Literary Histories: From the National to the Post-National Perspective
Literary Histories: From the National to the Post-National Perspective

Summary/Abstract: In the last decades of the twentieth century, it became increasingly clear that the writing of national literary histories in the past was not only one of the main vehicles for the formation and dissemination of national literary canons – as one of its most manifest consequences – but that this also had other functions. One of the answers to the question of the role of literary historiography in various European regions, be it “in West or East, in great or small cultures,”1 is obviously related to the fact that national literary histories, even when applying the facets of the comparative approach, served as an instrument of cultural nationalism, the overall ideological matrix that strongly determined European literary cultures, especially in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (cf. Leersen 2006). Facing the growing corpus of knowledge about the dynamics of national movements in Europe, many literary scholars insisted on a selfreflective, critical revaluation of the disciplinary past and on moving beyond the prevailing national(ist) orientation.

• Details
• Contents