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.

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.

Prodesse et delectare: The World of National Literatures and the World of Literature

2007 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 105-114
Author(s):  
HERBERT GRABES
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Classical Antiquity ◽  
Modern Times ◽  
Early Christian ◽  
Nation States ◽  
The World ◽  
Early Modern Times ◽  
Literary Histories ◽  
The 19Th Century

In a survey of the writing of literary histories in Europe, it is first pointed out that, in classical Antiquity and in the early Christian period from the fourth to the 12th centuries, such histories were transnational. After the Middle Ages, in which we find only catalogues of particular libraries, the rise of the European nation states in early modern times motivated the writing of national literary histories. With a concentration on the development in Britain, it is then shown that this development reached its peak in the 19th century, yet is still very strong today. In comparison, some examples of histories of European literature show that such transnational histories may also be informed primarily by the principle of prodesse in presenting either written culture or only what seems favourable for the understanding of national literary history; they may, however, also give more attention to literature and the imagination than to nations or culture and in that way foster delectare.

Literary Histories

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Seth Lerer
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
National Identity ◽  
Literary History ◽  
English Literature ◽  
Medieval Literature ◽  
Heinrich Heine ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
Literary Histories

Literary history has had a mixed history among the readers and the writers of the European traditions. For William Warburton, an eighteenth-century ecclesiast and critic, literary history was “the most agreeable subject in the world.” However, the early nineteenth-century German poet Heinrich Heine describes literary history as a “morgue where each seeks out the friend he most loved.” The complex connotation of literary history stems in part from the modern European understanding of the place of literature in the formation of national identity. This article examines how the history of medieval literature was received during the Renaissance. It first looks at the regulations of late Henrician reading, particularly the 1543 Act for the Advancement of True Religion, before focusing on Miles Hogarde and his poetry. It then discusses Richard Tottel’sMiscellanyin the context of English literature and its past, along with the poetry of love and loss that follows Tottel.

“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.

Invader Fictions: National Literature after Translation

2021 ◽  
pp. 204-208
Author(s):  
Rebecca C. Johnson
Keyword(s):  
Literary History ◽  
National Literature ◽  
Literary Canon ◽  
Reading Practices ◽  
National Conversation ◽  
History Of ◽  
Literary Histories ◽  
The Moment ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Modern Arabic

This chapter discusses how translation has affected literature. When we assess criticism of translated literature as part of the larger national conversation about the novel's purpose, the formation of the national literary canon comes to resemble a process of negotiating the foreignness that lies within it and not solely a process of casting the foreign out. In doing so, we ascribe historicity to the formation of national literary history itself, reformulating not just the position of Arabic in an imagined world literary canon but also the modern Arabic literary canon. Translation helped to shape a category of national literature that belonged in turn to a comparative process. Reading the history of the novel in translation forces us to recast national literary histories, to read the nation in translation. To locate foreign literature within national literary history at the moment of its formation is only possible if one uncovers the impact that translations had on “original” writing, discourses and institutions of modernity, and reading practices. Understanding that history challenges us to read novels' depiction of even national environments or characters in the comparative critical context in which they were written and to see “national realism” as a mode that was canonized through comparative and translational methodologies and as perhaps the culmination of a history of translation.

Eurafrasiachronologies

2016 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 17-28
Author(s):  
Alexander Beecroft
Keyword(s):  
Literary History ◽  
World Literature ◽  
Temporal Dimension ◽  
Old World ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
Literary Histories ◽  
Literature Theory

Critical accounts of World Literature theory often speak of the dangers of “Eurochronology,” of the tendency to impose the narrative (and teleology) of the history of European cultures upon other regions of the world. This temporal dimension of Eurocentrism is of course to be avoided assiduously. At the same time, a synthetic reading of the literary histories of many of the larger cultures of premodern Eurasia suggests that there may in fact be room for a “Eurasiachronology,” or indeed a “Eurafrasiachronology,” which would identify parallels and connections across the entire so-called “Old World,” and offer a chronological basis for thinking about world literary history in a comparative way.

From the National to a Transnational Paradigm. Writing Literary Histories Today

2013 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
pp. 241-251
Author(s):  
Svend Erik Larsen
Keyword(s):  
Literary History ◽  
Dominant Role ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Educational Institutions ◽  
Cultural Environment ◽  
Early 19Th Century ◽  
Cultural Intervention ◽  
Nation States ◽  
Literary Histories ◽  
Historical Trajectory

Modern literary history was born, together with the European nation states, in the early 19th century, encapsulating the emerging idea of literature as an articulation of the national mentality. In tandem with other national histories of art, politics, language, religion, culture and nature, literary history took part in the creation of a national identity, as did the literary texts it interpreted and canonized along a historical trajectory with the nation state as its teleological culmination. Literature and literary histories have always been a form of cultural intervention, not just texts. This is still the case, but in a modern transnational and globalized cultural environment, inherited historical paradigms are obsolete as scientific and didactic models. Nevertheless, they still play a dominant role in our educational institutions on all levels. This article discusses the resilience of the national paradigm, points to the institutional and conceptual obstacles for imposing alternative frameworks, but also exemplifies how new historiographical routes may be found.

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.

scholarly journals “thi all vores lærdom er dog mesten halfverk og stumpeviis”: en islandsk litteraturhistorie fra det 18. århundrede

2015 ◽  
Vol 12 ◽  
pp. 32-54
Author(s):  
Guðrún Ingólfsdóttir ◽  
Þórunn Sigurðardóttir
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Oral Tradition ◽  
Precise Information ◽  
Narrative Style ◽  
Interesting Part ◽  
History Of ◽  
Literary Histories ◽  
History Of Literature

Apparatus Literariam Islandicam: An Icelandic History of Literature from the Eighteenth CenturyThis article discusses an Icelandic literary history, compiled in the first half of the eighteenth century. The author was Jón Ólafsson from Grunnavík, who is best known for his work at the Arnamagneana collection in Copenhagen. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, European intellectuals began to write literary histories where literature was classified and defined in a novel manner, and which included precise information on various authors and their literary products. Jón Ólafsson’s history is a part of this effort. In his work, he deals with Icelandic poets and literati from the Middle Ages to his own time. The work demonstrates many of the main characteristics of literary histories of this period. The author borrows, for example, the methods of the Danish literary historian Albert Thura, but he is also influenced by Icelandic intellectuals such as Árni Magnússon, Þormóður Torfason and Páll Vídalín. Jón Ólafsson’s narrative style is, however, rather peculiar and his text is partly based on Icelandic oral tradition. An interesting part of Jón Ólafsson’s work is a chapter on female intellectuals and poets, but there he follows Thura’s example. Jón Ólafsson’s history has never been printed; neither has it been widely used by scholars. The authors of this article are preparing an edition of the work.

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.

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