scholarly journals Practices of Colonization in Regional Literary Histories

2020 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 28-46
Author(s):  
Ferenc Vincze
Keyword(s):  
20Th Century ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Eastern European ◽  
History Writing ◽  
Spatial Practices ◽  
Literary Context ◽  
Literary Histories ◽  
Ethnic Literatures ◽  
Minority Literatures ◽  
European Regional

Abstract The discourses on 20th century Eastern European regional literatures are predominantly determined by the use of terminology and interrelationships of national and ethnic literatures, which originated in social and state organizational embeddedness. Besides, the majority–minority relation is significantly present in the discourse on these literatures, with this relation representing a – sometimes implicit, sometimes explicit – approach of colonization. If ethnic (or minority) literatures are not only examined as opposed to national (or majority) literatures, it might occur that ethnic literatures themselves often resorted to practices of colonization when describing the literary context. This paper aims at examining the processes of literary history writing of German and Hungarian literatures from Romania, and by looking at them from a transnational perspective, identifying the in-between space where the mutually oppressive spatial practices are eliminated.

scholarly journals Writing of Contemporary National Literary History in Finland and Hungary – a Comparative Approach

2020 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 76-86
Author(s):  
Renáta Balázs
Keyword(s):  
Literary History ◽  
Comparative Approach ◽  
Minority Literature ◽  
History Writing ◽  
Migrant Literature ◽  
Hungarian Literature ◽  
Current State ◽  
Literary Theories ◽  
Shaping Process ◽  
Literary Histories

The discourse on the writing of national literary histories is still in progress due to the postcolonial and transnational turn. In the frameworks of these literary theories, the meaning of national has been reshaped by focusing on the territorial, ethnic and language borders of contemporary literature. The theory of literary history writing had to face the issues of defining the phenomenon of migrant, emigrant and minority literature. A new Hungarian book titled Kik vagytok ti? Kötelező magyar irodalom – Újraélesztő könyv (Who Are You? Compulsory Hungarian Literature – A Revitalizing Book) (2019), also evoked a debate concerning the theoretical issues of Hungarian literary history writing. In this debate, not only the author and his critics confronted but also the critics with one another. By analysing the critiques and the author’s answers, the fundamental questions of the national literary history writing can be identified. With this metadiscursive approach, I aim to present the current state of Hungarian national literary history writing focusing on the minority and emigrant literature. I will compare the questions generated by the migrant literature in Finland to the issues emerging in the debate about Hungarian literature. This comparative and metadiscursive approach helps to understand the shaping process of the national literature in the dynamics of canonizations and marginalisation.

The “Twilight of the Poets” in the Age of Realism

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Renker
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Print Culture ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Prose Fiction ◽  
Literary Movement ◽  
The Core ◽  
Multiple Voices ◽  
Institutional Status ◽  
Literary Histories ◽  
Historical Origins

American literary histories of the post-Civil War period typically treat “poetry” and “realism” as oppositional phenomena. The core narrative holds that “realism,” the major literary “movement” of the era, developed apace in prose fiction, while poetry, stuck in a hopelessly idealist late-romantic mode, languished and stagnated in a genteel “twilight of the poets.” This chapter excavates the historical origins of the twilight narrative in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. It shows how this narrative emerged as a function of a particular idealist ideology of poetry that circulated widely in authoritative print-culture sites. The chapter demonstrates that the twilight narrative was only one strain in a complex cultural debate about poetry, a debate that entailed multiple voices and positions that would later fall out of literary history when the twilight narrative achieved institutional status as fact.

Literary Histories

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eva-Marie Kröller
Keyword(s):  
New Zealand ◽  
Collective Identity ◽  
Literary History ◽  
English Language ◽  
South Pacific ◽  
The South ◽  
Cultural Elite ◽  
Historical Methodology ◽  
Literary Histories

This chapter discusses national literary histories in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the South Pacific and summarises the book's main findings regarding the construction and revision of narratives of national identity since 1950. In colonial and postcolonial cultures, literary history is often based on a paradox that says much about their evolving sense of collective identity, but perhaps even more about the strains within it. The chapter considers the complications typical of postcolonial literary history by focusing on the conflict between collective celebration and its refutation. It examines three issues relating to the histories of English-language fiction in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the South Pacific: problems of chronology and beginnings, with a special emphasis on Indigenous peoples; the role of the cultural elite and the history wars in the Australian context; and the influence of postcolonial networks on historical methodology.

Historical Romance

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ina Ferris
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Literary Form ◽  
Private Life ◽  
Distinct Form ◽  
Literary Field ◽  
History Writing ◽  
Historical Romance ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth

This chapter looks at historical romance. Late eighteenth-century historiography began to expand its purview to unofficial spheres of social, cultural, and private life typically cultivated by informal genres such as memoirs, biographies, and novels. The ‘matter’ of history was being increasingly redefined, and this had two key effects that bear on the question of historical romance. First, the ‘reframing’ of the historical field generated a marked reciprocity among the different historical genres in the literary field, as they borrowed material and tactics from one another; second, it led to a splintering albeit not displacement of ‘general’ history, as new branches of history writing took shape, notably that of literary history as a distinct form of history. Hence romance now denoted not only the realm of ‘fancy’ but a superseded literary form of renewed interest in the rethinking of the national past.

The Subaltern Critique of Dominant Historiography and a Case for Retrieving a Historiography of Dalit Literary Traditions in India

2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 7-15
Author(s):  
Vandana
Keyword(s):  
Literary History ◽  
Historical Analysis ◽  
History Writing ◽  
Literary Traditions ◽  
Literary Historiography ◽  
History Of ◽  
Longue Duree ◽  
Longue Durée ◽  
And Shifts ◽  
The Third World

In order to retrieve literary history in India, teleology operates on three levels: ancient, medieval and modern. As per the longue duree approach to the study of history, history is not an event or an object, but like the concept of time, is a configuration and a process. The history of the longue duree gives priority to long-term monumental historic patterns, moments and shifts in society, that is, the slow-paced structural processes which tend to have strong historical consequences. Similarly, languages and literatures, too, marked by historical catastrophes, undergo a process of sedimentation. For this reason, instead of a single literary history of South Asia, Sheldon Pollock proposes the concept of ‘literary cultures’ which allows room for ‘historical individuation’ of each culture rather than homogenising them merely for the sake of historical analysis. The basic questions that I have tried to look into through this study include: Why is it problematic to retrieve literary history in India? Why is it essential to have an alternative literary historiography of Dalit literature? How does Dalit subalternity differ from colonial subalternity? How the Dalit voice is disintegrated from within because of the prevalence of graded inequality? What constitutes the politics of history writing and canon formation in the third world countries like India where retrieving subaltern literary trends remain a problematic discourse?

scholarly journals The reconfiguration of the European Archive in contemporary German-Jewish migrant-literature

2017 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
pp. 38-54
Author(s):  
Jessica Ortner
Keyword(s):  
European Archive ◽  
Eastern European ◽  
History Writing ◽  
Migrant Literature ◽  
Holocaust Memory ◽  
Political Concern ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
Mass Shooting ◽  
History Of ◽  
German Jewish

A considerable number of Eastern European migrant authors of Jewish origin are currently lifting Holocaust memory to a new level. Writing in German about events taking place in remote areas of the world, they expand the German framework of memory from a national to a transnational one. By partaking in reconsidering what is ‘vital for a shared remembering’ of Europe, this branch of writing reflects the European Union’s political concern for integrating the memories of the socialistic regimes in European history writing without relativising the Holocaust. In Vielleicht Esther, Katja Petrowskaja consults various national and private archives in order to recount the history of the mass shooting of over 30,000 Ukrainian Jews at Babij Jar – a canyon near Kiev. Thus, she ‘carries’ a marginalised event of the Holocaust into the German framework of memory and uncovers the layers of amnesia that have not only concealed the event amongst the Soviet public but also distorted and for ever made inaccessible her family’s past.

scholarly journals Eduards Volters and the Institutionalization of Book Science in the Early 20th Century

Knygotyra ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 73 ◽  
pp. 230-263
Author(s):  
Aušra Navickienė
Keyword(s):  
Higher Education ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
Higher Education Institutions ◽  
Social Aspects ◽  
European Region ◽  
Early 20Th Century ◽  
Russian Society ◽  
Eastern European ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of

Eduardas Volteris (1856‒1941) is one of the first book theorists in the Eastern European region and developer of the most important memory and higher education institutions of independent Lithuania. This article analyzes the early 20th c. phenomenon of the institutionalization of book science. It attempts to answer the question of how Eduardas Volteris contributed to establishing the very first Eastern European societies of book researchers, to consolidating the sciences of bibliography, bibliology and book science within the realm of academia, and to professionalising of book scholarship. The sources for examination of the social aspects of book science are: documents belonging to the Russian Society of Bibliology, which was active in St. Petersburg in 1899–1931, materials in scholarly serial publications on book science of the early 20th c., theoretical papers published by E. Volteris, and the results of the historical studies on the history of European book science.

A Literary Chestnut: Dryden's “Cousin Swift”

PMLA ◽  
1952 ◽  
Vol 67 (7) ◽  
pp. 1024-1034
Author(s):  
Maurice Johnson
Keyword(s):  
Literary History ◽  
Family Relationship ◽  
John Dryden ◽  
Samuel Johnson ◽  
Single Sentence ◽  
The Family ◽  
Literary Histories ◽  
The One ◽  
Fictional Truth

It is hard to think of another brief quotation in English literary history so felicitous as the one attributed to John Dryden: “Cousin Swift, you will never be a poet.” Here in a single sentence the family relationship between two great writers is established; Dryden is placed as an incisive and prophetic judge of literary worth; Swift is dramatically provided with cause for turning away from his disappointing “Pindarics” to the remarkable prose connected with his name; his somewhat over-stressed “life-long” hatred for Dryden is given its impetus. And if Dryden may be considered representative of the end of the seventeenth century and Swift of the beginning of the eighteenth century in English letters, a whole new age of prose is conveniently suggested in the eight words Dryden is supposed to have uttered. Whether or not he really did utter exactly those words—and I am quite certain that he did not—makes no great difference now: it is too late to add qualifying phrases to all the biographies, critical essays, monographs, and literary histories in which Dryden's pronouncement may be read. It has assumed a quality of fictional truth that renders it more convincing and more “true” than demonstrably authentic pronouncements could be. It is like some of the equally quotable adjudications of Samuel Johnson, chestnuts from the same tree, which also seem too suspiciously apropos to have been casually voiced, though they may have been recorded verbatim. Indeed, the eight words under consideration sound much less like Dryden than like Dr. Johnson himself; but that is a matter I will refer to later on in this paper.

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