ◽  
Policy Shifts

AbstractThis article presents methodologies towards a multilingual literary history of Sri Lanka in the twentieth century by examining multilingual encounters or cultures through places, people, and institutions. Massey's concept of plural space underpins the study and gives rise to various strategies to build a multilingual literary history. The guiding research questions are: How do we construct multilingual literary histories in the context of language-based conflict? What can conflict environments teach us about approaches to multilingual literary histories and spheres? In addition to discovering future directions for intra-national comparative literary studies and documenting multilingual cultures and sites, I also focus on the changing geography of multilingualism in the twentieth century. As ideological separation of language spheres turned to real-world segregation through a series of policy shifts and institutional changes, we see that the pursuit of multilingual research takes us from organic, or naturally occurring, sites of multilingualism to orchestrated, or purposefully created, sites. Orchestrated sites work to counterbalance the decreasing opportunity for organic multilingual encounters in the context of ethnolinguistic conflict.

“It Is Difficult to Disengage a Single Thread from the Living Web of a Nation’s Literature”

2018 ◽  
pp. 27-55
Author(s):  
Karin L. Hooks
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
American Literature ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
American Women Writers ◽  
Literary Politics ◽  
History Of ◽  
Literary Anthologies ◽  
Literary Histories

Arguing that the changing and more consolidated literary politics of the century’s turn helped make possible the canon wars of the twentieth century, this paper investigates the history of literary histories. Twentieth-century constructs of the field overlook an awareness that late-nineteenth century female literary historians envisioned in terms of a more inclusive and democratic American literary canon. Recovering a literary history largely erased by the turn into the twentieth century through a case study of Sarah Piatt’s career, this chapter focuses on two female literary historians of the 1890s: Ellen Mackay Hutchinson and Jeanette Gilder, whose literary anthologies include Piatt’s writing, unlike those of the following century. Hutchinson, who (with Edmund Clarence Stedman) edited a sizeable collection of American texts, the eleven-volume Library of American Literature, and Jeanette Gilder, co-editor of The Critic, who hosted a popular election to identify the top 125 American women writers of 1890, made arguments for the inclusion of Piatt in the canon that are worth revisiting in light of turn-of-the-century mechanisms for erasing the literary history of which Piatt was a part.

scholarly journals La historia de la historiografía literaria española. La "Historia Literaria" de Gerardo Diego

2011 ◽  
pp. 448 ◽  
Author(s):  
Antonio Martín Ezpeleta
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Literary Historiography ◽  
Modest Contribution ◽  
Literary Thought ◽  
History Of ◽  
Literary Histories ◽  
Gerardo Diego ◽  
Siglo Xx

Dentro de la reflexión sobre el pensamiento literario español del siglo XX, el estudio de las Historias literarias españolas ocupa un lugar muy relevante. De ahí que propongamos a continuación una reflexión sobre la importancia de la disciplina de la Historiografía literaria española e insistamos en la necesidad de activar la redacción de una Historia de la historiografía literaria española. En este caso, nuestra modesta contribución a esta deseable obra nos lleva a contextualizar y caracterizar brevemente la poco conocida Historia literaria de Gerardo Diego1. Inside the reflection about Spanish literary thought in the twentieth century, the analysis of the Spanish Literary Histories plays a very important role. For this reason, we suggest a reflection about the importance of the discipline of the Spanish Literary Historiography and we propose the necessity of activating the writing of a History of the Spanish Literary Historiography. In this case, our modest contribution to this desirable work takes us to introduce and to characterize Gerardo Diego’s not very well- known Literary History.

The Indulekha Moment and the Malayalam Literary Canon: On the Literary History of the Early Twentieth-century Novels in Kerala, South India

2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Sruthi Vinayan ◽  
◽  
Merin Simi Raj ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Literary History ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Literary Canon ◽  
Colonial Modernity ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
History Of ◽  
Literary Histories ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Point Of Departure

This article analyses the politics of the literary canon of the early twentieth century Malayalam novels with particular focus on the impact of the novel Indulekha (1889) in literary history. The inception of novel as a literary genre is widely regarded as a point of departure for Malayalam literature leading to the development of modern Malayalam, thereby shaping a distinct Malayali identity. Interestingly, the literary histories which established the legacy of Malayalam prose tend to trace a linear history of Malayalam novels which favoured the ‘Kerala Renaissance’ narrative, especially while discussing its initial phase. This calls for a perusal of the literary critical tradition in which the overarching presence of Indulekha has led to the eclipsing of several other works written during the turn of the twentieth-century, resulting in a skewed understanding of the evolution of the genre. This article would explicate in detail, on what gets compromised in canon formation when aesthetic criteria overshadow the extraliterary features. It also examines how the literary history of early Malayalam novels shaped the cultural memory of colonial modernity in Kerala.

Forum: Dagmar Herzog's Sexuality in Europe

2013 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 275-275
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
History Of Sexuality ◽  
Future Directions ◽  
University Of Vienna ◽  
History Of ◽  
Recent Trends ◽  
East And West ◽  
Twentieth Century Europe

This discussion of Dagmar Herzog's Sexuality in Europe (2011) continues our new series of book fora. Herzog's new overview of changing European sexual mores and behaviour offers a jumping-off point for our panellists to discuss recent trends and future directions in the history of sexuality in twentieth-century Europe, East and West. Jeffrey Weeks (London South Bank University), Franz Eder (University of Vienna), Daniel Healey (University of Reading) and Victoria Harris (University of Birmingham) give their responses, and Herzog replies.

For an Eco-Archive

2019 ◽  
pp. 29-68
Author(s):  
John Patrick Walsh
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Literary Representations ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Haitian Literature ◽  
Boat People ◽  
History Of ◽  
Selection Of

This chapter continues to build the conceptual and historical frame of the eco-archive. It argues that contemporary Haitian literature records the transformation of the environment and accumulates and inscribes overlapping temporalities of past and present, like an archive. The first part reviews a range of Caribbean and Haitian thought on the environment, broadly understood, and considers key moments of Haitian literary history of the twentieth century. Earlier forms and paths of migration and refuge, from the sugar migration up to the journeys of “boat people,” inform and historicize literary representations of the earthquake and its aftermath. The chapter then carries out close readings of a selection of René Philoctète’s poetry and his novel, Le peuple des terres mêlées, a text that depicts the “Parsley Massacre” of 1937. It draws out Philoctète’s eco-archival writing and contends that the novel foregrounds the environmental ethos of the border in opposition to Trujillo’s genocidal nationalism.

Corruption and Redemption: The Legend of Valluvar and Tamil Literary History

2000 ◽  
Vol 34 (2) ◽  
pp. 449-482 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stuart Blackburn
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Language Ideologies ◽  
Cultural Identities ◽  
Colonial India ◽  
Literary Historiography ◽  
The Past ◽  
History Of ◽  
Literary Histories ◽  
History Of Literature

This [the Valluvar legend] is one of the traditions which are so repugnant to inveterate popular prejudice that they appear too strange for fiction, and are probably founded on fact. (Robert Caldwell 1875:132).If we now recognize that literary history is more than a history of literature, it is perhaps less widely accepted that the writing of literary history is an important subject for literary historiography. Yet literary histories are a rich source for understanding local conceptions of both history and literature. More accessible than archaeology, more tangible than ethnology, literary histories are culturally constructed narratives in which the past is reimagined in the light of contemporary concerns. Certainly in nineteenth-century India, the focus of this essay, literary history was seized upon as evidence to be advanced in the major debates of the time; cultural identities, language ideologies, civilization hierarchies and nationalism were all asserted and challenged through literary histories in colonial India. Asserted and challenged by Europeans, as well as Indians.

Thoughts on Writing Literary History: The Case of the Sri Lankan Malays

PMLA ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 131 (5) ◽  
pp. 1444-1451
Author(s):  
Ronit Ricci
Keyword(s):  
Literary History ◽  
Religious Affiliation ◽  
Stable State ◽  
Sri Lankan ◽  
State Structure ◽  
Political Unity ◽  
Nation States ◽  
Artificial Boundaries ◽  
History Of ◽  
Literary Histories

Literary Histories Have All Too Often Been Written with the Borders of Nation-States in Mind, Projecting Back in Time a political unity and standard use of language that only gradually, and sometimes recently, emerged. This approach has been criticized and increasingly replaced by an acknowledgment that literary histories must consider many variables that do not neatly map onto the story of single, powerful, and supposedly unified political entities and that these histories' artificial boundaries of inquiry must expand to encompass the movement of people, ideas, and texts. Although potentially more representative of the plurality of particular societies or cultures, a literary history that does not depend on the illusion of a stable state structure and the state's prioritized language is challenging to write, especially when basic questions regarding the location, religious affiliation, and linguistic preferences of the community producing a literature loom large. I present some thoughts and questions on one such challenging example—writing a literary history of the Sri Lankan Malays—in the hope that these reflections will resonate with those exploring other places, languages, and periods as we critically engage with old and new ways of understanding the diverse nature and roles of literature.

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