Literary Capitals In The Long Nineteenth Century

This book develops our understanding of the global literary field in the long nineteenth century by discussing nine different places outside the established metropoles. It shows how different economic, geographical and political factors combined to give each place its own distinctive literary culture and symbolic capital. Taking a geocritical approach, the book shows how its different case studies can be seen as ‘literary capitals’ in terms of their role within the wider nation, region or empire. The volume is divided into three parts. Part One discusses Kolkata, Hong Kong and Buenos Aires. Part Two considers ‘semi-peripheral’ European cities: Pest-Buda (Budapest), Helsinki and Dublin. Part Three focuses on cities within Italy: Trieste, Florence and Rome. Drawing on a wide range of literary texts and different genres, the book reads the nineteenth-century literary field as a constellation where different connections can be plotted across various points on the map at different times.

Building upon recent German Studies research addressing the industrialization of printing, the expansion of publication venues, new publication formats, and readership, Market Strategies maps a networked literary field in which the production, promotion, and reception of literature from the Enlightenment to World War II emerges as a collaborative enterprise driven by the interests of actors and institutions. These essays demonstrate how a network of authors, editors, and publishers devised mutually beneficial and, at times, conflicting strategies for achieving success on the rapidly evolving nineteenth-century German literary market. In particular, the contributors consider how these actors shaped a nineteenth-century literary market, which included the Jewish press, highbrow and lowbrow genres, and modernist publications. They explore the tensions felt as markets expanded and restrictions were imposed, which yielded resilient new publication strategies, fostered criticism, and led to formal innovations. The volume thus serves as major contribution to interdisciplinary research in nineteenth-century German literary, media, and cultural studies.

This book rethinks the notion of nineteenth-century capital(s) from geographical, economic and symbolic perspectives, proposing an alternative mapping of the field by focusing on different loci and sources of capital. Walter Benjamin’s essay ‘Paris, the Capital of the Nineteenth Century’ identifies the French capital as the epitome of modernity. His consideration of how literature enters the market as a commodity is developed by Pierre Bourdieu in The Rules of Art, which discusses the late nineteenth-century French literary field in terms of both economic and symbolic capital. This spatio-temporal approach to culture also underpins Pascale Casanova’s The World Republic of Letters, which posits Paris as the capital of the transnational literary field and Greenwich Meridian of literature. This volume brings together essays by specialists on Bayreuth, Brussels, Constantinople, Coppet, Marseilles, Melbourne, Munich and St Petersburg, as well as reflections on local-colour literature, the Symbolist novel and the strategies behind literary translation. Offering a series of innovative perspectives on nineteenth-century capital and cultural output, this study will be invaluable for all upper-levels students and scholars of modern European literature, culture and society.

The long nineteenth century (1789-1914) has been described as an axial age in the history of both bees and literature. It was the period in which the ecological and agronomic values that are still attributed to bees by modern industrial society were first established, and it was the period in which one bee species (the European honeybee) completed its dispersal to every habitable continent on Earth. At the same time, literature – which would enable, represent and in some cases repress or disavow this radical transformation of bees’ fortunes – was undergoing its own set of transformations. Bees, Science, and Sex in the Literature of the Long Nineteenth Century navigates the various developments that occurred in the scientific study of bees and in beekeeping during this period of remarkable change, focusing on the bees themselves, those with whom they lived, and how old and new ideas about bees found expression in an ever-diversifying range of literary media. Ranging across literary forms and genres, the studies in this volume show the ubiquity of bees in nineteenth-century culture, demonstrate the queer specificity of writing about and with bees, and foreground new avenues for research into an animal profoundly implicated in the political, economic, ecological, emotional and aesthetic conditions of the modern world.

Paris has long been the archetypal literary city. This identification reached its peak in the nineteenth century when Paris could reasonably fulfill Walter Benjamin′s claimn for it: that it was the ′capital of the nineteenth century′. In this expansive and entertaining book Christopher Prendergast explores the way writers and others have identified with Paris and been identified with it. He moves between social and cultural history, literature, painting and photography and presents an exemplary series of readings (of Balzac, Hugo, Baudelaire, Michelet, Flaubert, Zola, Valles, Laforgue). Throughout Paris is both the city represented and the very problem of representation.

"In Literary Executions, John Barton analyzes nineteenth-century representations of, responses to, and arguments for and against the death penalty in the United States. The author creates a generative dialogue between artistic relics and legal history. Novels, short stories, poems, and creative nonfiction engage with legislative reports, trial transcripts, legal documents, newspaper and journal articles, treatises, and popular books (like The Record of Crimes and The Gallows, the Prison, and the Poor House), all of which participated in the debate over capital punishment. Barton focuses on several canonical figures--James Fenimore Cooper, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Lydia Maria Child, Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, and Theodore Dreiser--and offers new readings of their work in light of the death penalty controversy. Barton also gives close attention to a host of then-popular-but-now-forgotten writers--particularly John Neal, Slidell MacKenzie, William Gilmore Simms, Sylvester Judd, and George Lippard--whose work helped shape or was in turn shaped by the influential anti-gallows movement. As illustrated in the book's epigraph by Samuel Johnson -- "Depend upon it Sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully" -- Barton argues that the high stakes of capital punishment dramatize the confrontation between the citizen-subject and sovereign authority. In bringing together the social and the aesthetic, Barton traces the emergence of the modern State's administration of lawful death. The book is intended primarily for literary scholars, but cultural and legal historians will also find value in it, as will anyone interested in the intersections among law, culture, and the humanities"--

Travelling Ideas in the Long Nineteenth Century is about how ideas travel on the waves of cultural transfer. The volume focuses in particular on the exchange of ideas, knowledge and culture between the Nordic countries and continental Europe. It includes reflections on travelling and transmitting ideas through various forms, and takes a step further in scrutinising how new theories in literary, cultural and historical studies, as well as new methods, are influencing research in the field of cultural transfer and transmission. In the first part of the volume, the authors examine the export and import of ideas through literature in translation, travel letters, international education strategies and the establishment of artists' colonies. Attention is paid to how writers, artists and cultural transmitters used their cross-border mobility in transferring ideas and how they were connected to each other in new contact zones. The second part is dedicated to new research approaches, such as the use of digital instruments, and research on the strategies and politics behind translated literature. Here, translation bibliographies and the bibliographical data of national libraries, which today are often accessible in digital form, come under scrutiny. These sources are valuable objects of study in the mining of translation flows.