Main description:
Continuing the work undertaken in Vol. 1 of the History of the Literary Cultures of East-Central Europe, Vol. 2 considers various topographic sites-multicultural cities, border areas, cross-cultural corridors, multiethnic regions-that cut across national boundaries, rendering them permeable to the flow of hybrid cultural messages. By focusing on the literary cultures of specific geographical locations, this volume intends to put into practice a new type of comparative study. Traditional comparative literary studies establish transnational comparisons and contrasts, but thereby reconfirm, however inadvertently, the very national borders they play down. This volume inverts the expansive momentum of comparative studies towards ever-broader regional, European, and world literary histories. While the theater of this volume is still the literary culture of East-Central Europe, the contributors focus on pinpointed local traditions and geographic nodal points. Their histories of Riga, Plovdiv, Timioara or Budapest, of Transylvania or the Danube corridor - to take a few examples - reveal how each of these sites was during the last two-hundred years a home for a variety of foreign or ethnic literary traditions next to the one now dominant within the national borders. By foregrounding such non-national or hybrid traditions, this volume pleads for a diversification and pluralization of local and national histories. A genuine comparatist revival of literary history should involve the recognition that 'treading on native grounds' means actually treading on grounds cultivated by diverse people.
Table of contents:
- Editors' Preface
- Acknowledgements
- Note on Documentation and Translation
- Table of contents, Volume I
- In preparation
- Introduction
- CITIES AS SITES OF HYBRID LITERARY IDENTITY AND MULTICULTURAL PRODUCTION
- Introduction
- Vilnius/Wilno/Vilna
- The Tartu/Tallinn Dialectic in Estonian Letters and Culture
- Monuments and the Literary Culture of Riga
- Czernowitz/Cernuti/Chernovtsy/Chernivtsi/Czerniowce
- 6;The City that Is No More, the City that Will Stand Forever'
- On the Borders of Mighty Empires
- Literary Production in Marginocentric Cultural Node
- Plovdiv
- The Torn Soul of a City
- Topographies of Literary Culture in Budapest
- Prague
- Cities in Ashkenaz
- 2. REGIONAL SITES OF CULTURAL HYBRIDIZATION
- Introduction
- The Literary Cultures of the Danubian Corridor
- Mapping the Danubian Literary Mosaic
- Upstream and Downstream the Danube
- The Intercultural Corridor of the 6;Other' Danube
- B. Regions as Cultural Interfaces
- Transylvania's Literary Cultures
- The Hybrid Soil of the Balkans
- Up and Down in Croatian Literary Geography
- Ashkenaz or the Jewish Cultural Presence in Central and Eastern Europe
- Representing Transnational (Real or Imaginary) Regional Spaces
- The Return of Pannonia as Imaginary Topos and Space of Homelessness
- Jan Lam and Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach
- Macedonia in Bulgarian Literature
- Transformations of Imagined Landscapes
- 3. THE LITERARY RECONSTRUCTION OF EAST-CENTRAL EUROPE'S IMAGINED COMMUNITIES: NATIVE TO DIASPORIC
- Introduction
- Kafka, vejk, and the Butcher's Wife, or Postcommunism/ Postcolonialism and Central Europe
- Tsarigrad/Istanbul/Constantinople and the Spatial Construction of Bulgarian National Identity in the Nineteenth Century
- Paradoxical Renaissance Abroad
- Paris as a Constitutive East-Central European Topos
- A Tragic One-Way Ticket to Universality
- Works Cited
- Index of East-Central European Names: Vol. 2
- List of Contributors
Continuing the work undertaken in Vol. 1 of the History of the Literary Cultures of East-Central Europe, Vol. 2 considers various topographic sites-multicultural cities, border areas, cross-cultural corridors, multiethnic regions-that cut across national boundaries, rendering them permeable to the flow of hybrid cultural messages. By focusing on the literary cultures of specific geographical locations, this volume intends to put into practice a new type of comparative study. Traditional comparative literary studies establish transnational comparisons and contrasts, but thereby reconfirm, however inadvertently, the very national borders they play down. This volume inverts the expansive momentum of comparative studies towards ever-broader regional, European, and world literary histories. While the theater of this volume is still the literary culture of East-Central Europe, the contributors focus on pinpointed local traditions and geographic nodal points. Their histories of Riga, Plovdiv, Timioara or Budapest, of Transylvania or the Danube corridor - to take a few examples - reveal how each of these sites was during the last two-hundred years a home for a variety of foreign or ethnic literary traditions next to the one now dominant within the national borders. By foregrounding such non-national or hybrid traditions, this volume pleads for a diversification and pluralization of local and national histories. A genuine comparatist revival of literary history should involve the recognition that 'treading on native grounds' means actually treading on grounds cultivated by diverse people.
Table of contents:
- Editors' Preface
- Acknowledgements
- Note on Documentation and Translation
- Table of contents, Volume I
- In preparation
- Introduction
- CITIES AS SITES OF HYBRID LITERARY IDENTITY AND MULTICULTURAL PRODUCTION
- Introduction
- Vilnius/Wilno/Vilna
- The Tartu/Tallinn Dialectic in Estonian Letters and Culture
- Monuments and the Literary Culture of Riga
- Czernowitz/Cernuti/Chernovtsy/Chernivtsi/Czerniowce
- 6;The City that Is No More, the City that Will Stand Forever'
- On the Borders of Mighty Empires
- Literary Production in Marginocentric Cultural Node
- Plovdiv
- The Torn Soul of a City
- Topographies of Literary Culture in Budapest
- Prague
- Cities in Ashkenaz
- 2. REGIONAL SITES OF CULTURAL HYBRIDIZATION
- Introduction
- The Literary Cultures of the Danubian Corridor
- Mapping the Danubian Literary Mosaic
- Upstream and Downstream the Danube
- The Intercultural Corridor of the 6;Other' Danube
- B. Regions as Cultural Interfaces
- Transylvania's Literary Cultures
- The Hybrid Soil of the Balkans
- Up and Down in Croatian Literary Geography
- Ashkenaz or the Jewish Cultural Presence in Central and Eastern Europe
- Representing Transnational (Real or Imaginary) Regional Spaces
- The Return of Pannonia as Imaginary Topos and Space of Homelessness
- Jan Lam and Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach
- Macedonia in Bulgarian Literature
- Transformations of Imagined Landscapes
- 3. THE LITERARY RECONSTRUCTION OF EAST-CENTRAL EUROPE'S IMAGINED COMMUNITIES: NATIVE TO DIASPORIC
- Introduction
- Kafka, vejk, and the Butcher's Wife, or Postcommunism/ Postcolonialism and Central Europe
- Tsarigrad/Istanbul/Constantinople and the Spatial Construction of Bulgarian National Identity in the Nineteenth Century
- Paradoxical Renaissance Abroad
- Paris as a Constitutive East-Central European Topos
- A Tragic One-Way Ticket to Universality
- Works Cited
- Index of East-Central European Names: Vol. 2
- List of Contributors