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Philip Ross Bullock, Stefano Evangelista, Gesa Stedman, Literary Communities in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries: Space, Place and Identity
Introduction, Forum for Modern Language Studies, Volume 53, Issue 3, July 2017, Pages 271–273, https://doi.org/10.1093/fmls/cqx016Close - Share Icon Share
Extract
Thisspecial issue ofForum for Modern Language Studies presents a series of articles by members of Writing 1900, an international network of literary scholars and cultural historians united by a common interest in comparative and transnational approaches to the writing of literary history in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.1 The members of the group take it as axiomatic that the decades between 1870 and 1930 constitute an era when an increase in cross-national literary traffic coincides with redefinitions of concepts of nationhood and political and economic power, both within Europe and on a global scale. The articles presented here investigate the shifting forms of literary culture in this age of transition from a number of cross-disciplinary and transnational perspectives. Their authors examine what happens to writers, works, ideas and artistic movements when they migrate across national and linguistic borders; they argue that national canons cannot be understood without reference to ideas of internationalism and cosmopolitanism; they explore how the meaning and value of literature are affected by patterns of cultural migration and exchange; and they foreground the particular geographical locations and cultural venues in which such exchange occurs. Approaching literature from a transnational perspective lays bare the ideological foundations and taxonomical fallacies that underlie ideas of ‘national’ literatures, which continue to shape the institutions of literary studies around the world.
