Worlding a Peripheral Literature 9789813294042, 9813294043

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Worlding a Peripheral Literature Marko Juvan

Canon and World Literature Series Editor Zhang Longxi City University of Hong Kong Kowloon, Hong Kong

World literature is indeed the most exciting new phenomenon in literary studies today. It is on the rise as the economic, political, and demographic relationships and balances are changing rapidly in a globalized world. A new concept of world literature is responding to such changes and is advocating a more inclusive and truly global conceptualization of canonical literature in the world’s different literary and cultural traditions. With a number of anthologies, monographs, companions, and handbooks already published and available, there is a real need to have a book series that convey to interested readers what the new concept of world literature is or should be. To put it clearly, world literature is not and cannot be the simple conglomeration of all the literary works written in the world, but only the very best works from the world’s different literatures, particularly literary traditions that have not been well studied beyond their native environment. That is to say, world literature still needs to establish its canon by including great works of literature not just from the major traditions of Western Europe, but also literary traditions in other parts of the world as well as the “minor” or insufficiently studied literatures in Europe and North America. More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/15725

Marko Juvan

Worlding a Peripheral Literature

Marko Juvan Research Center of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts Ljubljana, Slovenia

Canon and World Literature ISBN 978-981-32-9404-2    ISBN 978-981-32-9405-9 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-32-9405-9 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2019 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: PjrStatues / Alamy Stock Photo Title: Monument to France Prešeren (national poet, 1800-1849) in Prešernov trg (Prešeren Square), Ljubljana, Slovenia. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. The registered company address is: 152 Beach Road, #21-­01/04 Gateway East, Singapore 189721, Singapore

Acknowledgments

In this book, which is partly based on the ideas of my Slovenian monograph Prešernovska struktura in svetovni literarni sistem (The “Prešernian Structure” and the Literary World System, Ljubljana: LUD Literatura, 2012), I have rewritten, adapted, and updated more or less extensive segments of the texts in English that have been previously published under the following titles: “World Literature(s) and Peripheries.” In: Marko Juvan, Literary Studies in Reconstruction: An Introduction to Literature. Frankfurt/M. etc.: P. Lang, 2011. Pp. 73–86. © Peter Lang. “Introduction to World Literatures from the Nineteenth to the Twenty-­ First Century.” CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 15.5 (December 2013). Web. © Purdue University Press. “Worlding Literatures between Dialogue and Hegemony.” CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 15.5 (December 2013). Web. © Purdue University Press. “The Crisis of Late Capitalism and the Renaissance of World Literature.” In: Irma Ratiani, ed. National Literatures and the Process of Cultural Globalization. Tbilisi: Shota Rustaveli Institute of Georgian literature, 2014. Pp. 21–33. “Peripheries and the World System of Literature: A Slovenian Perspective.” In: Amaury Dehoux, ed. Centres et périphéries de la littérature mondiale. Saint-Denis: Connaissances et Savoirs, 2018. Pp. 91–118. © ed. Connaissances et Savoirs. “Perspectivizing World Literature.” Literaturna misal 61.1 (2018): 3–19. v

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

“Literary Self-Referentiality and the Formation of the National Literary Canon: The Topoi of Parnassus and Elysium in the Slovene Poetry of the 18th and 19th Centuries.” Transl. Marta Pirnat  – Greenberg. Neohelicon: Acta Comparationis Litterarum Universarum 31.1 (2004): 113–123. © Springer Nature. “Romanticism and National Poets on the Margins of Europe: Prešeren and Hallgrímsson.” In: Sonja Stojmenska-Elzeser et  al., eds. Literary Dislocations. Skopje: Institute of Macedonian Literature, 2012. Pp. 592–600. “World Literature in Carniola: Transfer of Romantic Cosmopolitanism and the Making of National Literature.” Transl. Jean McCollister. In: Jüri Talvet, ed. World Literature and National Literatures (Interlitteraria, 17). Tartu: Tartu University Press, 2012. Pp. 27–49. “In the Background of the ‘Alphabet War’: Slovenian-Czech Interliterary Relations and World Literature.” Transl. Jean McCollister. In: Liina Lukas, ed. Taming World Literature (Interlitteraria, 20, 1). Tartu: University of Tartu Press, 2015. Pp. 148–158. “The Nation between the Epic and the Novel: France Prešeren’s the Baptism on the Savica as a Compromise ‘World Text’.” Transl. Mojca Šorli and Neville Hall. Canadian Review of Comparative Literature 42.4 (2015): 382–395. © CRCL/RCLC. “The Aesthetics and Politics of Belonging: National Poets between ‘Vernacularism’ and ‘Cosmopolitanism’.” Arcadia: Zeitschrift fur vergleichende Literaturwissenschaft 52.1 (2017): 10–28. © de Gruyter. I would like to thank Shota Rustaveli Institute of Georgian literature, Institute of Macedonian Literature, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, Peter Lang, Purdue University Press, de Gruyter, Connaissances et Savoirs, Springer Nature, University of Tartu Press, and Canadian Review of Comparative Literature (CRCL/RCLC) for their permissions to use my texts published in their editions. I am most grateful to Professor Zhang Longxi, the editor of the series Canon and World Literature, for his care and confidence. I would also like to express my gratitude to Ms. Sara Crowley-Vigneau, the responsible editor of my book, and Ms. Connie Li, the editorial assistant, for all their support during the preparation of this book.

Contents

1 Introduction  1 2 The Canonicity of World Literature and National Poets 35 3 Perspectivizing World Literature (in Translation) 61 4 The Birth of National Literature from the Spirit of the Classical Canon 81 5 World Literature in Carniola141 6 A Compromise “World Text”199 7 Worlding the National Poet in the World-­System of Translation219 Works Cited257 Index277

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction

In his private notes, written during the fascist repression of the Slovenian minority in Italy, the Slovenian writer Vladimir Bartol (1903–1967), who was compelled to leave his native Trieste and flee across the Italian border to Ljubljana in his youth, boldly considered his novel Alamut (1938) a potential global hit (see Košuta 1988: 554, 1991). In fact, the text gives the impression that it was conceived to become an international bestseller, in precisely the style that Rebecca Walkowitz defines as “born translated” (Walkowitz 2015: 3–4). It uses an easily translatable style, draws on Orientalist historical knowledge, sets the story in exotic eleventh-century Iran, displays erudition, clings to successful genre patterns, creates suspense, and addresses big issues of totalitarianism, dictatorship, terrorism, and conspiracy theory. In the very year of its first publication in Slovenian, Bartol tried to offer his novel to the global cultural market. He submitted a screenplay about Alamut Castle directly to the Hollywood film metropolis, but MGM studios rejected it. Fifty years later, Alamut nevertheless began to gain worldwide popularity. It has been translated into almost twenty languages, including English (Bartol 2004). In 2007, the plot and idea of Bartol’s Orientalist novel even inspired the popular series of video games Assassin’s Creed, and the Slovenian newspaper Delo reported on 22 February 2013, that the French film director and scriptwriter Guillaume Martinez was enthusiastically planning to screen Alamut and make an international hit out of it. Alamut’s success story remains unfinished; it still has not been adapted for film. As a matter of fact, Bartol’s entrance © The Author(s) 2019 M. Juvan, Worlding a Peripheral Literature, Canon and World Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-32-9405-9_1

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into global literary traffic occurred due to a favorable, although contingent, historical situation and thanks to a global metropolis. In 1988, when Alamut was first translated into French, its story and setting coincided with the topicality of Islamic fundamentalism after Khomeini’s revolution in Iran. Needless to say, the global obsession with Islamic radicalism, terrorism, and suicide bombers continues to hold sway after 9/11, Al Qaeda, and ISIS—whatever poses a permanent threat to Western-style democracies and the world-system is suitable for the topicality of Bartol’s novel. The case of Alamut shows that peripheral authors, even those subjected to repression of their native language (their primary instrument), may have a sense of the world literary space and a desire to take a position in this space. Moreover, when writing intertextually and drawing on transcultural resources, peripheral authors from small literatures and expressing themselves in minor languages appear to have a better chance at establishing themselves internationally, however troublesome and delayed their entrance to the world literary traffic might be. However, such cases are rare, and even rarer is international canonization of peripheral authors. Probably hardly any player of the game Assassin’s Creed has ever heard of Bartol, and it would be difficult to find a globally prominent literary critic or scholar that would mention Bartol among the top fifty world writers of the twentieth century. Alamut is quite popular across the world, but its author is a far cry from being an international celebrity. This paradox leads to the problem of the author function and the canon. The power of the author function seems to vary according to the historically changeable position of a particular writer in the world-systems of languages and literatures. How and to what degree do authors partake in the world literary space if they come from a peripheral (minor, weaker, dependent) literary system? Compared to authors of major literatures, what are their chances of becoming recognized, world-famous, awarded, and included in the international literary canon? While everybody knows Assassin’s Creed without having the slightest idea of Bartol as a peripheral writer, everybody is familiar with the name of Goethe without knowing how he sought to overcome the peripherality of German letters vis-à-vis the European West. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, the internationally recognized promoter of the idea of world literature (his quotes recur as a topos in every narrative on the history of the concept), originally referred to the term Weltliteratur in order to lend a touch of cosmopolitan universality to his writing and establish his position as a “classical national author” (Goethe 1963: 239–244) in the German lands

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and Europe alike. In other words, the idea of world literature was instrumental not only in rectifying Goethe’s intercultural intertextuality and his social networking in the international respublica litterarum but also in his self-canonizing efforts to become a German classic. He aimed to assume the role of a nation-founding author whose classical universality would simultaneously transcend nationalist parochialism and represent the authority central to European literary life. Evidently, he wanted to help German letters—which he held as backward in comparison to renowned Western literatures—achieve international recognition on the purportedly universal basis of humanism and the aesthetic mode of cultural consumption. Such ambitions that surfaced in the context of the nineteenth-century European national movements seem to be at odds with Goethe’s canonical position in world literature today and with the current centrality of Germany in the European core of the world-system. Hence, Goethe’s enormous lifetime success and posthumous canonicity obliterated the particularly semi-peripheral and nationalist subtext of the presumed universality implied in his influential notion of world literature. In comparison with existing narratives on world literature featuring Goethe, I would instead call attention to his role in the nineteenth-­century nexus of national and world literatures. As I corroborate in this book, Goethe exemplifies the authorial function of a nation-representing author from a (semi-)periphery whose canonicity establishes a symbolic link between national and world literatures as interdependent entities. Having explored the asymmetrical relations between a peripheral literary field and the world literary system, I go on to show how a marginal perspective on the original Goethean nexus of national and world literatures influenced the emergence and development of one of the internationally least studied East-Central European peripheries: Slovenian literature.1 The central figure of my theorizing on the nexus of national and world literature in peripheral Romanticism is the Slovenian national poet France Prešeren (1800–1849).2 He was born as the third of eight children to a respected Upper Carniolan peasant family. His mother was literate, knew 1  In addition to a detailed history of the term “world literature,” the discussion of recent concepts of world literature, in particular the world-systems analysis, the links between the formation of Slovenian literature and the world literary spaces was the main topic of my monograph in Slovenian Prešernovska struktura in svetovni literarni sistem (The Prešernian Structure and the World Literary System; Juvan 2012a; for a review, see Tutek 2013). 2  The following biography of Prešeren is adapted from my encyclopedic entry (Juvan 2018). See also Slodnjak 1952, 1964.

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German, and intended Prešeren for the priesthood. At school in Ljubljana (1812–1813), his talent was spotted and encouraged by his enlightened and Francophile teacher Valentin Vodnik (1758–1819), celebrated as the author of the first Slovenian printed volume of secular poetry (1806). While finishing his studies at the University of Vienna, he dropped his clerical ambitions and enrolled as a law student, providing for himself by various means such as scholarships or work as a private tutor to the future poet Anastasius Grün and others. He received a doctorate in law in 1828. While in Vienna, he presented his early poetry in 1825 to the renowned Slavic philologist Jernej (Bartholomäus) Kopitar, who advised patience and a more polished reworking of his texts. After obtaining his degree, Prešeren returned to the Carniolan town of Ljubljana, where he planned to practice law. After his jurisprudential qualification exam (1832), several applications for his law practice were unsuccessful because of his bohemian lifestyle, which raised the suspicion of him being a Freigeist. Ultimately, in 1846, he was allowed to practice in the provincial town of Kranj, where he worked until his death. Prešeren’s life was marked by a series of platonic relations or flirtations with mostly much younger women. The most notable was Julija Primic, the German-speaking daughter of a wealthy Ljubljana merchant family, whom he poetically idealized as a Petrarchan “Laura” (1833–1836). In the 1830s, he reconnected with the philologist Matija Č op (1797–1835) and other friends from his school days. They founded a literary circle around the almanac Krajnska čbelica. His comrades in this circle died young (Č op in 1835, the Polish deportee Emil Korytko in 1839, and Andrej Smole in 1840), which—added to his professional and amorous disappointments—worsened his sense of failure. Consequently, the depressive and self-destructive traits of his otherwise introverted, balanced, kind, and occasionally jovial character began to prevail. He took to drinking, attempted suicide, and became neglectful of himself. However, he persevered with publishing or circulating his poems. His volume Poezije (Poesies) appeared in 1847 and, although it did not sell well, some Slovenian and German critics welcomed it. Prešeren marginally participated in the revolutionary events of 1848; he died of cirrhosis of the liver in 1849. Prešeren is the figurehead of Slovenian Romanticism. Although Slovenian was his native language, and he consistently wanted to raise it to a vehicle of literature and culture, like most central European intellectuals at the time he was functionally bilingual in German and also used that

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language for correspondence, poems (e.g., the elegy Dem Andenken des Matthias Č op, To the Memory of Matija Č op, 1835), or translations (e.g., Mickiewicz’s sonnet Rezygnacja, Resignation). Although his poetry is typically Romantic in its themes and genres, it also includes occasional songs and satirical, humorous, folkloric, jovial, or Anacreontic verse. His most celebrated work from the 1830s—ballads, Spanish romances, elegies, sonnets, ghazels, and a verse tale—are marked by classicist imagery, neo-Petrarchism, and reliance on earlier literary models. This universalist, historicist, and classicist quality, which is also recognizable in his translations of Bürger and Byron, came to Prešeren by way of his erudite friend, the philologist and aesthetician Č op. Prešeren’s work circulated through oral recitation, in manuscripts, leaflets, and pamphlets, as well as in printed form for a wider public (e.g., in the almanac Krajnska čbelica, in the literary supplement to the newspaper Laibacher Zeitung entitled Illyrisches Blatt, and the weekly Novice). His publishing involved many clashes with the censorship of the Metternich years. Kopitar, the imperial censor for Slavic publications, became the harshest opponent of Prešeren’s circle. Prešeren’s first printed book, the historical verse tale Krst pri Savici (The Baptism on the Savica, 1836) appeared in 600 copies. During his lifetime, Prešeren was already recognized as an outstanding figure by various Slovenian, German, and Slavic critics in the Habsburg Empire, even though his poetry was not fully understood. His role in Slovenian literary life was underappreciated owing to his slightly bohemian lifestyle and the fact that his poetry was considered objectionably amorous and sentimental. His canonization as the Slovenian “national poet,” equal to masters of world literature, began with the 1866 edition of his poems by the circle of more radical liberal Young Slovenians. The centenary of Prešeren’s birth was already a national celebration. His monument was raised in the center of Ljubljana in 1905. In 1944, the Partisan resistance movement proclaimed Prešeren Day a national holiday. It was celebrated not only in communist Yugoslavia but since 1991 also continues to be celebrated in Slovenia today. Since the German book translations of the 1860s, his major works have been translated into several other languages. Having briefly presented Prešeren, the protagonist of my narrative, I now introduce the structure, arguments, and basic concepts of this book. As I have presented in more detail elsewhere (Juvan 2011: 73–86, 2013), the recent renaissance of Goethean Weltliteratur is a symptom of sociopolitical shifts of literary studies in the context of globalization and the crisis of late capitalism. As adopted in the current comparative

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l­iterature, Goethe’s concept primarily refers to the practices and institutions of the cross-national traffic of literary repertories. His metaphorical parallels between the coming of world literature and the world economy— with an eye to achieving the balance of trade between unequal stakeholders—have lately inspired transnational comparative studies, especially theorists that draw on world-systems analysis and its constitutive divide between core and peripheral literatures. The notion of world literature thus tends to designate phenomena akin to the present-day cultural globalization and its asymmetrical relation between hegemonic centers and subordinate semi-­peripheries and peripheries. It refers to economically, culturally, or politically unequal locations of practices, media, and institutions that foster textual circulation across national and linguistic boundaries, cultural transfer, and translation, intertextual adoption of global repertoires, cosmopolitan networking, and self-conscious production for international audiences. However, since the nineteenth century, national ideology has significantly impregnated the originally cosmopolitan discourse of world literature. Hence, Weltliteratur, conceived as a composition of national literatures, was instrumental in establishing the international profile and self-esteem of individual European national literatures, primarily those that started their worlding from a peripheral or semi-peripheral position. Notwithstanding its cosmopolitan aim to transcend local parochialism and national narrow-mindedness through cultural exchange, the idea of world literature thus reinforced the ideological notion of national literatures in both the dominant and dependent countries. Within the growing inter-­ state system, individual national literary systems—considered building blocks of cultural identities necessary for the existence of a nation-state— took form through imitation of and differing from more established literatures of other communities (neighboring, dominating, or kindred ones). From this, one may conclude that the concept of world literature rests on the contradiction between a potentially boundless circulation of texts and their territorialized production or consumption, which both depend on power asymmetries. This might be why world literature is always already localized and perspectivized: it can be grasped only through the archives and perspectives of localized literary fields, whereas the distribution of central or peripheral sites of production and consumption of world literature is world-systemic and historically changeable. Ever since the first half of the nineteenth century, the discourse on world literature has been essential to literature’s systemic autopoiesis because it

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has reflected and ideologically steered the global development and understanding of transnational literary practices. As it is known, Goethe discussed world literature in about twenty sketchy formulations scattered over his public lectures, review articles from his Kunst und Altertum, talks with his secretary Johann Peter Eckermann, and extensive personal communication with intellectuals of European respublica litterarum (Goethe 1949, 1963: 351–352, 361–364, 1973; Eckermann 1998: 164–167). Goethe’s ideas became fairly lively debated by British, Italian, and French literary journals during the last years of his life (see D’haen 2012: 5–9; Koch 2002: 19, 231–233; Pizer 2006: 3, 21, 83). This early, short-lived exchange, however, engendered a long-lasting transnational meta-discourse on world literature, which, functioning as an autopoietic recursive loop, both reflected and fostered localized practices of global literary processes, such as “bibliomigrancy” (see Mani 2012), translation, interliterary intertextualities, and transnational canonization. Goethe’s utterances initiating this discourse responded to contradictory aspects of his experience of a “national” (i.e., German) author who gained a broader “international” reputation (see Pizer 2006: 18–46; Strich 1949: 32–51). Indeed, the historical moment of Goethe’s introduction of world literature meta-discourse and the periods of its conjuncture coincide with cycles of world capitalism from the industrial revolution to the present global dead-end of late capitalism. In the nineteenth century, the international book market and copyright fundamentally changed the social position of writers. Authors began to be evaluated according to their success in book sales, their symbolic capital, and increasingly also by their international profile. It is within this reconfiguring of the author function that Goethe’s idea took shape (see Juvan 2012a: 87–89, 112–117). The next two major global turning points in the functioning of the literary field are associated with further conjunctures of the world literature discourse. In the aftermath of the major economic depression and WWII, Strich, with his cosmopolitan liberal humanism, undertook the first resounding revival of Weltliteratur, while since the turn of the millennium, coinciding with the end of the American cycle and the crisis of world capitalism, we are witnessing a renaissance of this concept in Pascale Casanova, Franco Moretti, David Damrosch, John Pizer, Mads Rosendahl Thomsen, Theo D’haen, and others. Triggered by Moretti’s controversial and lucid 2000 essay, the concept of world literature has evolved from a denomination of a research field to a “new critical method” (Moretti 2000: 55), moreover, to a new “paradigm” of literary studies (D’haen 2012: 1; Thomsen 2008: 5–32).

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In its attempts to transcend the respective fields of comparative literature, national literary histories, and postcolonial studies, however, world literature studies has been formed heteronomously, by imagining and interpreting its object of cognition through models that have been already proposed by globalization theories. Worldlit studies correspond with their emphasis on international and transcultural flows of people, capital, goods, and ideas, and deconstruction of monolingual, ethnically essentialist categories (see Hayot 2012b: 223–224). Through the same key, the current literary studies has actualized Goethe’s Weltliteratur as a locus classicus, the historical prototype for the reinterpretation of interliterary relations. During its late-capitalist revival, Goethe’s idea of Weltliteratur triggered contradictory interpretations. On the one hand, it was perceived in terms of multicultural dialogism and free exchange, whereas on the other hand it was recognized as a cultural form of hegemony coextensive with the world-system. Launching a long-lasting transnational discourse on world literature during the rise of early industrial globalization, Goethe grounded his idea of dialogism on the unacknowledged hegemony of Eurocentric aesthetic ideology. In his enlightened cosmopolitan humanism, Goethe expected world literature to open up an equal dialogue between nations, languages, and civilizations. As mentioned above, his ideas of allgemeine Weltliteratur grew from his uncertainty about the position of German literature vis-à-vis traditionally established national literatures of Western Europe (Casanova 2004: 40; Damrosch 2003: 8; Pizer 2006: 18–41; Strich 1949: 27–30), while also taking roots in his cosmopolitan networking through which intellectuals of the European republic of letters pursued their universal human ideals (Buescu 2012; D’haen 2012: 7–8; Koch 2002: 43–176). Other factors of living experience also played an essential role in Goethe’s invention of the term: his worldwide private library (Nethersole 2012: 309; Mani 2017: 53–54) along with reading, translating, and commenting on foreign literatures and print media; his poetry that intertextually drew on manifold literary resources, peripheral and non-European included (Koch 2002: 177–229); last not least his notion of “circulation” based on the rise of the late modern traffic of artworks across linguo-cultural boundaries. With the statements with which he introduced the phrase Weltliteratur, Goethe declared that he was witnessing the dawn of a new, cross-national era of literary production (see Strich 1949: 5, 16, 31, 52). From his novel Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship to statements made in his old age, Goethe, occasionally using economic metaphors, compared the circulation

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of cultural goods with the capitalist world market (Casanova 2004: 12–14; Koch 2002: 2, 17; Strich 1949: 31). Literature was going global because of the exposure to the capitalist mode of production and the accelerated development of communication technologies. It was above all this new social reality of the post-Enlightenment literary discourse that was reflected, given sense, and even programmed by a meta-discourse on world literature inaugurated by Goethe. It has been repeatedly stressed that Goethe, with his aristocratic-­ cosmopolitan humanism, expected world literature to encourage the renewal of every national literature and to create a space in which smaller, peripheral, or non-European literatures could establish themselves on an equal basis (see, e.g., Strich 1949: 32–36, 45–48). For Goethe, the opening world literary space allowed national literature to assert itself internationally, without feeling hampered by the dominance either of the canon of the Antiquity or major literatures that had been established and widely recognized since early modernity. Even national literature that appeared to be dependent on and lagging behind major literatures of the European West could now prove to be an original producer, a competent translator, and a central mediator of cross-literary traffic. To be sure, Goethe was thinking primarily of German national literature. Through his self-conscious networking within the European republic of letters, Goethe attempted to promote Weimar not only to make of it the cohesive intellectual center of politically disjointed and backward Germany but also as a hub of the nascent world literary system at large. A necessary condition for the worldwide assertion of the national literature is, however, that it renounces parochial self-sufficiency. As epitomized by his intertextual dialogue with Hafez in West-östlicher Divan, in which he represents his subjectivity through Orientalist otherness, Goethe was persistently attempting to avoid subjectivist arbitrariness and, by refracting his experience through foreign forms and themes, achieve the status of a “classical national author” (klassicher Nationalautor), comparable to British, French, and Italian writers of European fame (Goethe 1963: 240–242; Strich 1949: 45–47). Goethe advised every literature to make use of literary patterns from other parts of the world and recognize within the foreign elements a different individualization of the “generally human”; thus individual national literatures build up universality through their active exchange (see Eckermann 1998: 164–167). According to Goethe, the aesthetic perception of works from foreign languages and distant civilizations enabled the self-reflection of the modern European

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individual, while interliterary traffic and the cooperation of intellectuals in a literary republic was the path to intercultural understanding and durable peace between nations (see Strich 1949: 5, 12–20, 31–39). Nonetheless, to facilitate mutual dialogue and the overcoming of differences, Goethe thought it necessary to imagine a “universal” common foundation, for which he adopted a particular European concept of aesthetic humanism whose canonic criterion was the ancient classics (see Damrosch 2003: 13; D’haen 2012: 29–33). Goethe therefore based the utopia of spiritual dialogue between cultures, which is in fact totalized by Western aesthetic ideology, on speculation about the potentials that could be brought to cultural production by globalization. This impresses a distinctly Eurocentric seal on the universalism of his Weltliteratur. In his statements on world literature, in many places, Goethe silently presupposes various forms of hegemony. As a high noble official in the Weimar Court, he was able to form his cosmopolitanism through access to the cultural goods that Europe as a colonial power had concentrated in its libraries and examined in other “centers of calculation” (see Latour 1996; Young 2012: 213–214). Goethe perceived world literature within the frameworks of cosmopolitan high culture, which was the privilege of the European cultured class. However, Goethe frequently consciously responded to and resisted Western cultural hegemony. He introduced the conception of Weltliteratur partly intending to use it as a means to contend with the traditionally dominant Western centers and to establish the equality of new national literatures, such as German literature. In the world literary market, however, Goethe also anticipated the potential marginalization of serious, sophisticated literature which would likely become overshadowed by standardized literary production calculated to please the masses. Thus, he was the first to distinguish the elite and the mass circuits of works that find their audiences abroad (see D’haen 2012: 8). Democratic and egalitarian as it appears to be, Goethe’s dialogism, in fact, rests on the assumptions of the post-aristocratic high culture. Goethe reserved cross-national conversation, networking, and cultural exchange for the monde, the educated elite he deemed capable of aesthetically discriminating between highbrow and mass culture. In addition to cosmopolitan elitism, Goethe’s apparently dialogic interaction of different cultural perspectives tends to universalize the norm-giving role of the Western perspective, including its aesthetic ideology and canonic norms derived from Greco-Latin antiquity. Echoing Goethe’s intimations of Weltliteratur, Marx and Engels exposed aesthetic and humanist cosmo-

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politanism as the ideology masking the European bourgeoisie’s global economic hegemony and the worldwide expansion of Western geoculture. In their Communist Manifesto of 1848, Marx and Engels materialistically grounded the economic metaphors with which Goethe had described the dawn of world literature. Instead of following Goethe’s interpretation in terms of aristocratic aesthetic humanism, they disclosed cosmopolitanism as an ideology with which the European bourgeoisie masks its world economic hegemony. Thus, they linked world literature, which is supposed to replace the particularism of national literatures, with the global dominance of (cheap) Western bourgeois geoculture over economically dependent cultural practices: In place of the old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have intercourse in every direction, universal interdependence of nations. And as in material, so also in intellectual production. The intellectual creations of individual nations become common property. National one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness become more and more impossible, and from numerous national and local literatures, there arises a world literature. The bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production, by the immensely facilitated means of communication, draws all, even the most barbarian, nations into civilization. … It compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production … In one word, it creates a world after its own image. (Marx and Engels 1998: 39)

Regardless of Marxian harsh diagnosis, part of Western literary studies, frequently associated with teaching literature, interprets world literature primarily as a space for the intercultural dialogue. Through the circulation of texts and their active presence in foreign environments, individuals and communities are supposed to broaden their horizons, reflect upon their own identity in a multicultural relationship to otherness. Thus, they surpass nationalist narrow-mindedness, strengthen the cosmopolitan ethos, refashion domestic traditions, increase the scope of the expressible, and gain an opportunity to establish themselves globally, even if they perhaps write in a minor language. In his monograph Goethe and World Literature, Strich affirms Goethe’s ideal of world literary circulation in which, through dialogue, authors contemplate themselves and their national literatures in the mirror of the world. In so doing, Strich indirectly supports the renewal of international peace, economic exchange, and cultural cooperation, as i­ llustrated by the following excerpt, colored with Goethe’s economic metaphors:

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World literature is, then, according to Goethe, the literature which serves as a link between national literatures and thus between the nations themselves, for the exchange of ideal values. Such literature includes all writings by means of which the peoples learn to understand and make allowances for each other, and which bring them more closely together. It is a literary bridge over dividing rivers, a spiritual highway over dividing mountains. It is an intellectual barter, a traffic in ideas between peoples, a literary market to which the nations bring their intellectual treasures for exchange. … It is an international conversation, an intellectual interest in each other. (Strich 1949: 5; emphases added)

In recent years, Sarah Lawall and Damrosch have rearticulated Strich’s liberal-humanist perspective in contemporary vocabulary, connecting it with social issues current in the US in the period of late capitalism. In her introduction to the 1994 volume Reading World Literature, Lawall erodes the dominance of the Western-centric aesthetic-ethical universalism of university world literature curricula in the US, supporting the broadening of the transnational canon with the voices of subalterns. With the deconstruction of the oppositions, self vs. Other and home vs. the world, Lawall goes on to show how identities enmeshed in interliterary communication contrive themselves through signification and cognition as dialogic networks (Lawall 1994: 33–34). The author refers to Goethe’s idea, claiming that “interconnected society and world view” form themselves through “the community discourse of world literature” (46). By emphasizing the relationalism of identities immersed in reading acts within transnational literary discourse, Lawall shows world literature to be a system of cognitive interactions; that is, a dialogue. Along with Pascale Casanova and Moretti, Damrosch usually figures in the trio of founders of the Wordlit paradigm of literary scholarship. His What Is World Literature?—unlike Dionýz Ď urišin’s monograph of the same title published in 1992, which was practically unknown in the West until recently—has become a key reference in the globalized renaissance of Goethe’s conception. Damrosch realizes the ideal of the multicultural broadening of the canon with his selection of texts of peripheral origin, which he interprets as examples of world literature. Thus, he commits himself to the interests of communities and regions whose peripherality was only given a historical explanation by Casanova and Moretti. Unlike them, Damrosch does not present Goethe’s ruminations on international literary circulation as a prefiguration of the global culture market, typically

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dominated by major centers that occasionally appropriate sources, products, and workers from the peripheries under their own influence; instead, he interprets Goethe from the perspective of cosmopolitan conceptions of intercultural hermeneutics and aesthetics. Damrosch argues that in world literature, literary works that circulate across the border of their original language and culture with the aid of translation make gains as they actively come to life in foreign societies. To Damrosch, the world literary traffic represents a “mode of circulation and of reading” in which “windows on the world” open up to us, and through which the intellectual horizons of national literatures refract in mutual dialogue. These works, therefore, create an autonomous, transnational, multicultural, and decentralized (elliptical) aesthetic space, enabling us to free ourselves from a political connectedness to our nation, language, or class (see Damrosch 2003: 5, 15, 281). In opposition to the liberal-humanist perspective of Strich, Lawall, and Damrosch, contemporary critics of world literature emphasize its hegemonic character. Critiques of world literature’s dialogism come not only from camps of comparative literature, postcolonial studies, and literary transnationalism. Even champions of Wordlit studies have denied dialogism of interliterary exchanges stressing the hegemonic model of cultural diffusionism instead. According to diffusionism, texts and conventions that are produced or mediated by the major Western languages and cultural metropolises spread throughout the planet, whereas peripheral or dependent cultural spaces only passively adapt them. Under the global influence of few world literary capitals and world languages, a standardized geoculture, with its products, conventions, and practices, gradually imposes itself on local cultural dialects—such a condition of world literature is currently criticized as “Anglo-globalism” (Arac 2002). With historical sociology of literary field and forms respectively, Casanova’s and Moretti’s work emphasize asymmetries in the constellation of cultural power, that is, inequality between the dominant centers of influence and the weaker, predominantly receptive peripheries. Casanova and Moretti point out that this systemic imbalance, which is partly homologous but not reducible to historically changing constellations of global economic and political power, has been shaping the flow, direction, and content of interliterary processes from the beginning of the modern era to contemporary times. Critics reproach the conceptions of the “world literary ­system” (Moretti 2000, 2003) or “world literary space” (Casanova 2004: 3–4, 82–125) for placing exaggerated emphasis on competitiveness, Darwinian survival struggle, and for their reductionist explanation of

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interliterariness through analogies with Fernand Braudel’s and Immanuel Wallerstein’s economic histories of capitalism (see, e.g., Prendergast 2004). By underestimating the unpredictable creative potentials of “world-semiosis” in the peripheral zones beyond Western metropolises, Casanova and Moretti are thought to have overlooked the polycentrism, plurilingualism, and multidirectionality of literary flows (see, e.g., Kliger 2010; Thomsen 2008: 33–39, 138). In these reproaches, multiculturalists and humanist liberals from Worldlit studies concur with those who attack world literature from other camps, such as Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak in the name of a “planetary” and subaltern renewal of philological-comparative methods (Spivak 2003: 101, 108), or representatives of postcolonial and transnational studies. Pier Paolo Frassinelli and David Watson, for instance, accuse Casanova of “a progressivist notion of aesthetic development” and “a teleological narrative” in which “the literary aesthetic [is] overcoming history, the nation, and the political, and generating its own autonomous space.” They expose her “reproducing a geography in which much of the postcolonial world is positioned as peripheral to literary modernity” as a characteristic of “Eurocentric diffusionism” (Frassinelli and Watson 2011: 197–199). One can hear the even harsher appraisals that Goethean Weltliteratur, with its historical genesis and current methodological application on a global scale, is, in fact, provincial (see Behdad and Thomas 2–7, 10). According to Graham Huggan, politically it even represents “the cultural realpolitik of globalization masquerading as either a ‘worldly’ cosmopolitanism of reading (Damrosch 2003) or a transnational study of form (Moretti 2000)” (Huggan 2011: 491). Theorists of the world literature system and their critics thus share a common perception that the concept of world literature implies hegemony. Therefore, Weltliteratur—whether we understand it as a theoretical concept, an ideologeme, a publishing and translation practice, a transnational network of literary life or a school canon—appears to legitimize Western (male, white, bourgeois) dominance and reinforce monolingualism (English as a global language), imposing itself on all others as a universal criterion. After all, the terminology is an indicator of the conflictive and aporetic nature of theoretical thinking and the expression “world literature” may be ranked among Mieke Bal’s “traveling concepts.” These are migrating “between disciplines, between individual scholars, and between geographically dispersed academic communities.” Because their “meaning, reach, and operational value differ” (Bal 2002: 24), they have become “the sites

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of debate, awareness of difference, and tentative exchange” (13). As a traveling concept, the term “world literature” has been globalized in different linguo-semantic variants and invested with ideological tensions, such as partly described above. As far as the late modern cultural history of European territory is concerned, the prevailing notions of world literature—focused mainly on the Greek and Latin classics, the Bible, and the modern literary traditions of the (European) West—were based on the ideology of cultural nationalism, the concept of nation-state, and the colonial experience. This is why they presupposed national literatures as a prime if not only components of the global literary space; conversely, actors in particular literary systems referred to the ideas and practices of world literature in order to ideologically establish or confirm their national identity on a broader scale (see Juvan 2011: 73–79). Although Dionýz Ď urišin (1992: 109–160), Irina Neupokoyeva (2012), and Alexander Beecroft (2008, 2015) rightly claim that the world literary process knows systemic units other than nations and nation-states (e.g., tribes, city-states, imperia, regions and border zones, minorities, diasporas, migrations, or interliterary communities and other territories connected religiously or linguistically), it cannot be denied that, in the period that gave birth to the international book market and the term Weltliteratur respectively (i.e., the epoch of the “‘second’ Weltliteratur” or the “worldliterary system,” according to Moretti [2013: 134–135]), national movements and nation-states figure as most important players, at least ideologically. The inclusion of the national in the world, the presence of the world in the national, and nationality as a necessary condition for the appearance of world literature may be understood as symptoms of the interlocking ideologies of post-Enlightenment cultural nationalism, cosmopolitanism, and the aesthetic understanding of art practices (Juvan 2011: 77). Along with the expansion of capitalist world-system and the global diffusion of Western liberal-bourgeois modernity in the form of the leading “geoculture,” this nexus has been reproduced and modified also outside Europe and become increasingly compatible with the “inter-state system,” since the latter is legitimized through proliferation of distinctive national identities (see Wallerstein 1991: 139–157, 184–199). So it does not come as a surprise that since the early nineteenth century, world literature has been inscribed into every European literature, be it emerging-peripheral or traditionally established and central. To be sure, the contents and quantity of such imports vary: while major languages and influential literatures tend to be somewhat self-sufficient, the share of

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translation—the primary medium of world literature’s circulation—in literary print is more prominent in smaller languages and (semi-)peripheral literary systems (see, e.g., Sapiro 2011). Hence, it is within this ambivalence of dialogism and hegemony that the process of worlding and nationalizing European literatures has taken place since the early nineteenth century. Nationalizing, the first of the concepts that inform the thrust of this book denotes the transformation of post-Enlightenment belles-lettres into the ideological apparatus of national movements and nation-states (see Schmidt 1989: 282–283; Widdowson 1999: 35). Printed in the vernacular whose standardization they cultivated and exemplified, national literatures took part in building the public sphere of the ethnic community by demonstrating the aesthetic capacity of its proper language, evoking its history, and depicting its land, mores, and spirit. The other key concept is worlding (see Kadir 2004; Hayot 2012a, b). In my understanding of the concept, to world national literature means to determine its actual and desired positions in the global literary space and, starting from this act of imaginary or analytical comparison with other literatures, attempt to export national repertoires across ethnic and language borders. In the second chapter, I deal with the canonicity of world literature as reflected in the canonization of national poets in the periphery. Aware of their dependence on imperial powers, the protagonists of (semi-)peripheral national movements longed for the international recognition of their nascent collective identity. The figures of national poets were invented to represent their respective nations to the gaze of the Other, symbolized by the emerging world literature and empowered through the evolving inter-­ state system dominated by the core countries of the European West. In a secular parallel to the canonization of saints in the Catholic Church, the imaginary placing of a national poet in the world (i.e., worlding) was crucial in the (unfulfilled) longing for the poet’s international confirmation as belonging to the hyper-canon of world literature. Whereas several East-­ Central European national poets involved in national movements showed what Andre Terian aptly called a “vernacular” tendency, Goethe represented the more “cosmopolitan” model of a national classic (see Terian 2013). Such affiliation to the universal aesthetic canon is also characteristic of the politics of the Slovenian Romantic movement and its poet, France Prešeren. Although Prešeren’s poetry, which suffered from the Austrian censorship, only sparsely employs explicit nationalist discourse, his imaginary worlding and intertextual transfer of universal aesthetic repertoires

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from the established literatures into the Habsburg periphery fashioned a cosmopolitan strategy of cultural nationalism. Prešeren has been venerated in Slovenia since the late nineteenth century as the singular national classic whose oeuvre compensates for the apparent lack of classical and modern traditions in Slovenian and deserves to be recognized worldwide. Employing typological comparison from the systemic point of view, I show how literary systems from distant margins of Europe—Slovenian and Icelandic literatures—reflect the figure of the national poet as a distinctive cultural phenomenon of European Romantic nationalism. As mentioned above, the canonization of national poets, such as the Slovenian France Prešeren and his Icelandic contemporary Jonas Hallgrímsson (1807–1845), enabled national communities to enhance their internal cohesion ideologically. On the other hand, national poets proved that a nation—especially if deprived of statehood—resembled other nations and could meet the imagined standards of the world literature canon. These poets themselves attempted to render topics of presumably national importance in the aesthetic codes that figured as the standard of modern artistic developments in core European literary systems or as key to the Western tradition. The lives and works of Prešeren and Hallgrímsson, as well the processes of their posthumous canonization, show striking parallels, regardless of the differences that can be epitomized by the opposition of the decentered and centered cultural paradigm. Through their surface similarities, the analogies of their systemic functions come to the fore. These shed light on analogous developments of the aesthetic autonomization and nationalization characterizing two emergent peripheral and dependent literatures during Romanticism. The third chapter, devoted to peripheral perspectives on world literature, starts from the observation that the division of the world literary and translation system into hegemonic centers and dependent peripheries has drawn criticism from theorists that have tried to pursue literary studies within the postnational paradigm in a manner different from that of the followers of Goethe’s Weltliteratur in the era of globalization. The conception of world literature seems problematic to these theorists due to its Western-centrism. In its materialist-systemic interpretation with the center/periphery antagonism, world literature is said to reinforce the centrality of the cultural model that was developed in modernity by Western capitalism. On the other hand, in its humanistic and cosmopolitan interpretation, it reproduces Western-centrism through the domination of global English as the language of translation, through the globalization of

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an aesthetic mode of reading, and the Eurochronology of literary history. Various strategies have arisen as an alternative to the center/periphery model of world literature, ranging from the substitution of the concept of world literature with other terms (such as transnationalism, cosmopolitanism, postcolonialism, Francophonie, etc.), through the pluralization and decentralization of world literature in the name of perspectivism, to the affirmation of the periphery. In their verbal commitment to the symbolic elimination of global literary inequality, these approaches are reminiscent of Freudian denial (Verleugnung). They adopt the deceptive view that texts move freely, and that they can be attributed global importance irrespective of their origin, the pressures of the economic and political system, and the restrictions on the international cultural market. As a system that has evolved from the end of the eighteenth century until the present day, world literature is a pertinent analytical category that, in my opinion, should be accepted because it helps in understanding the economic, political, and linguistic-cultural overdetermination of global interliterary exchange. However, drawing on Dionýz Ď urišin, Yuri Lotman, Ilya Kliger, and Susan S. Friedman, it can be argued that peripheral cultural interaction occasionally bypasses global centers, establishing its networks and temporary subcenters; for example, in the twentieth-century avant-garde movements. Moreover, peripheries enable the reproduction of world literature metropolises and influence their evolutionary shifts, even though the semiotic dynamics that infuse centers tend to be exoticized, anonymized, or marginalized. Although semiotic production of transgressive information is by no means limited to centers, the pressures of the literary world-system do condition, select, and channel the global circulation of peripheral innovation. The modernist poetry of Srečko Kosovel (1904–1926) illustrates the modes of peripheral productivity and its irregular paratactic response to evolutionary processes in the center. It also highlights the systemic obstacles that prevent this information from being globalized. How nationalizing and worlding influence the literary canon formation of national movements is the question the fourth chapter addresses. During the early, so-called philological phase of European national revivals, standardizing the vernacular and developing the media and ­infrastructure that were necessary for the social diffusion of literary texts in the standard language were essential in establishing the ideological coherence of the national community in statu nascendi and the community’s public sphere. In Slovenian poetry from the Enlightenment to post-­

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Romanticism, too, the utopian imagining of the national literary system, its planning, and the gradual formation of its canon went hand in hand with the efforts toward the standardization of Slovenian. In this context, the intertextual indigenization of the Greco-Latin topoi of Parnassus and Elysium—images of the chosen and collectively memorized personalities representing a norm-giving culture—served as a self-regulatory strategy acquired by Slovenian writers in the Habsburg land of Carniola to assimilate the structures of the universal canon and capitalize on its PanEuropean prestige within the emerging national literary ecology. At the same time, their indigenization of images of the top cultural accomplishment stressed the symbolic difference between a peripheral semiosphere in the making and the universality of the classics. Finally, by representing how the national canon formation emulates the classical canon, the actors of the evolving literary periphery compared the highest national aesthetic achievements with other national literatures. To take an example, the postRomantic critic and poet Josip Stritar attempted to world Slovenian literature in an imaginary way by evoking the elevation of the national poet Prešeren to the international hyper-canon. From 1828 to 1835, while Goethe was introducing his idea of world literature to the European public, the philologist Matija Č op and the poet France Prešeren were engaged in the cultural transfer of Schlegelian Romantic cosmopolitanism to Slovenia. In the fifth chapter, I demonstrate how these authors from the margins of the Habsburg Empire embody links between theoria and poiesis that were essential for the Jena Romantic circle and its legacy. Moreover, their work corresponds to transnational cultural practices of pre-1848 Europe that grounded both Goethe’s notion of Weltliteratur and the world-history narratives about postmedieval vernacular literatures, seen as cultural foundations of nascent national identities (e.g., Mme de Staël, Friedrich Bouterwek, Friedrich Schlegel). From the outset, the notions of world literature were rife with contradictory tendencies of cosmopolitanism and nationalism. To ground ethnic identity in literary cosmopolitanism and attract the educated classes to the national movement was the strategy that Č op and Prešeren embraced in the early phase of Slovenian nation-building. Their cultural transfer of early Romantic nationalist universalism into vernacular literature ­emerging on the periphery of world literature encompassed not only emulation and intertextual adoption of repertoires from the core European literatures. It also entailed activities and controversies connected to their endeavors to establish Slovenian literary media and infrastructure. From the viewpoint

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of Schlegelian literary universalism, recourse to Roman and Romance literary traditions appeared to be able to cultivate a presumably backward national literature, elevate its language, and place the nation on the world literary map. Poetic language, intertextually referring to European aesthetic resources, represented a shortcut to Č op and Prešeren by which Slovenians—subjects of the Habsburg crown that lacked a public sphere and institutions of their own—could catch up with developed European literatures. Č op’s considerable international networking, polemic writing, cosmopolitan library, and aesthetic-philological expertise were in line with most of what Goethe was envisioning as world literature at that time. The same applies to Prešeren’s poetics of the Romantic classic, which cast highly individualized aesthetic self-reflection, national commitment, and erotic and existential declarations into forms of representation intertextually derived from repertoires of world literature from the Antiquity to the present. Č op and Prešeren’s transfer of the German early Romantic cosmopolitanism thus represents the founding inscription of world literature in the national literary field. It was a Schlegelian compromise between the universality of the world literature canon and the non-conformist, nationalist, and revolutionary spirit of Romanticism that inspired the Slovenian orientation toward the so-called Romantic classic. ̌ Although it is probable that Cop, who read and quoted from Goethe’s Kunst und Altertum (Art and Antiquity), was familiar with his mentions of Weltliteratur, the Slovenian periphery introduced an explicit discourse on world literature several decades after Goethe had been able to conceptualize his lifelong cosmopolitan literary practice in semi-peripheral Germany. As I present in more detail elsewhere (Juvan 2012b), the term Weltliteratur was first mentioned in Slovenian periodicals only in 1866 (in German) and 1884, respectively (in Slovenian as svetovna književnost), but Josip Stritar’s critical essays of the 1860s and 1870s tacitly assumed the term. Stritar attempted to evaluate Slovenian literary and artistic achievements in the light of the world literary canon, the classical tradition, and his quasi-universal notions of humanism and the aesthetic. Being aware of the unequal importance of national literatures in “the world culture” tradition and the contemporary circulation of international literary trends (such as naturalism), he worried about the proper proportion between original and translated literature in Slovenia that would not jeopardize the sense of national belonging. Key to Stritar was to demonstrate that Prešeren as the Slovenian national poet was equal to other world classics. The majority of mentions of the term svetovna književnost around 1900

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presupposed the normative and canonic understanding of the concept that led to a frustrating conviction that Slovenian literature is doomed to lag behind the West. The comparative view that enabled Slovenian intellectuals to recognize that Slovenian literature shares its marginal position with other small and non-Western literatures of Europe was essential to Anton Ocvirk’s conceptual and institutional transfer of (French) comparative literature to his homeland’s academe, where national literary history prevailed. In his 1936 introduction to comparative literature Teorija primerjalne literarne zgodovine (Theory of Comparative Literary History), one of the earliest volumes of its kind in Europe, Hazard’s student Ocvirk provided the first in-depth comparative, historical, and theoretical description of the concept of world literature from a Slovenian perspective. In the sixth chapter, I start from Barthes’s thesis that European nineteenth-­century literatures witnessed the move from classical to modern writing. It seems that, whereas peripheral European literatures sought to establish a national identity with the aid of the epic as a privileged form of classical writing, the central and well-established national literatures demonstrated their integrity with the novel as a popular form of modern writing. In Slovenian literary culture, Prešeren’s narrative poem Baptism on the Savica (1836), which thematizes the involuntary compromise of an epic hero and his renunciation of the national cause, was paradoxically canonized as a sacred text that defines “Slovenianness” and as such gives rise to ever new reinterpretations. This is in contrast to Josip Jurčič’s Deseti brat (The Tenth Brother, 1866), the first Slovenian novel, which—according to Moretti’s formula (2013: 50–57, 116–117)—comes across as an (unhappy) compromise between a foreign genre form imported from the center and local Slovenian subject matter and perspective. Therefore, in the nineteenth century, a peripheral nation was constituting itself on the “sacred text” of a compromise but singular epic, rather than merely on the mass printing of compromise novels. Finally, based on Kadir’s (2004) and Hayot’s (2012a, b) concept of worlding, which differs from Cheah’s (2016) recent ethical turn of Heideggerian term, I discuss the worlding of the Slovenian national poet within the world-system of translation. The imaginary worlding of Prešeren through perspectives and canonization internal to the Slovenian literary system has proven to be ideologically successful. His actual presence in the global literary space, however, does not correspond to homegrown perceptions of his value.

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The beginning of Prešeren’s external worlding associated with the interliterary relations through which three types of literary systems arose in the Austrian Empire: national literatures, Slavic interliterary community, and world literature. The so-called Slovenian Alphabet War of 1833 was a symptom of the widespread fetishization of language that fueled European cultural nationalism. In the controversy over the reformed writing system, which in the view of the Slovenian linguist Jernej Kopitar (1780–1844)—a highly influential philologist, one of the founders of Slavic studies, an Austro-Slavist, the custodian of the Imperial Court Library, and the imperial censor in Vienna—contributed to bridging the differences among Slavs using the Latin alphabet, a clash broke out between two differing strategies for national revival. Inspired by Herder, Kopitar’s ideas about Slovenian national revival relied on philological work, the standardization of language, collecting folklore, editing old manuscripts, and educating the predominantly peasant and illiterate population. In contrast, Č op and Prešeren argued for a bolder Romantic nationalist program of aesthetic cosmopolitanism primarily intended for the educated class. At the time of the Alphabet War, one sees how the emerging Slovenian literary field began to integrate into the world literary system through establishing contacts with the interliterary community of Austrian Slavs. Representing the nodes of international cultural traffic, literary reviewing and translating played an essential role in this case as well. In the nineteenth century, Slovenian literary culture found itself at the intersection of the areas of influence of Vienna and Prague, two regional centers that competed in the Habsburg Empire for the position of the center for Slavic studies and literatures. In the 1833 language controversy, the philologist Č op commented at length on a review of the poetry almanac Krajnska čbelica (Carniolan Bee) that had been published a year before in the leading Prague literary journal by the Czech poet František L. Č elakovský. In his favorable, albeit patronizing review of the beginnings of Slovenian secular poetry, Č elakovský encouraged Carniolan national revivalists—dominated by the German-speaking public sphere— by promising them a readership of “sixty and more million Slavs.” In his German-­written polemic with his fellow-countryman Kopitar, Č op reproduced and commented on Č elakovský’s Pan-Slavic praise of Prešeren’s poetic achievement and his sample Czech translations of Prešeren’s texts. As is often the case in the world republic of letters, Č op framed Č elakovský’s defense of Prešeren to provide an international argument of quality supporting his position in the internal controversy; that is, Č op’s aesthetic cosmopolitanism that struggled with Kopitar’s Herderianism.

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Subsequent and continuous efforts of Slovenian intellectuals to export the Slovenian national poet with the help of internationally renowned consecrators and translators, starting with Samhaber’s 1880 Preširenklänge (Prešeren’s Strains) and the Russian 1889 translation of “The Wreath of Sonnets,” has proven to meet little success. In the final analysis, the possibility of a particular literary text written in a peripheral language gaining access to global literary circulation depends on the consecrators from the metropolises of the world translation system and the demand of the international book market. Prešeren, a classic of peripheral literature, wrote in a language of lesser diffusion. Such circumstances, along with his class origin and almost non-existent transnational networking during his lifetime, has kept him from global recognition and inclusion in the Romantic hyper-canon. His translation presence has remained limited mostly to countries that used to belong to the same states or cultural-political alliances as Slovenians (the Habsburg Empire, Yugoslavia, and the Slavic world). Moreover, his complex poetic texts have hampered his international recognition. They are difficult to translate without risking reducing Prešeren’s singular voice to a quasi-universal locus communis, unable to invent and establish for him a new, universal audience. Worlding a Peripheral Literature is the title I have chosen for the present book. Being aware of Kadir’s insight that the very concept and practices of world literature are essentially processual, constituted by the speech acts of unequal historical agencies and related to disciplinary practices (see Kadir 2004), I need to finally address the question of why I am writing about world literature in the first place, from what perspective, and with what intentions. How am I involved in the process of worlding literature, why have I decided to participate in the transnational discourse of world literature? In his book Globalization and Literature, Suman Gupta discusses the recent upswing of the discourse on globalization in literary studies (Gupta 2009: 123–148). He raises the question of how late capitalism not only entices literature from “inside” to represent the phenomena of globalization and anti-globalism in its textual worlds (e.g., De Lillo’s Cosmopolis) but also impacts the subject field and methods of literary studies. As is the case with the literary discourse, which is becoming increasingly dependent on transnational publishing, globalization is a field of force that also inflicts the discipline of literary studies from the “outside,” through the commodification of cultural and scholarly production and the concentration of academic publishing in multinationals. Gupta points out that globaliza-

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tion presses on the institutional basis of literary studies, forcing its disciplinary reorganization and conditioning the position of its actors. We, scholars, are subjected mainly to multinational academic publishers and the affiliated corporations measuring our global visibility. That our careers depend on the infamous “publish or perish” principle has become a truism. According to Gupta, the ascent of the paradigm of world literature counts among the most noticeable effects of globalization within the academe. Demanding ever new intellectual products and constant rebranding of scholarly methodologies (recall dozens of recent “turns”), the commodification of knowledge on the global cultural market requires disciplinary changes, both in the focus of research and the approach to literature. The idea of circulation revived from almost 200-year-old Goethe’s intuitions of Weltliteratur came in handy as a perfect signifier for a noticeable epiphenomenon of globalization. Whereas there is a consensus about the defining features of globalization such as dematerialization of finance, space of flows, cross-national networking, glocalization and hybridization, space-time compression, global cities, and heterogeneity-hegemony contradiction, the evaluation of globalization and its periodization are still subject to controversies and debates.3 Neoliberals generally praise globalization as the triumph of the free market, the ecstasy of interconnectivity and social networking, the liberation of individual initiative, and the efficiency of a more flexible organization of production. In their critiques of globalization, their left-wing adversaries attack the growing social inequality, the devastation of the environment, uniformization of the ways of living, the destruction of the welfare state, the political hegemony of transnational corporations, and the extreme concentration of capital. As a counteraction to the economic pressures of globalization, critical theorists advocate transnational anti-­globalist movements or “globalization from below.” The positions about how long globalization is around also vary. Some claim that globalization is but a name without a referent in the economic reality (Wallerstein), ­others limit it to phenomena of late capitalism, others still extend its temporal scope, identifying it either with modern capitalism at large (Amin) or even recognizing its existence as far as 5000 years ago (Frank, Gills, Abu Lughod).4 3  In the following brief discussion of globalization, I draw on the collective volume Literature and Globalization (Connel and Marsh 2011) as well as on Gunn 2001; Gupta 2009; Jameson and Miyoshi 1998; Robinson 2006, 2007; Saussy 2006. 4  For the debate about globalization and world-systems, see Frank and Gills 1992, 1993; Dussel 1998; Jameson 2009: 435–438.

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I cannot go into a detailed discussion of these issues here, so let me outline my position insofar it is relevant to the world literature concept. It can be no doubt that peoples, empires, and civilizations of the world interconnected through commerce, traffic, travel, religion, language, warfare, or imperial rule for millennia. The silk way and other famous cross-regional traffic routes facilitated the diffusion and exchange of concepts, products, and practices in the sphere of culture, what finally contributed to the interconnectedness of what Moretti designates as the premodern world literature (Moretti 2013: 134–135). The capitalist world-system, though, differs from the 5000-year-old world-system(s), in that it first introduces a single dominating core that—only during a single economic cycle— defines the international division of labor and accumulates the surplus value based on the capitalist imperative of permanent growth. Only the world-system of the capitalist economy created the economic and ideological grounds for the formation of the modern literary world-system and the concomitant global system of translation, both of them dependent on the rise of the cross-national cultural market. Thus, I would argue in favor of applying the term globalization to the period when this concept came to life and in which it contributed to the period’s intellectual self-understanding. The term “globalization,” known already in the 1930s, began to signify a new stage of the global economy only in the 1980s when it also gained international currency (see Gupta 2009: 3–10). Only from then on globalization—with its economic and cultural effects celebrated, rejected, or denied—is being introduced as a concept that allows our cognition to map reality in which we live. Since then, globalization challenges not only economists but also social scientists and humanities scholars. Globalization as a phenomenon of late capitalism is not the subject of disinterested study of the kind that only well-paid scholarly elites can afford but a force that transforms the discipline itself. Among the corollaries of globalization, the emergence of world literature studies is among the most prominent in literary studies. There are several reasons for that. The pressures of the global commodification of intellectual production have already been recalled. The predominance of the US-American academe and academic publishing, which are coextensive with the current location of the world-system’s hegemonic core, is also discernible in the global discourse on world literature: most quoted are, in principle, contributions of US-American scholars and those that publish in global English with prestigious publishers (located, at least partially, in the US). Perhaps more important are ideological factors. The

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notion of world literature contributes to the master-narrative of the global, which is constitutive of globalization as a field of forces and practices. Moreover, comparative literature—the actual origin of the talk on world literature today—embraces the idea of Weltliteratur with the expectation that literature, the object of its study, would be reattributed importance as a world-­forming power after it has been relegated to other marginal cultural phenomena. Perhaps one day it will turn out that the renaissance of Goethe’s Weltliteratur by Western literary studies is a final hopeless attempt, during the decline of its world dominance, to universalize its conception of “literature” and “world” through a methodological update. Or, as J. Hillis Miller detects: “The new discipline of World Literature … might be seen as a last-ditch effort to rescue the study of literature. It does this by implicitly claiming that studying literature from around the world is a way to understand globalization” (Miller 2011: 253–254). And finally, in the guise of self-critique: economism as the ruling ideology of the present-­day globalization has sneaked also into literary studies, making them concentrate on the economics of literature, what has produced the innovative approaches to the literary world-system, and international book market. Seen from the intrinsic perspective of literary studies, globalization— with its circulation, flows, the transgression of national borders, and planetary interconnectedness—encourages the formation of methods that attempt to overcome methodological nationalism and establish instead more comprehensive units of analysis ending with the world itself. Goethe’s ideas of Weltliteratur seem to be instrumental to this turn because they announce interconnectivity, cosmopolitan networking, transnational market exchange of cultural goods, as well as the idea of the world as a totality in which we live. Accordingly, Vilashini Cooppan notes that “different globalization theorists imagine distinct alternative ‘nationally-constituted society as the appropriate object of discourse,’ for example, the world system, the network, the dyad of global and local.” Comparative literature, in her view, is historically associated with globalization, and this unfolds through Goethe’s Weltliteratur (Cooppan 2004: 12–13). Pizer, too, believes that today’s “literature is becoming immanently global,” challenging literary studies to refashion its methods; a “new field of inquiry” emerges that might be called “transnational literary studies,” the inspiration for it being Goethe’s “paradigm” of Weltliteratur (Pizer 2000: 213–214).

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Thus, since the turn of the millennium and with the symptoms of a lingering crisis of late capitalism, Goethe’s idea of world literature, rediscovered and newly packed, has been emanating world-wide mainly from the US, whose core position within the world-system proves to be increasingly jeopardized. Weltliteratur, refurbished by Casanova, Moretti, Damrosch, and others, is undergoing canonization. Growing across the planet, the plethora of intertextual references to the founding figures of the world literature concept enables global diffusion of concepts denoting or connoting globalization. This condition also applies to Slovenia, my home scholarly ecosystem. In recent Slovenian science policy, globalization reflects in the tendency of encouraging scholars to publish in world languages and participate in international academic networks. Public funding of research, which is fragmented according to technologies of project management, relies on the criteria of bibliometric “excellence” and thus depends on Anglocentric citation indexes. Facing the circumstances that globalization imposed on the local ecosystem of the humanities, the younger generation of literary scholars, in particular, has been challenged to reconsider the position of Slovenian literary studies in the international context. Ever since Anton Ocvirk’s theoretical and historical explanation of Weltliteratur in his 1936 Theory of Comparative Literary History (Ocvirk 1936: 68–75), the notion has not been much discussed in Slovenia. World literature has been taken for granted in university curricula, anthologies, textbooks, readers, and collections of translations. After this quiet period, the crossnational theoretical discourse on world literature reached the country almost simultaneously with its 2004 accession to NATO and the European Union. Slovenian literary critics must have felt uncomfortable, besieged by the triumphant Euro-globalization rhetoric accompanying the political and socio-economic transformation of the local ecosystem of scholarship. They found themselves caught between local traditions and contemporary challenges of globalization. On the one hand, the incoming globalization of the discipline promised to secure a cosmopolitan backing for the local efforts at reconfiguring traditional approaches to literature. It also led researchers into the temptation to take part in international scholarly networks, as these, in the wake of postcolonial theory, have become more interested in non-metropolitan voices, marginal or hybrid identities, and the like. On the other hand, globalization seemed to threaten traditional habits and positions of Slovenian literary studies, while the possibility of gaining international recognition was far from guaranteed. In these

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circumstances, both the adoption of and critical distance to the ongoing global debate on Weltliteratur were understandable. One is tempted to describe the meeting point of the global discourse on world literature and comparative literary studies of a semi-peripheral EU country that was Slovenia in terms of Walter Mignolo’s postcolonial concept of “border gnosis.” Border gnosis is said to empower postcolonial subalterns to overcome their role of objects of study or tokens of cultural otherness. Through their hitherto marginalized insight, ThirdWorld theorists are allowed to assert their specific scholarly knowledge and take over the “locus of enunciation” equivalent to that of metropolitan critics of the First World (Mignolo 1998). The possibility Mignolo evokes by his border gnosis is, of course, always open but solely in principle. The equivalence is only achievable through the struggle of peripheral theorists with hegemonic discourse controlled by metropolises. Thus, the newcomers from borders have to be recognized by the metropolis not only as mastering its hegemonic discourse but also as deflecting it in an unexpected direction relevant to the metropolis. It seems, then, that the meeting of global approaches to world literature and local agencies of literary research can be better circumscribed in terms of Franco Moretti’s model of a compromise between the foreign form on the one side and local themes and perspectives on the other side (Moretti 2013: 50–57, 116–117). However, the symbolic struggle between the hegemonic discourse and the perspective of a local agency that ends up in a compromise may also result in an innovative conception, albeit its universal value remains unacknowledged. A paper on world literature by Slovenian comparatist Vid Snoj (b. 1965) may serve as a case in point. Snoj begins with a critique of globalization as the dominant framework for conceptualizing world literature. According to Snoj, it seems “as if only now, right now there emerges world literature in the true sense—as a global fact” which is subject to “the impetus of liberal market economy … that takes hold of the world with the a-national logic of multinational capital” (Snoj 2006: 62, 65). Unaware of his adherence to methodological nationalism and aesthetic elitism endemic to Slovenian comparative literature, Snoj shows his reservation about the global discourse on Weltliteratur. He refrains from elaborating the idea that “world literature, rising from the fallen national borders and the ruined cultural identities, seems to be particularly telling credential of mixing cultures and as such perhaps represents an ideal object of cultural

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studies” (66). Snoj’s disdain for “cultural studies,” which appeared to threaten the autonomy of literary scholarship at that period, is so resilient that he abruptly turns his discussion of the idea of world literature in the apparently retrograde direction of Heideggarianism, another locally wellestablished approach that has permeated Slovenian philosophy, theory, and literary criticism since the modernist 1960s. However, what might appear a retrograde retreat into the backward existentialist lap of the homeland humanities proves to be a groundbreaking twist within the global world literature discourse. Granted, Snoj’s notion of world literature departs from purportedly value-neutral, all-­ inclusive concepts referring to global circulation and flows. Snoj instead adheres to representations of world literature as a canon of works that constitute what is universal to humanity. His criterion for a work to be selected to world literature, however, is idiosyncratic. Playing in a Heideggerian manner with the polysemy of the Slovenian adjective svetoven (“world”), Snoj replaces the geo-spatial understanding of the “world” (which contemporary approaches have borrowed from Goethe) with Heidegger’s existential-ontological meaning of the “world” (the adjective svet in Slovenian also means “sacred”). By switching between different philosophical paradigms and their incompatible frames of reference revolving around the same expression, Snoj proposes that a piece of writing qualifies as world literature insofar as it creates and opens up the world as the site of being: “World literature is a world-creating literature” (69).5 Snoj’s conclusion, perhaps surprisingly, predates Cheah’s understanding of worlding in terms of literature’s “normative force” and the world-making (Cheah 2016). Created in the periphery as a compromise between the global and local, Snoj’s pioneering concept has little chance to become universally recognized. While preparing this book, I had to struggle with doubts that my colleagues in world literature studies that focus either on the canonized West 5  A similar referential shift is at work in Snoj’s reinterpretation of the expression “other,” which current discourse on globalization largely understands in cultural terms—as a distinctive feature that establishes ethnic, religious, racial, and other group identities. Snoj avoids not only culturalistic meaning of the other but also the theological and psychoanalytical ones. To him, the “other of literature that exists in the language [… is] the unspeakable.” To sum up, Snoj’s criterion of world literature is that a literary work entering the transnational canon opens up a world of being and articulates what remains unspeakable in other discourses (70). With this conclusion, Snoj’s essay comes close to the contemporaneous notion of singularity as proposed by Clark and Attridge.

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or the postcolonial rest most probably do not know. I felt a constant pressure to convince an international reader why my peripheral perspective on the worlding of a peripheral Romantic poet from East-Central Europe matters. Prešeren, who probably never will become a world classic, or Bartol, who still has a chance to conquer global movie screens, and, finally, Slovenian literature in general—all of them look so similar to famous Western authors and literatures but not different enough from them to attract the otherness-seekers. After much hesitation and reflection, I have concluded that precisely the apparent lack of priority, centrality, and otherness in my central examples complements the analysis of the literary worldsystem. Such cases of the worlding of national literatures are typical in European peripheries and semi-peripheries just as are, according to Moretti (2013: 53–57), peripheral novels in the world evolution of the genre. I seek to demonstrate this in the next chapter, devoted to the canonicity of world literature and national poets. After all, if the humanities moved from canonic high culture to the everyday or from Eurocentrism to the global south, why would the international community of comparatists not also take an interest in the European margins?

Works Cited Arac, Jonathan. 2002. Anglo-globalism? New Left Review 16: 35–45. Bal, Mieke. 2002. Traveling Concepts in the Humanities: A Rough Guide. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Bartol, Vladimir. 2004. Alamut. Trans. and Afterword Michael Biggins. Seattle: Scala House Press. Beecroft, Alexander. 2008. World Literature without a Hyphen: Towards a Typology of Literary Systems. New Left Review 54 (November– December): 87–100. ———. 2015. An Ecology of World Literature: From Antiquity to the Present Day. Verso. Buescu, Helena. 2012. The Republic of Letters and the World Republic of Letters. In The Routledge Companion to World Literature, ed. Theo D’haen, David Damrosch, and Djelal Kadir, 126–135. London: Routledge. Casanova, Pascale. 2004. The World Republic of Letters. Trans. M.B. DeBevoise. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Cheah, Pheng. 2016. What Is a World?: On Postcolonial Literature as World Literature. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Connel, Liam, and Nicky Marsh, eds. 2011. Literature and Globalization: A Reader. London and New York: Routledge.

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Cooppan, Vilashini. 2004. Ghosts in the Disciplinary Machine: The Uncanny Life of World Literature. Comparative Literature Studies 41 (1): 10–36. D’haen, Theo. 2012. The Routledge Concise History of World Literature. London and New York: Routledge. Damrosch, David. 2003. What Is World Literature? Princeton: Princeton University Press. Ď urišin, Dionýz. 1992. Č o je svetová literatúra. Bratislava: Obzor. Dussel, Enrique. 1998. Beyond Eurocentrism: The World-System and the Limits of Modernity. In The Cultures of Globalization, ed. Fredric Jameson and Masao Miyoshi, 3–31. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Eckermann, Johann Peter. 1998. Conversations of Goethe with Johann Peter Eckermann. Trans. John Oxenford. Cambridge: Da Capo Press. Frank, André Gunder, and Barry K. Gills. 1992. The Five Thousand Year World System: An Interdisciplinary Introduction. Humboldt Journal of Social Relations 18 (1): 1–80. ———., eds. 1993. The World System: Five Hundred Years or Five Thousand? London and New York: Routledge. Frassinelli, Pier Paolo, and David Watson. 2011. World Literature: A Receding Horizon. In Traversing Transnationalism: The Horizons of Literary and Cultural Studies, ed. Pier Paolo Frassinelli, Ronit Frenkel, and David Watson, 191–207. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Goethe, Johann Wolfgang. 1949. Appendix: The Twenty-One Passages from Goethe’s Works, Diaries, Letters and Conversations, In Which He Makes Use of the Expression ‘World Literature’. In Goethe and World Literature, ed. Fritz Strich, 349–351. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul Ltd. ———. 1963. Schriften zur Kunst. Schriften zur Literatur. Maximen und Reflexionen. 5th ed. Eds. Herbert von Einem, Hans Joachim Schrimpf, and Werner Weber. Hamburg: Ch. Wegner (Goethes Werke: Hamburger Ausgabe; Bd. 12). ———. 1973. Some Passages Pertaining to the Concept of World Literature. In Comparative Literature: The Early Years. An Anthology of Essays, ed. Hans-­ Joachim Schulz and Philipp H. Rhein, 1–12. Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press. Gunn, Giless. 2001. Introduction: Globalizing Literary Studies. PMLA 166 (1): 16–31. Gupta, Suman. 2009. Globalization and Literature. Cambridge: Polity. Hayot, Eric. 2012a. On Literary Worlds. Oxford and New York: Oxford UP. ———. 2012b. World Literature and Globalization. In The Routledge Companion to World Literature, ed. Theo D’haen, David Damrosch, and Djelal Kadir, 223–231. London and New York: Routledge. Huggan, Graham. 2011. The Trouble with World Literature. In A Companion to Comparative Literature, ed. Ali Behdad and Dominic Thomas, 490–504. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell.

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Jameson, Fredric. 2009. Valences of the Dialectic. London: Verso. Jameson, Fredric, and Masao Miyoshi, eds. 1998. The Cultures of Globalization. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Juvan, Marko. 2011. Literary Studies in Reconstruction: An Introduction to Literature. Frankfurt: Peter Lang. ———. 2012a. Prešernovska struktura in svetovni literarni sistem. Ljubljana: Literarno-umetniško društvo Literatura. ———. 2012b. Slovenjenje svetovne književnosti od Č opa do Ocvirka. In Svetovne književnosti in obrobja, ed. Marko Juvan, 277–295. Ljubljana: Založba ZRC. ———. 2013. Worlding Literatures between Dialogue and Hegemony. CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 15 (5). https://doi. org/10.7771/1481-4374.2343. ———. 2018. Prešeren, France. In Encyclopedia of Romantic Nationalism in Europe, ed. Joep Leerssen, vol. 1, 491–493. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Kadir, Djelal. 2004. To World, to Globalize – Comparative Literature’s Crossroads. Comparative Literature Studies 41 (1): 1–9. Kliger, Ilya. 2010. World Literature Beyond Hegemony in Yuri M.  Lotman’s Cultural Semiotics. Comparative Critical Studies 7 (2–3): 257–274. Koch, Manfred. 2002. Weimaraner Weltbewohner: Zur Genese von Goethes Begriff ‘Weltliteratur’. Tübingen: Niemeyer. Košuta, Miran. 1988. Alamut: roman – metafora. In Alamut, ed. Vladimir Bartol, 551–597. Ljubljana: Mladinska knjiga. ———. 1991. Usoda zmaja: ob svetovnem uspehu Bartolovega Alamuta. Jezik in slovstvo 36 (3): 56–61. Latour, Bruno. 1996. Ces résaux que la raison ignore – laboratoires, bibliothèques, collections. In La pouvoir des bibliothèques: La mémoire des livres dan la culture occidentale, 23–46. Paris: Albin Michel. Lawall, Sarah, ed. 1994. Reading World Literature: Theory, History, Practice. Austin: University of Texas Press. Mani, Bala Venkat. 2012. Bibliomigrancy: Book Series and the Making of World Literature. In The Routledge Companion to World Literature, ed. Theo D’haen, David Damrosch, and Djelal Kadir, 283–296. London and New  York: Routledge. ———. 2017. Recoding World Literature: Libraries, Print Culture, and Germany’s Pact with Books. New York: Fordham University Press. Marx, Karl, and Frederick Engels. 1998. The Communist Manifesto. Trans. Samuel Moore in cooperation with Frederick Engels. London: Verso. Mignolo, Walter D. 1998. Globalization, Civilization Processes, and the Relocation of Languages and Cultures. In The Cultures of Globalization, ed. Fredric Jameson and Masao Miyoshi, 32–53. Durham and London: Duke University Press.

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Miller, J. Hillis. 2011. Globalization and World Literature. Comparative Literature: Toward a (Re)construction of World Literature. Ed. Ning Wang. Neohelicon 38 (2): 251–265. Moretti, Franco. 2000. Conjectures on World Literature. New Left Review 1: 54–68. ———. 2003. More Conjectures. New Left Review 20: 73–81. ———. 2013. Distant Reading. London and New York: Verso. Nethersole, Reingard. 2012. World Literature and the Library. In The Routledge Companion to World Literature, ed. Theo D’haen, David Damrosch, and Djelal Kadir, 307–315. London and New York: Routledge. Neupokoyeva, Irina Grigorevna. 2012. Dialectics of Historical Development of National and World Literature (1973). In World Literature: A Reader, ed. Theo D’haen, César Domínguez, and Mads Rosendahl Thomsen, 104–113. London and New York: Routledge. Ocvirk, Anton. 1936. Teorija primerjalne literarne zgodovine. Ljubljana: Znanstveno društvo. Pizer, John. 2000. Goethe’s ‘World Literature’ Paradigm and Contemporary Cultural Globalization. Comparative Literature 52 (3): 213–227. ———. 2006. The Idea of World Literature: History and Pedagogical Practice. Baton Rouge: Louisiana University Press. Prendergast, Christopher. 2004. The World Republic of Letters. In Debating World Literature, ed. Christopher Prendergast, 1–25. London and New York: Verso. Robinson, William I. 2006. Critical Globalization Studies. In Public Sociologies Reader, ed. Judith R. Balu and Keri E. Iyall Smith, 21–36. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield. ———. 2007. Theories of Globalization. In The Blackwell Companion to Globalization, ed. George Ritzer, 125–143. Oxford: Blackwell. Samhaber, Edward. 1880. Preširenklänge. Ljubljana: Kleinmayr and Bamberg. Sapiro, Gisèle. 2011. Comparativism, Transfers, Entangled History: Sociological Perspectives on Literature. In A Companion to Comparative Literature, ed. Ali Behdad and Dominic Thomas, 225–236. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell. Saussy, Haun, ed. 2006. Comparative Literature in an Age of Globalization. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Schmidt, Siegfried J. 1989. Die Selbstorganisation des Sozialsystems Literatur im 18. Jahrhundert. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Slodnjak, Anton. 1952. Prešeren, France. In Slovenski biografski leksikon, vol. 2/8, 517–564. Ljubljana: SAZU. ———. 1964. Prešernovo življenje. Ljubljana: Mladinska knjiga. Snoj, Vid. 2006. World Literature against the Background of the Other. Interlitteraria 11 (1): 41–49. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. 2003. Death of a Discipline. New  York: Columbia University Press.

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Strich, Fritz. 1949. Goethe and World Literature. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Terian, Andre. 2013. National Literature, World Literatures, and Universality in Romanian Cultural Criticism 1867–1947. CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 15 (5). https://doi.org/10.7771/1481-4374.2344. Thomsen, Mads Rosendahl. 2008. Mapping World Literature: International Canonization and Transnational Literatures. New York: Continuum. Tutek, Hrvoje. 2013. Limits to Transculturality: A Book Review Article of New Work by Kimmich and Schahadat and Juvan. CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 15 (5). https://doi.org/10.7771/1481-4374.2352. Walkowitz, Rebecca. 2015. Born Translated: The Contemporary Novel in an Age of World Literature. New York: Columbia University Press. Wallerstein, Immanuel. 1991. Geopolitics and Geoculture: Essays on the Changing World-System. Cambridge University Press. Widdowson, Peter. 1999. Literature. London and New York: Routledge. Young, Robert. 2012. World Literature and Postcolonialism. In The Routledge Companion to World Literature, ed. Theo D’haen, David Damrosch, and Djelal Kadir, 213–222. London: Routledge.

CHAPTER 2

The Canonicity of World Literature and National Poets

In my view, recent debates have confusingly flattened the concept of world literature to a presentist image of global literature, in which international authors “born translated” into global English conquer international publishing industry (see Walkowitz 2015: 3–4, passim). World literature differs substantially from what one should instead call global literature. Goethe’s sketchy writings in the 1820s (see, e.g., 1973) and his celebrated Conversations with Eckermann (Eckermann 1998: 164–167), followed by Marx and Engels’s world-shattering Communist Manifesto of 1848 (Marx and Engels 1998: 39) all envisioned Weltliteratur as an epoch in the making whose characteristic appeared to be an intensified, accelerated, and worldwide interaction between languages and literatures. The original concept of world literature thus implies historicity and a specific spatiotemporal breadth, what many of its present-day students seem to have forgotten. Adequatly understood, world literature is historical both as a concept and as reality designated by this concept. Taking into account the historicity of world literature, we should bear in mind that the universality the notion of world literature presupposes originated from a particular position in the inter-state structure of the modern world-system. It came from disjointed and semi-peripheral German lands that felt to be backward in comparison with the Italian, Spanish, French, and British literatures. Moreover, it was interdependent with the concept of national literature, that is, another modern notion invented only a few decades earlier. Indicatively, the German polymath world historian August Ludwig © The Author(s) 2019 M. Juvan, Worlding a Peripheral Literature, Canon and World Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-32-9405-9_2

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Schlözer first used the word Weltliteratur in 1773 with reference to a periphery, that is, Icelandic literature (Schamoni 2008). In more general terms of the world-systems approaches, it is necessary to estimate the historical durée of the ideological conjunction that produced the concept of world literature. Based on the globalizing drive of the capitalist cultural market, the idea of Weltliteratur resulted from hybridizing the Enlightenment cosmopolitanism with Romantic cultural nationalism. The term world literature thus designates a globalizing process that, since around 1800, has established a growing system of cross-­lingual and crossnational circulation of texts. Due to Western aesthetic discourse ideologically underpinning this very process, the traveling works (original or translated) were predominantly understood as literary regardless of their spatiotemporal origin and primary function. Goethe’s metaphors comparing literature’s transnational flow with the world market are indicative as is Marx and Engels’s literal parallel between world literature (as a metonymical part of social superstructure) and the global expansion of the capitalist mode of production (see Cheah 2016: 63–65). The authors of the Communist Manifesto suggested that world literature, materially based on the world market, contributes to the global spread of Western bourgeois culture. These connections between literature and economy allow for the conclusion that the international meta-discourse on world literature from Goethe onward reflected, gave the sense, and even programmed a new socio-historical reality in which literature began to circulate across the ethnic, linguistic, cultural, and civilization borders more massively and widely than ever. The intensity and asymmetry of this circulation under the global dominance of Western literatures result from the fact that the production, mediation, and consumption of imported texts within particular modern literary systems were coextensive with the colonial and imperialist expansion of industrial capitalism, the boom of print culture, the liberalization of censorship, and the growing share of translation in the overall literary production. Hence, capitalism—with its bourgeois geoculture, nationalism, and the aesthetic ideology—has conditioned the evolution of the modern world literature ideologically and socio-politically ever since Goethe’s influential conjectures. Notwithstanding the dynamics of cross-lingual and cross-national flows that currently draws the attention of literary studies (what might result from its exposure to the globalization talk), world literature’s historicity also comprises its latent or manifest canonicity, that is, the trans-historical and normative appeal (see, e.g., Damrosch 2006; Carravetta 2012; Kirby 2012). Granted, the idea and practice of world literature are corollaries to

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the volatile fortunes of particular texts on the global cultural market and the persistent power relations that rule this market. However, world literature also epitomizes the universal measure of literary value that can either take the form of an imagined Olympian space of actual and potential works transcending their linguo-cultural and historical particularity or refer to a hyper-canonic repertoire of existing works, classical or modern, that have already been internationally acknowledged as embodying such values. The canonic function of world literature has latently accompanied the post-Enlightenment process of establishing modern national literatures in Europe. They asserted their individuality by attempting to find a proper place (be it imaginary or actual) in the emerging world literary space, especially with an eye to literatures whose positions were neighboring, regionally important, imperial, or globally dominant. As I will attempt to explain in the following, impregnating the literary life of nineteenth-century Europe with cultural nationalism and the aesthetic discourse, bourgeois ideology perpetually appealed to universal values ruling the seemingly autonomous empire of world literature.1 Even European Romantics who largely rejected the universality of classicism in the name of originality, individuality, and the distinctiveness of the vernacular and the Volksgeist (e.g., by narrating the national past and mores, emulating homegrown folklore traditions, picturing breathtaking landscapes of their country) tacitly resorted to the imagined world literary space. In it, the flux of international comparisons of literary achievements yielded a vague notion of the universal aesthetic quality that, elusive as it was, also served as a common background for assessing the individual capability of a particular linguistic community. The imaginary empire of world literature thus figured as an instance of what Mikhail Bakhtin (1990: 22–52) would call “outsidedness” (vnenakhodimost), that is, the universal Other expected to perceive from the outside and approve the qualities members of a particular community had already ascribed to works written in their language and within their culture. The outsidedness of world literature enabled actors of a particular culture to imagine the universal recognition of works ­expressing the individuality of their Volksgeist along with the works’ unique contribution to the universal sphere of beauty and the general human. 1  Cultural nationalism informed the nationalization of literature (i.e., redesigning it as the quintessential mark of national identity), whereas the aesthetic ideology led to the complementary process of autonomization, that is, establishing literature as the realm of the pleasure in self-sufficient beauty. More on this below.

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At the same time, world literature began to take a more concrete form of the international hyper-canon (see Damrosch 2006: 45; Carravetta 2012; Kirby 2012). Hyper-canonic works and authors from the Antiquity through the Middle Ages to modern vernacular literatures emblematized the universal aesthetic and ethical standard by which the individual national literatures compared their masterpieces and prominent writers. In some cases, nineteenth-century writers from European peripheries attempted to appropriate a share of the global cultural capital by intertextually drawing on hyper-canonic repertoires or imitating internationally successful contemporary authors from renowned literatures. Hence, the world literary space played the role of the outsidedness possessing universal literary norms or canonic international repertoire of classical and modern works. The newly invented figure of the national poet facilitated the link between the world literary space and nascent national literatures. According to Virgil Nemoianu’s seminal study “‘National Poets’ in the Romantic Age” (Nemoianu 2002), the institution of national poets arose in Romanticism and Post-Romanticism when the lives and works of the poets who were thought to represent the national spirit became cultural symbols of the nation-building. As it is known, modern ethno-lingual communities in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe and the Americas that came to regard themselves as “nations,” grounded their respective identities in the notion of their historical individuality. The latter was thought to result from common descent, territory, language, history, and culture. New national communities also appealed to the idea that natural law warranted their status of a collective subject of politics and, ideally, of becoming the true sovereign of the nation-state. National communities were thus in need of symbols that would establish and enhance the sense of their internal ideological cohesion and collective identity. Through their canonization, national poets made it possible for modern national communities to concretize their ideology in a shared repertoire of poetic images, narratives, and sayings. Instituting national poets, these communities imaginarily overcame internal class antagonisms, surmounted regional or dialectal differences, and developed a shared public sphere in a standard language based on the vernacular. On the other hand, national poets served the imaginary or actual self-placement of a particular nation in the world. Canonized as the embodiments of the unique individuality of a particular nation, national poets helped to face the anxieties of this nation in the competitive and conflicting international arena. The icon

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of a national poet proved that a nation—especially if deprived of statehood or the importance within the universal history—was equal to other established nations despite the apparent shortage of cultural capital. A national genius played the role of a modern classic entitled to join the postmedieval canon of Dante, Cervantes, and Shakespeare. Mostly, but not exclusively, in East-Central European and other (semi-) peripheral literatures of the Romantic and Post-Romantic period, the canonization of national poets provided the nation-building with central ideologemes. The public discourse, education, philology, editing, and literary history of the individual national movements and communities immortalized the work of such poets by treating it as exemplary and representing the national idea. Moreover, these institutions and practices gradually recast the story of the poet’s life to fit the sacrificial narrative through which the educated class committed to nationalism ideologically grounded the existence and aspirations of the ethnocentric community in the making. For their part, these poets, too, usually took part in the cultural activities serving nationalist ends. For example, they rendered national programs in the poetic register, narrated the founding myths of the newly constructed national history, praised the beauties of their country or the virtues of their countrymen, collected and rewrote local folklore, helped establish institutions and media with national-awakening agenda, spoke at public gatherings, or the covers of leading newspapers featured their texts. In poetry, they often attempted to bolster their public importance through individualized self-portraits connoting the statures of a leader, prophet, seer, martyr, or bard. Elevating their native language through quasi-­ universal aesthetic forms and forging a repertoire of verbal icons allegorizing the national spirit, history, and future, national poets addressed their readership and, through the performative force of their texts—further corroborated by canonizing practices—symbolically assisted their addressees to imagine themselves as belonging to a national community. National poets were canonized mainly during the nineteenth century as part of the process that Jernej Habjan (2019), following Max Weber, designates by a chiasmus “from the culture of saints to the saints of culture.” In this post-Protestant development, capitalist entrepreneurs, merchants, or bankers were expected to adopt the ascetic virtues of premodern saints and transpose them from religion into their daily life ruled by the invisible hand of the market. However, the secular incarnation of sainthood in the virtuous bourgeois created a symbolic lack of the sacred that haunted the restrained mimetic systems of representation characteristic of the “serious

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century” (see Moretti 2006). By avoiding stylistic excess and foregrounding the realist novel, the nineteenth century celebrated the everyday. However, this century could hardly stick to unheroic prosaics because it absorbed and radicalized the revolutionary spirit of 1789 notwithstanding the Restoration.2 The revolutionary spirit of nationalist movements thus invented a proper symbol to sacralize its aspirations—cultural saints. Unlike the premodern saints of the Church and the modern sainthood of the bourgeois, they consecrated national movements. With their quasi-­aristocratic heroism or quasi-saintly martyrdom, both expressed in the cultural sphere, such figures began starring in sacrificial narratives of their nations. In many aspects, the canonization of poets as national cultural saints proves to be a modern and secular parallel to the tradition of the ecclesiastical sanctification procedure. The latter results typically from the recognition of exemplary and exceptional virtues in the life of some tried individual and from communal reliance on her or his inexplicable power that is believed to help the lives of others. The notion of cultural saint as developed in Marijan Dović and Jón Karl Helgason’s book National Poets, Cultural Saints: Canonization and Commemorative Cults of Writers in Europe (2017) presupposes the framing concept of secular, civil, or political religion discussed since the 1930s by Adolf Keller, Frederik A. Voigt, Eric Voegelin, Raymond Aron, and Robert Bellah (see Gentile 2000, 2006: 1–15; Hammer 2003). These concepts pertain to the understanding of nationalism as a secularized and political form of religion in which language and culture take a leading role. In her book Nation and Word, 1770–1850, Mary Ann Perkins (1999) demonstrated that the discourse of the nineteenth-century nationalism in Europe—whose similarities with religion were already recognized by its contemporaries—in fact adopted Judeo-Christian symbols and narratives such as that of the chosen people to sacralize the modern social bond within the national movement or the nation-state. Intertwined with the premodern ecclesiastical religion or the post-Enlightenment civil religion proposed by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the pseudo-religious aura of the national idea gave impetus to national movements and empowered the constitution of nation-states in the disenchanted world of modern capitalism and industrialization. 2  After the defeat of Napoleon’s imperialist efforts to universalize the French Revolution, national movements adopted its principles of liberty and equality but abstracted them from class relations. They reduced them to the imagined collective body of the nation struggling for recognition of imperial powers.

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Once the poet’s nation-building legend and key texts had been institutionalized within the national community as a kind of the aesthetical lingua franca, that is, a canonical poetic language that allows for diverse, even contradictory appropriations by different classes, sociolects, and generations, they were embraced by discourses, places, and rituals of cultural memory. For several decades, the national poet’s canonical opus continued to provide points of reference to successive reinterpretations of national identity. Consequently, the national poet’s key texts often engendered a long-lasting intertextual series of adaptations, allusions, quotes, and rewriting in literature, music, visual arts, and film. Nation-building encompassed venerating national poets as cultural saints in many East-Central European countries. With their bohemian or heroic transgression of bourgeois virtues, poets recognized as cultural saints played the role of Messiah to redeem their compatriots through culture. Their lives were often interpreted in terms of martyrdom and their work canonized as exemplary (see Dović and Helgason 2017; Neubauer 2010a; Nemoianu 2002). The national poet’s private life represented the sacrifice to a bourgeois surrogate for the sacred—the aesthetic sphere. As a sacrifice to the numinous beauty of art, the national poet grounded the national community, alleviated its antagonisms, and affirmed its culture internationally. National poets incarnated the spiritual quintessence of their nations in world literature. Encapsulating the nation’s memory and linguistic individuality in universal aesthetic forms, the poet’s word was expected to become flesh dwelling among the nation as a political force. Immortalized through ritual veneration and the ideological apparatuses of the national movement, the sanctified voice of the national poet calls the nation to assert itself in the grand narrative of history. In Romanticism, the Greco-Latin classical canon had to make room for the Eurocentric canon of world literature, consisting of remnants of the ancient classics plus selections from the medieval and modern writings of successive leading literatures such as Italian, Spanish and Portuguese, British, French, and German (see Schulz-Buschhaus 1988: 52–57). Thus, in his paper on European national poets, Virgil Nemoianu argues that before Romanticism any poetic achievement was measured “by the extent to which it approaches the standards and values prescribed by a venerable and firmly reliable tradition” (Nemoianu 2002: 249). With the nineteenth-­ ­ century “emergence and/or consolidation of the nationstate” and especially among the stateless national movements, “validation of an ethno-linguistic (‘national’) group by a personal and autonomous

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literature” became indispensable, not only in eastern Europe but also in its southern and northwestern peripheries. “Reaching and demonstrating to others a certain level of intellectual and aesthetic achievement had become of high importance” (Nemoianu 2002: 249). Paraphrasing Rastko Močnik (2006: 219–226), who analyzed the ideological underpinnings of Slovenian literature and literary history from an Althusserian-Lacanian perspective, I would argue that the aesthetic use of language in literature was key to the nation-building process because of two reasons. First, the aesthetic discourse of literature represented not only an additional variant to the existing linguistic varieties (mainly dialectal or supra-dialectal) which might have already been used also for literary or preliterary purposes. With its cultivation of vernacular language through the incorporation of universal aesthetic forms, literature introduced a denaturalized standard language that appeared to be generally valid and acceptable, free from dialectal bias. As such, the aesthetically cultivated language of literature was canonized as grounding the construction of the linguistic standard, the principal medium of the nation-building public sphere that transcended dialectal diversity resulting from traditional geohistorical and administrative boundaries. Second, with its apparent universality, autonomy, openness to any content, ideological neutrality, and independence from material conditions, the aesthetic form seemed to provide to the nascent national community a common linguistic ground necessary for the representation, exchange, and intertranslation of its different sociolects and contradictory perspectives. On the one hand, the aesthetic language of literature thus enabled heteroglossia, discursive articulation of the class struggle, and linguistic pluralism within the national community in the making. On the other hand, with its autonomous forms and the mediating function, the aesthetic discourse was believed to unite the nation as a homogeneous community despite its internal societal and ideological tensions. To summarize, in addition to the print culture and the public sphere, the aesthetic discourse of literature was constitutive in the nation-building. In his comparative introduction to a series of case studies on this topic, John Neubauer stresses that “national poets arguably emerged in the course of their country’s Romantic national awakening preceded by the country’s exposure to Modernism.” He adds that they are “not unique for this region, and though they seem typical, not all countries of the region seem to have national poets” (Neubauer 2010a: 11). National poets started to play the role of an instrument calibrating the level of particular national

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literature against canonic standards of world literature, classical and modern. From among a host of literary producers, the poets elevated as national, such as Schiller, Burns, Moore, Mickiewicz, Petőfi, Eminescu, Botev, Kreutzwald, Runeberg, Hallgrímsson, Njegoš, or Prešeren, had to meet at least two sets of expectations (see Dović and Helgason 2017: 71–96). They had to intervene importantly in the ideology and politics of a respective national movement, mainly through what Itamar Even-Zohar (2008) calls “culture planning,”3 whereas their literary texts had to have great merits for the aesthetic cultivation and standardization of the vernacular and the narration of nation.4 That is to say, for the ethnic community of their native country, the work of national poets proved the international standards of their literary language, articulated or invented the national past, pronounced national longing, and envisioned the national future (see Neubauer 2010a, b; Koropeckyj 2010: 19–20; Penčev 2010: 117). National movements regarded the poets they were canonizing as modern classics that deserved to enter the European hyper-canon. According to John Guillory, nationalism invented the continuity between the great authors of the West—translated, anthologized, and included in literary curricula—and the newly established canon of national literature in order to appropriate Western cultural capital (Guillory 1993: 41–43). It may be claimed that the canonization of poets as national cultural saints functioned as a secular parallel to the sanctification process in the Catholic Church, in which grassroots initiatives to declare someone’s sainthood had to be confirmed by the universal authority of the Pope. Correspondingly, the virtues of particular national poets could genuinely represent their nation internationally only if their internal canonicity also gained recognition from the outside, that is, if the gaze of the imagined lawgiving Other 3  Culture planning includes, for example, writing or allegorizing national programs; establishing cultural institutions and media with national-awakening intentions; appearances at public meetings or on covers of leading newspapers. Hand in hand with ethnographers, antiquarians, and historians, many of the poets canonized as national partook in collecting and artistically adapting folk literature, inventing and rediscovering their homelands’ relics, and depicting heroic or catastrophic pasts. The national role of poets was sometimes recognized already during their lifetimes, not only by their sympathizers and members of literary circles but also by the media that advocated the national cause. 4  As John Guillory reminded, national cultural and educational institutions shape the standard language such as English by drawing on the existing aesthetic language of literature that has already been canonized (Guillory 1993: 97).

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confirmed the poet’s placement in the universal tradition. In the case of the nineteenth-century national poets, the position of the universal Other was taken by the emerging space of world literature, which was simultaneously imaginary (from the perspectives internal to particular literary fields) and actual (as an international publishing and translation market reflecting the inequalities of the inter-state system dominated by core countries). With their national poets, Icelandic and Slovenian literatures are a case in point. Granted, Icelandic and Slovenian literatures are geographically distant and belong to different language groups. Icelandic and Slovenian early nineteenth-century authors probably knew next to nothing about each other. However, precisely because of the absence of rapports de fait between the Slovenian and Icelandic Romantic literary cultures, their juxtaposition has proven to be a pertinent model for a comparative project that attempts to analyze European literatures as a complex system of multidirectional and transnational cultural transfers. From this perspective, it becomes clear that even most remote European literatures adapted the same matrix of cultural practices, forms, and representations to the particular needs of their nation-building (see Leerssen 2006). National poets and other cultural saints are among the most prominent phenomena of this kind.5 A comparative research of two contemporaneous albeit distant national poets, the Slovenian France Prešeren (1800–1849) and the Icelandic Jónas Hallgrímsson (1807–1845), started from the impression that they were doubles, living far apart and not knowing of each other (for Hallgrímsson, see Jónsdóttir 2004; Ringler 2002; Óskarsson 2006).6 The poets were born and died almost at the same time; both were of peasant origin and obtained higher education in the capitals of the Danish or Habsburg monarchies which ruled their compatriots; in the 1830s, they contributed significantly to almanacs published in their native languages to establish a national public sphere (Fjölnir; Krajnska čbelica); 5  The following comparative outline is also meant to encourage internal de-colonization of Euro-comparatistics. Instead of the “peripherocentric” tendency to demonstrate “regularity,” “development,” and “completeness” of peripheral literatures by relating them primarily to metropolises of the world literary system (see Juvan 2010), the attention should be paid to other marginal literatures and their mutual contacts, structural analogies, and differences. 6  Supported by EEA grants and the Slovenian Research Agency, the project carried out in 2011 led to a longer collaborative research of Sveinn Yngvi Egilsson, Jón Karl Helgason, Marijan Dović, and me. See Dović 2011; Egilsson 2011; Helgason 2011; Juvan 2012; Dović and Helgason 2017.

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they both experienced emotional turbulence and, with their benign freethinking bohemianism, aroused suspicion, pity or indignation, on the verge of social exclusion; both wrote literature in their free time and earned money in intellectual professions; both are held to be the leading Romantic poets who shaped the national consciousness; and, finally, they were canonized as cultural saints only toward the end of the nineteenth century; their monuments in the national capital were erected virtually simultaneously at the beginning of the twentieth century—in 1905 to Prešeren, in 1907 to Hallgrímsson (see Dović and Helgason 2017: 134–144, 168–184). However, a closer look—albeit based on “distant reading” (Moretti 2013: 44–49), that is, second-hand expertise and translation—shows that the contents of their work are hardly comparable. Notwithstanding their aesthetic qualities, Hallgrímsson created his literary texts on various occasions and ad hoc external incentives. Transferring semiotic material from the internationally acclaimed German authors such as Schiller, Chamisso, and Heine into the Icelandic periphery, he masterfully hybridized borrowings from European literary centers of modernity with homegrown traditions, for example, the Old Norse meters. His poetry typically sought to depict Icelandic landscapes in aesthetic settings, either bucolic or sublime and put them into the perspective of natural or national history, both the objects of his study and extensive fieldwork (see Egilsson 2011). Hallgrímsson thus differs from Prešeren not only in poetic orientation but even more in his study of the natural sciences, as well as in his multifarious oeuvre, which includes literary criticism, essays on natural history, and narrative prose. Prešeren, on the other hand, wrote poetry alone and was considered a sentimental poet of love during his lifetime. Only in the 1860s, he was recognized by Stritar and others as a Romantic classic who—following the Roman elegists, Petrarch, Byron, Kollár, and the Schlegel brothers—combined Romance and other European forms with modern existential and erotic confession, meta-­poetic reflection, and the national cause. His occasional, satirical, and jovial poems remained on the margins of his canon.7 7  From a Slovenian point of view, Hallgrímsson’s work seems closer to the Post-Romantic generation of so-called Young Slovenians, Prešeren’s first canonizers. Similarly, a variety of genres and contents covered by the Icelandic almanac Fjölnir shows more parallels with the literary review Slovenski glasnik (Slovenian Herald), published since the 1850s and addressed to Slovenian educated class, than with the contemporaneous almanac Krajnska čbelica (Carniolan Bee), which contained exclusively poetry of a rather mediocre quality (with the exception of Prešeren).

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As to their canonization as cultural saints, the opposition of a decentered and centered paradigm epitomizes the difference between Jónas and Prešeren. The Icelandic cultural saint authored a multigenre and multivoice oeuvre. His canonic role in Icelandic history had significant competitors such as Bjarni Thorarensen as the representative of Romantic poetry or the politician Jón Sigurdsson as the father of the nation. In contrast to Jónas, Prešeren’s work concentrates on single-­voiced lyrical poetry, whereas he figures as the single national poet, the only true romanticist, and the unanimously accepted founding figure of the nation. The dissimilarity of their work and cultural function is readable from the symptomatic placing of their memorials: Jónas’s sculpture has been moved across Reykjavík and come to rest in a beautiful, albeit intimate corner of the urban nature—in the park near the city pond Tjörnin (see Helgason 2011); Prešeren’s statue, on the other hand, remained on the central square of Ljubljana’s Old Town, the genuinely urban place for massive gatherings and entertainment. Here, Prešeren’s saintly image at times ceases to play the national poet role and approximates that of present-day pop icons. Nevertheless, the superficial parallels between Jónas and Prešeren are far from insignificant. It is not so much by the substance of their opuses but through their surface similarities that the analogies of their structural functions come to the fore. As Nemoianu pointed out, the institution of national poets operates on the threshold between individual national literature and the general space of the world republic of letters. Seen from the world-system viewpoint, the analogies between the Slovenian and Icelandic cultural saints appear to be corollaries of the nineteenth-­ century emergence of peripheral literary systems on the scene dominated by major European literatures whose widely spoken languages, imperial background, extensive cultural influence, and long-lasting continuity embodied quasi-universal standards against which the development of newcomers was measured. The Slovenian and Icelandic national poets appropriated the aesthetic canons of what was during that period constructed from a Eurocentric perspective as the world literature canon and the global state of modernity. Prešeren, on his part, attempted to render his poetic individuality as a modern classic: his textual structure is tectonically balanced, whereas his imagery and forms intertextually draw on the world literature canon ranging from the masters of the Antiquity to Pre-­Romantic and Romantic European poetry of his time. As shown by Egilsson (2011), Jónas’s strategy was different: he, too, embraced

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forms like ottava or terza rima but he preferred to elevate Iceland by iconizing the national landscape according to the aesthetic principles of the acknowledged European tradition. These differences notwithstanding, they share a familiar pattern: as national poets, they grounded their national literatures in a cosmopolitan horizon of Weltliteratur, that is, in the context of aesthetic traditions and recent trends that were felt to be central to all Europe. Through the figure of the national poet, the Icelandic and Slovenian educated class took part in the pan-European processes of autonomizing and nationalizing literature (see Schmidt 1989), adjusting it to the historical conditions of their imperial dependence.8 As a discourse, intended primarily for the aesthetic consumption, literature was abandoning its religious and educative functions and assuming the character of autotelic, imaginative, free, and individualized expression. As discourse that cultivates vernaculars, imbuing them with the allegedly universal aesthetic forms, semantic complexity, lexical richness, and grammaticality, literature asserted its public role and attempted to counter the dominance of imperial languages. Occupying the public sphere, vernacular belles-lettres disseminated a range of representations that the nascent national community perceived as its essentials such as Hallgrímsson’s Icelandic landscapes and motifs borrowed from sagas, or Prešeren’s elegiac narrative about the downfall of the medieval Principality of Carantania. Finally, with its media, social networks, and establishments, literature evolved to a social subsystem on its own. Paradoxically, and as the sociologist Rastko Močnik (2006) put forward, it was precisely the presumed aesthetic autonomy of literature that best served the political needs of nation-building. Striving simultaneously to the aesthetic autonomy and the national thought, the Slovenian and Icelandic literary systems aimed to help their dependent national communities achieve cultural and administrative-political autonomy within the two foreign-speaking monarchies (i.e., the Habsburg Empire and the Kingdom of Denmark). For this purpose, both national movements not only established the organizations and media of their own but also relied on and made use of the education system, cultural institutions, and the public sphere of the ruling regime. With their texts, Jónas and Prešeren cultivated their vernaculars to make them equal to Danish or German. However, both writers were bilingual and did not feel to be renegades when writing and publishing in 8

 More on this in Chap. 4.

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dominant languages. Through their poetry in Danish or German respectively, they sought recognition primarily among their countrymen and did not want to address the wider Danish or Austrian public. Radical and Romantic, their cultural programs faced public opposition of supposedly more realist and practical strategies of national awakening. Limited to smaller circles of the nationally conscious intelligentsia, they failed to arouse the interest of the wider public. Only later, when cultural nationalism conquered Slovenian or Icelandic public media, reading clubs, or national meetings, nearly the entire local population supported the canonization of Prešeren and Hallgrímsson as national poets. Their lives and work were collectively memorized not only through institutionalized forms of literary criticism, scholarly editions, school curricula, memorial days, monuments, toponymy, and the like, but also through popular culture, which recalled their works and lives in jovial anecdotes, oral histories, stereotyped images, and catchwords. In essence, Prešeren and Hallgrímsson were elevated to cultural sainthood because they were thought, in turn, to have elevated their national literatures to the level at which the national was becoming European. Thus, canonizing a poet as a nation’s cultural saint (“sainting”) implied his or her “worlding” (Kadir 2004; Hayot 2012a, b)9; that is, the intentional positioning of agents of a particular (national) literary field within the imagined universal space of world literature and their efforts to participate in unequal interactions between European languages and literatures. As Nemoianu succinctly put it: “Establishing a ‘national poet’ was a kind of shorthand, a summary of the achievements and of the profile” of a particular nation on the “Olympian plateau” of Weltliteratur (2002: 254–255). Nemoianu is silent about how and who establishes their status as ambassadors to world literature. As it will be demonstrated in Chap. 4 in more detail, this is the result of the canonization process and the accompanying critical discourse. For example, Josip Stritar’s 1866 essay, which first presented Prešeren as the Slovenian national poet and cultural saint, explicitly determines the poet’s saintly status through his position in the international canon of world literature: “Every nation has a man whom she imagines with a holy, pure nimbus above his head. What Shakespeare is to Englishmen, Racine to Frenchmen, Dante to Italians, Goethe to Germans, Pushkin to Russians, and Mickiewicz to Poles—this is Prešeren for Slovenians” (Stritar 1955: 48; emphasis added). In Stritar’s view, 9

 A detailed discussion of the concept follows in Chap. 7.

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Prešeren’s position in both national and world literature is equivalent to that of Shakespeare, Goethe, or Dante. With his act of installing Prešeren into the national and global canon simultaneously, Stritar consciously avoided older nationalist strategies of representing domestic celebrities as metaphoric clones of the established world classics, for instance, portraying a minor poet Koseski as “Slovenian Schiller.” Cultural nationalism of ethnicities dependent on western, eastern, or central European empires established ambivalent relationships with aesthetic standards deemed universal. For instance, in 1867 Titu Maiorescu, the leading representative of the Junimea literary society, accused modern Romania of copying merely the forms of Western culture without providing them with genuine substance (Terian 2013: 4). Commenting on these positions taken by Romanian critics vis-à-vis world literature, Andrei Terian draws on Mircea Martin’s recent theory of “cultural complexes.” These “emerg[e] from the comparison (constantly detrimental to the subject) with an Other,” that is, the established and universally respected Western canon (Terian 2013: 4). In Terian’s view, the “refusal to accept the peripheral role of a literature” resorts to several different strategies: “(1) the favorable comparison of one’s own writers or literature with foreign authors or other literatures, (2) the construction of a ‘national character’ starting from … characteristics which should illustrate literary excellence or even universality, and (3) the attempt to appropriate an archaic or regional literary heritage which would ‘elevate’ that particular literature” (5). Summarizing these interliterary strategies, Terian formulates a typological opposition between the tendencies toward “vernacularization” and “cosmopolitanization.” The former tendency creates a protectionist image of a strong, independent, and individual national literature, while the latter strives for “affiliation” and “acculturation” of “universal” tradition (8). Homologous to the tensions between the aesthetically autonomous and heteronomous (i.e., politically instrumental) poles of individual literatures within what Pascale Casanova calls “the world republic of letters” (1999: 60–67, 123–155),10 both vernacularization and cosmopolitanization are present as tendencies in a given literary field and the inherent 10  According to Casanova, the autonomous pole in a particular (peripheral) literary field tends to follow modern literary processes initiated by and diffused from cosmopolitan metropolises, notably Paris. Within a national literature, the autonomous pole thus stimu-

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struggle for domination. Although vernacularization emphasizes ethnic autochthonism, its very concepts and strategies, such as the cultivation of folklore, the narration of the national past, and standardization of the vernacular, result from the transnational ideology and practices of Herderian cultural nationalism, which itself is a post-Enlightenment variety of cosmopolitanism. The tendency toward cosmopolitanization, too, has its vernacular dimension, because it aims to cultivate the vernacular through aesthetic forms and thus to strengthen the interpellation and the affective forces of nationalism. It seems that European national poets involved in the politics of pre- or post-1848 national movements predominantly showed an anti-classicist vernacularism tendency, demonstrating that Romantic literature did not amount to individual fantasies and arbitrary inspiration. Nemoianu notes that the Romantics constructed “a solid pedigree of their own,” a kind of “viable Romantic alternative to the classical and the neoclassical tradition.” Their recourse to the vernacular European canon of Dante, Cervantes, and Shakespeare and efforts to recover or even forge literary relics of old indigenous traditions both legitimated the Romantic versions of the modern literary canon (Nemoianu 2002: 250). Hence, several national poets, such as Adam Mickiewicz (Koropeckyj 2010: 20), Sandor Petőfi (Neubauer 2010b: 43–49), Petar P. Njegoš (Slapšak 2010: 110), or Hristo Botev (Penčev 2010: 117–118), lean toward aesthetic depiction of ethnoscapes, creative emulation of folklore, expressive individual spontaneity, originality, historicist or antiquarian evocation of the national past, and an openly political or satirical discourse. However, in an endeavor to ennoble their vernacular and seemingly homegrown traditions, they paradoxically follow the transnational pattern—that of a pre-Romantic national bard. Exemplified in Homer, the national bard is supposed to think and speak for his imagined community, bridging the gap between its remote past and present. Furthermore, the national bard is believed to link folklore (i.e., the oral, popular culture tradition) with high literature as an elite form of modern bourgeois print culture.11 As a rule, the national poet imbues his vernacular with an aesthetic component that he adopts from lates modernity and literariness, while the heteronomous pole clings on to the national political role of literature. 11  For example, according to the canonic Bulgarian interpretation, Botev’s “poetry ‘closes the gap’ between folklore and literature” (Penčev 2010: 118). Equivalent views could be found in other literatures of the region.

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well-known literary forms emanating mostly from centers of the emerging world literary system. Through such an import, which contains varying proportions and mixtures of post-Herderian folklorism, landscape poetry, and forms of high literature (e.g., Byronism, the ode, the sonnet, the Romantic epic poem, or the alexandrine), the national poet purportedly dignifies his mother tongue and sublates its dialectal and sociolectal heteroglossia. In turn, the canonization of his literary texts thus substantially contributes to the standardization of language. In Nemoianu’s opinion, it was Germany, with Schiller and Goethe, that represented a slightly different model of the national poet. It is based on the universality of the classical tradition merged with Romanticism (Nemoianu 2002: 253–254). A more pronounced “cosmopolitan” and “affiliative” orientation toward the universal canon and the classical tradition is also characteristic of the Slovenian national movement and its national poet, France Prešeren.12 Granted, Prešeren did also write according to the vernacularization strategy: he adapted folk songs and ballads, wrote casual couplets and love poems intended to be embraced by country lads, and occasionally expressed his political and nationalist views in verse. However, the canonization process marginalized the vernacular Prešeren. It seems then, that in the Slovenian long nineteenth century, Prešeren was more relevant as the figure of a singular “national classic” whose oeuvre compensates for the apparent lack of classical and modern traditions in Slovenian and who is on par with the peaks of European hyper-canon.13 Slovenian cultural nationalism, in its backing of Prešeren’s canonical 12  Prešeren might have an exceptional place among East-Central European national poets due to his intensive intertextual drawing on the Greco-Latin, medieval, Renaissance and Baroque literary repertoires (see below; with his nineteenth-century historicism, Prešeren could be termed, somewhat metaphorically, a Romantic postmodernist), even though evocation of world-historic horizons can be found in other Romantic poets of the region as well. For example, Svetlana Slapšak mentions in this manner Njegoš’s “hermetic epic Luča mikrokozma (The Ray of the Microcosm; 1845), which was influenced by Dante’s Divine Comedy and Milton’s Paradise Lost” (Slapšak 2010: 110). Similarly, Eminescu, in his poem “Memento mori,” “attempted to rewrite in a Schopenhauerian vein the history of the decay of civilizations, from Egypt to Troy, to Rome and beyond” (Mihăilescu 2010: 91). 13  Singling out a nineteenth-century author to be canonized as a national poet and “uncritically praised by virtually all parties, ideologies, and political systems of the country” fits the general pattern of canonization as described by Neubauer (2010a: 14); however, Slovenian canonization of the national poet seems to depart from the model according to which, in Neubauer’s words, “[t]he canonization of a national poet inevitably involved suppressing the transnational elements in his poetic identity” (ibid.).

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afterlife (on this, see Dović 2010), thus preferred to affiliate Slovenians to the phantasmatic values of the dominating Other, while sublimating the resulting inferiority complex in several defense mechanisms. At the turn of the twentieth century, the ambitious desire for national subjecthood and self-assertion, blocked by realities of being a peripheral and small latecomer, finally produced a persistent self-denigrating self-image of Slovenians as hlapci (serfs), launched by the dramatist Ivan Cankar (see Žižek 1987). The prevailing cultural politics in Carniola, relying on post-Herderian conservative Enlightenment as propagated by the prominent Slovenian linguist and imperial censor Jernej Kopitar, preferred what Terian would call “vernacularization” of Slovenian letters. Struggling against this ideology, Prešeren and his theoretical mentor Matija Č op (librarian, philologist, literary historian, and critic) took up another model of relating Slovenian literature to the norm-giving Other of European interliterary system—that of cosmopolitan worlding. Paradoxically cosmopolitan and nationalist at the same time, Prešeren’s tendency to cultivate his vernacular according to the highest canons of world literature challenged the dominant ideology in Carniola that allowed only popular genres of religious, educational, and morally faultless easy vernacular reading to be addressed to the lower classes. As a bilingual literary producer,14 Prešeren developed a poetic style that, although it belonged to two socially unequal linguistic systems and literatures (Slovenian and German), encapsulated aesthetic homogeneity at the level of a personal idiom. With his poems written in the two languages he demonstrated that, at least in the modern aesthetic realm, the Slovenian language had become a de facto equal to German, the language of the Austrian state and the public sphere. Moreover, Prešeren often attempted to make sense of his literary activity and Č op’s cosmopolitan nationalism, both frustrated by backward realities, by imagining them in the space of universal aesthetic values of world literature. His 1835 German elegy Dem Andenken des Matthias Č op (In Memory of M. Č op) is a case in point. Here he depicts his friend’s untimely death in the aestheticized setting of 14  Neubauer’s comparative overview points out that this was typical for small nations of East-Central Europe: “Linguistic diversity was as central in the formation of national poets as mixed ethnic background. Several of them grew up multilingually, and narrowed down their linguistic identity relatively late, partly because some languages (e.g., Croat and Slovak) were still in the process of being standardized” (2010a: 13).

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the native ethnoscape, simultaneously letting Č op’s body and “genius” be embraced by the world spiritual space through a chain of sublime Romantic symbols (Weltgeist, Urlicht, Krystall): Der milden Abendsonne kühl’re Strahlen Vergoldeten den grünen Schmuck der Aue, Im Hintergrunde schautest du die kahlen Giganten Oberkrains mit kühnem Baue, Rings um dich rauschten sanft der Save Wellen, Die dir zu sprechen schienen: uns vertraue; Ob deinem Haupte segelten die schnellen, Weißflock’gen Wolken hin: der Freud’ erschlossen Fing an die Brust von hehrer Lust zu schwellen. Nicht ahntest du, daß deine Bahn beschlossen; Der Weltgeist sandte aus der lichten Halle, Dich abzurufen zu des Lichts Genossen Den Genius ab; im hellesten Krystalle Der reinsten Woge löscht’ er aus den Funken, Auf daß er rein zurück zum Urlicht walle. Du schiedest von der Welt begeistrungtrunken, In voller Kraft, des Schmerzes überhoben Zu seh’n die Deinigen in Gram versunken. (Prešeren 1966: 95–96; emphases added)

In his lament, Prešeren stresses both the national and international importance of Č op’s supreme polyglot literary learning, which mastered what Goethe at the time began to call “world literature”: Welch herrlichen Gewinn hätt’ er getragen, Des Wissens reichster Schatz, der nun verschlossen, Dem Vaterland, der Welt in künft’gen Tagen! Es trieb dich ewig vorwärts, unverdrossen Hast du gekämpft, bis du den Sieg errungen, Bis sich des Lichtes Pforte aufgeschlossen. Dir waren heimisch unsres Welttheils Zungen: Was Hellas, Rom unsterbliches geschrieben, Des Britten Lied begeistertes gesungen, Der Lusitanier, Spanier, heiß im Lieben, Der Italiener, Deutsche und Franzose Geschaffen von der innern Gluth getrieben, Das sprach zu dir im lieblichen Gekose

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Der Muttersprache. Im sarmatschen Norden, Wohin gerufen dich des Schicksals Loose, Hast du gelauscht des Mickiewicz Accorden, Und was der Č eche, Serbe und der Russe Ans Licht gefördert, ist dir kund geworden. Mnemosyne hat dich mit ihrem Kusse Geweihet zu des Vaterlandes Frommen, Um auszuspenden von dem Überflusse. (Prešeren 1966: 97; emphases added)

̌ had aesthetically From the above enumeratio of European literatures that Cop enjoyed and studied, we can see that Prešeren, too, was aware of the dawning of Goethean world literature. In the space of Weltliteratur, the core European traditions—Greco-Latin, Italian, Spanish, English, and French—were opening the door to newcomers; that is, to the emerging national literatures of European peripheries, including Slovenian belles-lettres. In light of this, Prešeren’s poetic language attempted to condense and resignify the canonic legacy and modernity of European core literatures. Prešeren could find these resources in Č op’s library and the library of the Ljubljana lyceum, where Č op worked as a librarian. Intertextually absorbing this semiotic material, Prešeren’s poetic voice internalized the polyphony of historical periods, languages, and cultural spaces. With this voice, backed by the universal chorus of the European hyper-canon, he was able to articulate a highly individual experience, which paradoxically presents itself as generic. This paradox allowed for Prešeren’s canonization and his constitutive role in national ideology. By and large, world literature’s canonicity was initially more or less latent and integrated into discursive practices of the literary field. Several literary protagonists of the nineteenth-century national movements strove to gain broader recognition by adopting or alluding to the purportedly universal aesthetic discourse represented by classical or contemporaneous authors that were already recognized internationally. Worlding nascent national literatures thus relied on establishing imaginary or intertextual affiliations to the international literary repertoire allegedly transcending linguistic, historical, and cultural particularity. In their attempt to meet the universal aesthetic standard and join reputable literary traditions on an equal basis, the emerging national literatures sought their place in the world literary space. Within this space, the canon of world literature was in the making. The Romantic cult of Dante, Petrarch, Shakespeare, and Calderón testifies that the international hyper-canon—comprising the

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classics of the Antiquity and selected authorities from medieval and early modern vernacular literatures of the European West and South—was acquiring regulative power that influenced the practices of writers, critics, editors, readers, and other actors of national literary fields. In its quality of the object of desire and the instance of the universal law of aesthetic humanism, world literature possesses latent canonicity that has profoundly influenced literary production. Today, more familiar seems to be its explicit canonicity, that is, the ossified and inert form of the hypercanon of great authors and works selected from all languages, nations, and epochs. Composed, reproduced, and revised world-wide through successive anthologies, book series, and the university or high school curricula since the mid-nineteenth century, the canon of world literature varied historically according to changing national, linguo-cultural, and ideological appropriations. Notwithstanding such pluralism and persistent regroupings of its margins (due to inclusions of recent authors), the kernel of the international canon, at least, was thought to rise above any spatiotemporal bias and address the humanity at large. Thus, the world literary process may well entail constant reshaping, change, and variant inscriptions of the globalized repertoire in particular literary fields (what I intend to demonstrate in the following), but it also transcends its time- and space-based variation because its semiotic sediments are kept and reproduced through the forms and contents of cultural memory. Cultural memories of literatures in various languages share contents of what counts as universal literary and human value, most notably in the form of the international hyper-canon. Ever since the 1980s, critiques and defense of the Western canon have shown that the kernel of world literature’s “eternal works” is virtually omnipresent because it is a mnemonic petrification constructed in the course of a centuries-long global dominance of white Western males (see, e.g., Lawall 1994, 2009 vs. Bloom 1995). Consequently, in addition to David Damrosch’s criterion of a work of world literature, that is, the work’s active presence in (major) foreign literatures (Damrosch 2003: 4, 15), its mnemonic durée and normative value in the global space are equally important. Works of world literature need to be remembered across the globe, which implies their long-lasting reproduction in different literary fields, the globally dominant systems being necessarily among them. Consequently, when measuring a world literary status of a particular text in terms of its active presence abroad, one should not stop at its occurrence in library holdings, the number of its translations to world languages or numbers of copies printed and sold. What is also essential to study, however, is a prolonged timeline of data such as the work’s successive

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editions over several decades, inclusions in a series of anthologies, its continuous status of a reference or object of study in the humanities, and, last but not least, a firm position in schools and curricula. Along with rewriting, retranslating, staging, film or TV adaptation, and other practices of intertextual referencing (including catchphrases and stereotyped allusions, such as To be or not to be, Faustian longing), these data testify to how deep the work in question has been engraved in the cultural memory of a particular linguistic, ethnic, or territorial community. To conclude, as a process of cross-linguistic circulation and a hyper-­ canonic structure of cultural memory, world literature establishes the normative horizon on which actors of a given literary field perceive their particular standing in relation to the presumed universality of the literary. World literature imagined this way represents to individual literatures (primarily to those that are emergent, dependent, minor, or peripheral) the Promised Land of their potential universality. It is the gateway and goal of their worlding. At the same time, the locally specific variant of the world literature repertoire enmeshed in the cultural memory and literary practices of given literature evokes metonymically the historical totality of the global time-space continuum. As Eric Hayot would say: “While the work is, in the Heideggerian sense, a world, it also shows a world, just as the world itself shows a world. Both work and world show both world and its worlding” (Hayot 2012a: 25). Domesticated through translation, adaptation, scholarly comment, and teaching, the limited selection of fragments of world literature actively present and remembered in the individual literature forms an aesthetically consumable mosaic representing the incommensurability of the global spatiotemporal otherness. Although every literary field and language have established their proper variant of world literature, the plurality of world literature’s repertoires in various cultures is always already overdetermined by Western bourgeois geoculture that has been irresistibly globalized since the nineteenth century.

Works Cited Bakhtin, Mikhail M. 1990. Art and Answerability: Early Philosophical Essays. Eds. Michael Holquist and Vadim Liapunov. Austin: University of Texas Press. Bloom, Harold. 1995. The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages. Paperback ed. London and Basingstoke: Papermac and Macmillan. Carravetta, Peter. 2012. The Canon(s) of World Literature. In The Routledge Companion to World Literature, ed. Theo D’haen, David Damrosch, and Djelal Kadir, 264–272. London and New York: Routledge.

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Casanova, Pascale. 1999. La République mondiale des Lettres. Paris: Ed. du Seuil. Cheah, Pheng. 2016. What Is a World?: On Postcolonial Literature as World Literature. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Damrosch, David. 2003. What Is World Literature? Princeton: Princeton University Press. ———. 2006. World Literature in a Postcanonical, Hypercanonical Age. In Comparative Literature in an Age of Globalization, ed. Haun Sasussy, 43–53. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Dović, Marijan. 2010. France Prešeren: A Conquest of the Slovenian Parnassus. In History of the Literary Cultures of East-Central Europe, ed. Marcel Cornis-Pope and John Neubauer, vol. 4, 97–109. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: J. Benjamins. ———. 2011. The Canonization of Cultural Saints: France Prešeren and Jónas Hallgrímsson. Slovenian Studies 33 (2): 153–170. Dović, Marijan, and Jón Karl Helgason. 2017. National Poets, Cultural Saints: Canonization and Commemorative Cults of Writers in Europe. Leiden: Brill. Eckermann, Johann Peter. 1998. Conversations of Goethe with Johann Peter Eckermann. Trans. John Oxenford. Cambridge: Da Capo Press. Egilsson, Sveinn Yngvi. 2011. Nation and Elevation: Some Points of Comparison between the ‘National Poets’ of Slovenia and Iceland. Primerjalna književnost 34 (1): 127–145. Even-Zohar, Itamar. 2008. Culture Planning, Cohesion, and the Making and Maintenance of Entities. In Beyond Descriptive Translation Studies: Investigations in Homage to Gideon Toury, ed. Anthony Pym, Miriam Shlesinger, and Daniel Simeoni, 277–292. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Gentile, Emilio. 2000. The Sacralisation of Politics: Definitions, Interpretations and Reflections on the Question of Secular Religion and Totalitarianism. Trans. Robert Mallett. Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions 1 (1): 18–55. ———. 2006. Politics as Religion. Trans. George Staunton. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press. Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. 1973. Some Passages Pertaining to the Concept of World Literature. In Comparative Literature: The Early Years. An Anthology of Essays, ed. Hans-Joachim Schulz and Philipp H. Rhein, 1–12. Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press. Guillory, John. 1993. Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Habjan, Jernej. 2019. From the Culture of Saints to the Saints of Culture: The Saint and the Writer between Life and Work. In Great Immortality: Studies on European Cultural Sainthood, ed. Marijan Dović and Jón Karl Helgason, 331–342. Leiden and Boston: Brill. Hammer, M. Gail. 2003. Cultural Saints. In Religion and American Cultures: An Encyclopedia of Traditions, Diversity, and Popular Expressions, ed. Gary Laderman and Luis León, vol. 2, 447–448. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO.

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Hayot, Eric. 2012a. On Literary Worlds. Oxford and New York: Oxford UP. ———. 2012b. World Literature and Globalization. In The Routledge Companion to World Literature, ed. Theo D’haen, David Damrosch, and Djelal Kadir, 223–231. London and New York: Routledge. Helgason, Jón Karl. 2011. Relics and Rituals: The Canonization of Cultural ‘Saints’ from a Social Perspective. Primerjalna književnost 34 (1): 165–189. Jónsdóttir, Guðríður Borghildur. 2004. Jónas Hallgrímsson. Trans. Victoria Cribb. In Icelandic Writers, Dictionary of Literary Biography 293, ed. Patrick J. Stevens, 212–233. Detroit: Thomson Gale. Juvan, Marko. 2010. ‘Peripherocentrisms’: Geopolitics of Comparative Literatures between Ethnocentrism and Cosmopolitanism. In Histoire de la littérature et jeux d’échange entre centres et périphéries: Les identités relatives des littératures, ed. Jean Bessière and Judith Maar, 53–56. Paris: Harmattan. ———. 2012. Romanticism and National Poets on the Margins of Europe: Prešeren and Hallgrímsson. In Literary Dislocations: 4th International REELC/ ENCLS Congress, 592–600. Skopje: Institute of Macedonian Literature. Kadir, Djelal. 2004. To World, to Globalize – Comparative Literature’s Crossroads. Comparative Literature Studies 41 (1): 1–9. Kirby, John T. 2012. The Great Books. In The Routledge Companion to World Literature, ed. Theo D’haen, David Damrosch, and Djelal Kadir, 273–282. London and New York: Routledge. Koropeckyj, Roman. 2010. Adam Mickiewicz as a Polish National Icon. In History of the Literary Cultures of East-Central Europe: Junctures and Disjunctures in the 19th and 20th Centuries, ed. Marcel Cornis-Pope and John Neubauer, vol. 5, 19–39. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Lawall, Sarah, ed. 1994. Reading World Literature: Theory, History, Practice. Austin: University of Texas Press. ———. 2009. The West and the Rest: Frames for World Literature. In Teaching World Literature, ed. David Damrosch, 17–33. New  York: The Modern Language Association of America. Leerssen, Joep. 2006. Nationalism and the Cultivation of Culture. Nations and Nationalism 12 (4): 559–578. Marx, Karl, and Frederick Engels. 1998. The Communist Manifesto. Trans. Samuel Moore in cooperation with Frederick Engels. London: Verso. Mihăilescu, Călin-Andrei. 2010. Mihai Eminescu: The Foundational Truth of a Dual Lyre. In History of the Literary Cultures of East-Central Europe: Junctures and Disjunctures in the 19th and 20th Centuries, ed. Marcel Cornis-Pope and John Neubauer, vol. 5, 86–96. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Močnik, Rastko. 2006. Julija Primic v slovenski knjiežvni vedi. Ljubljana: Založba Sophia. Moretti, Franco. 2006. Serious Century. In The Novel, ed. Franco Moretti, vol. 1, 364–400. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press. ———. 2013. Distant Reading. London and New York: Verso.

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Nemoianu, Virgil. 2002. ‘National Poets’ in the Romantic Age: Emergence and Importance. In Romantic Poetry, ed. Angela Esterhammer, 249–255. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company. Neubauer, John. 2010a. Figures of National Poets: Introduction. In History of the Literary Cultures of East-Central Europe: Junctures and Disjunctures in the 19th and 20th Centuries, ed. Marcel Cornis-Pope and John Neubauer, vol. 5, 11–18. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. ———. 2010b. Petőfi: Self-Fashioning, Consecration, Dismantling. In History of the Literary Cultures of East-Central Europe: Junctures and Disjunctures in the 19th and 20th Centuries, ed. Marcel Cornis-Pope and John Neubauer, vol. 5, 40–55. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Óskarsson, Þórir. 2006. From Romanticism to Realism. In A History of Icelandic Literature, ed. Daisy Neijmann, 251–307. Lincoln and London: The University of Nebraska Press; The American-Scandinavian Foundation. Penčev, Boyko. 2010. Hristo Botev and the Necessity of National Icons. In History of the Literary Cultures of East-Central Europe: Junctures and Disjunctures in the 19th and 20th Centuries, ed. Marcel Cornis-Pope and John Neubauer, vol. 5, 117–127. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Perkins, Mary Ann. 1999. Nation and Word, 1770–1850: Religious and Metaphysical Language in European National Consciousness. Aldershot: Ashgate. Prešeren, France. 1966. Zbrano delo. 2. Ed. Janko Kos. Ljubljana: Državna založba Slovenije. Ringler, Dick. 2002. Bard of Iceland: Jónas Hallgrímsson, Poet and Scientist. Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press. Schamoni, Wolfgang. 2008. “Weltliteratur”  – zuerst 1773 bei August Ludwig Schlözer. Arcadia. Internationale Zeitschrift für Literaturwissenschaft 43 (2): 288–298. Schmidt, Siegfried J. 1989. Die Selbstorganisation des Sozialsystems Literatur im 18. Jahrhundert. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Schulz-Buschhaus, Ulrich. 1988. Kanonbildung in Europa. In Literarische Klassik, ed. Hans-Joachim Simm, 45–68. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Slapšak, Svetlana. 2010. Petar Petrović Njegoš: The Icon of the Poet with the Icon. In History of the Literary Cultures of East-Central Europe: Junctures and Disjunctures in the 19th and 20th Centuries, ed. Marcel Cornis-Pope and John Neubauer, vol. 5, 110–116. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Stritar, Josip. 1955. Zbrano delo. Vol. 6. Ed. France Koblar. Ljubljana: DZS. Terian, Andre. 2013. National Literature, World Literatures, and Universality in Romanian Cultural Criticism 1867–1947. CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 15 (5). https://doi.org/10.7771/1481-4374.2344. Walkowitz, Rebecca. 2015. Born Translated: The Contemporary Novel in an Age of World Literature. New York: Columbia University Press. Žižek, Slavoj. 1987. Jezik, ideologija, Slovenci. Ljubljana: Delavska enotnost.

CHAPTER 3

Perspectivizing World Literature (in Translation)

What is world literature, after all? To my knowledge, an unequivocal answer still has not been given, although Dionýz Ď urišin first raised the question in the 1990s (Ď urišin 1992; see Domínguez 2012) and David Damrosch did the same in the next decade (2003). From canonical writings of the contemporary troika of world literature studies (Casanova 1999; Moretti 2000, 2013; Damrosch 2003), one may distill a provisional definition. According to the definition, world literature is a system that, by establishing interaction between particular literary fields and through translation, creates channels for the cross-national circulation of literary works, the reception and cultural impact of which become anchored relatively permanently within a multitude of different literary fields outside their local environment. A literary work entering world literature must find its place in great foreign literature belonging to an internationally influential country, which, consequently, is the homeland of a world language. From the above definition, it follows that world literature is structured unequally, through relationships of mutual dependence. The international distribution of each work is dependent on the media and status within globally influential countries, as well as on translations into world languages. As is known, translation is the primary channel for the global circulation of literary texts (Ď urišin 1992: 184–185; Damrosch 2003: 281–300; Eysteinsson 2006; Helgesson and Vermeulen 2016: 9). Translation not

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only connects individual literatures to transnational developments1 but also enables their access to the world space and shapes for the foreign audience the “images” of their writers, works, periods, genres, or their entire contents (Lefevere 1992: 5–9). Images of works created by translation steer their contemporaneous cross-national reception and, if reproduced in world languages during a more extended period, may even contribute to globalized social memory that informs the world literary canon as a longue durée mental structure. Since the production of translations is a subsystem of national literatures and world literature, it is itself determined by the asymmetry in the distribution of cultural capital, as pointed out about world literature by Franco Moretti (2000, 2013) and Pascale Casanova (1999). As Johan Heilbron explains, translation activity, too, knows centers and peripheries (Heilbron 2010: 306–314): whereas centers are predominantly export-oriented (more texts around the world are translated out of the central languages than out of peripheral languages), peripheries are predominantly import-oriented. It is in the translation system that the intertwining of the political-economic and linguistic-cultural factors of literary dependency is the most obvious (see Casanova 2010: 288). What is translated, as well as how and for what purpose it is translated, depends on the publishing industry as an economic activity, while the strength of the publishing industry is commensurate with the level of economic development and political influence of its social environment. Gisèle Sapiro has recently provided an excellent case study of the Parisian publisher Gallimard. With its geopolitically motivated strategies of broadening the number of languages and countries represented in its translation repertoire, Gallimard acquired a high “consecrating power … on an international scale” (Sapiro 2016: 143 passim). According to Sapiro, many international authors Gallimard published in French with introductions by renowned French writers and intellectuals won worldwide recognition through further translations and prestigious literary awards, such as the Nobel Prize, whereas the publisher was able to (economically) capitalize the symbolic capital of authors it helped to promote as international classics. 1  According to Itamar Even-Zohar (1990: 46–47), translation may even occupy a central place within a literary system in the period of its emergence (the translated repertoire helps establish the literary language and provides the repertoire of themes, genres, forms, and stylistic registers subsequently assumed by the homegrown literary production) or at critical moments of transition when the influx of innovation prevents the system from stagnating.

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In the field of translation, the economic factors interplay with the socio-­ linguistic ones. As a form of linguistic practice, literature is inevitably dependent on the relations between the dominating and dominated languages of the world. Drawing on Abram de Swaan (2001), Pascale Casanova states that languages lacking their notation system, standardization, or venerable literary tradition submit to written and standardized languages with a long literary tradition. Languages with hundreds of millions of speakers have less difficulty becoming established in the world than minor languages. More than by the number of native speakers, however, the international position of individual literature is determined by how many multilingual speakers master its language (Casanova 2010: 289–290; see also Heilbron 2010: 306). The languages mastered by most multilingual speakers are world languages. Their dominant position also depends on the economic and political power of the countries in which these languages have been standardized—as a rule, world languages are heirs to the early modern empires. The position of particular literature and its language in the world-­ system is not merely an analogy with the position of a national economy in the global one, whereas literary circulation, exchange, or traffic are more than sheer metaphors. The contiguity between a country’s position in the global economy and the global position of its culture is established by the activity of the international publishing market, with its commodity exchange based on the exploitation of intellectual labor. Eugene Eoyang measures the imbalance in the international trade in translations with a “Translation Index” (TI), that is, the ratio between translation imports and exports. It is below one in the most translated literatures and over one in the literatures that translate the most.2 Eoyang calls literatures that more frequently translate out of than are translated into foreign languages dependent, whereas he considers literatures with the opposite exportimport ratio hegemonic (Eoyang 2003: 17–26). 2  Eoyang illustrates this by statistical data for 1985 showing that Japan was a major translating importer (its TI was 11.39) while the UK and US were the biggest exporters of texts translated into other languages (their TI was 0.09); at the same time, German TI was 2.18, the Soviet (Russian) 1.27, and French 0.74. In the similar vein, according to Sapiro (2011), in modern core literatures the share of translation in their overall literary production is relatively small (from 3% in the US to 15% or 20% in France and Germany); it is higher on the margins (around 65% in Sweden). That literary traffic regularly flows from centers to peripheries is evidenced by the fact that the majority of target languages translate mostly from English—in the 1980s, more than half of all translated books reproduced English originals.

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Inevitably, the recognition of inequalities within the world literary and translation systems has caused anxieties. I would venture to claim that the center/periphery opposition has drawn criticism mainly from the intellectual standpoint attempting to think and speak for the periphery. To be more precise, the harshest have been the critics affiliated to prominent academic locations who figured as spokespersons of peripheral others. These scholars have suggested pursuing literary studies within the postnational paradigm in a manner different from the one adapting Goethe’s Weltliteratur to the heyday of globalization and its post-9/11 crisis. Adherents of postcolonialism and literary transnationalism blamed Casanova’s and Moretti’s materialist opposition between centers and peripheries for territorializing relationships between literatures and reducing them to the cultural market and diffusionism. As an unbearable consequence of the center/periphery dichotomy, authors of dependent milieus would be destined to a belated imitation and bereaved of authenticity. In the opinion of postcolonial critics, the concept of the world literary system proposed by Moretti and Casanova thus only reproduces the outdated Eurocentrism of traditional comparative literature (Frassinelli and Watson 2011: 197–204). Proclaiming a utopian ideal of “planetarity” and urging for a close philological interpretation of “texture,” Gayatri Spivak also rejects Moretti’s “distant reading” together with his application of Wallerstein’s economic world-system, on the assumption that they miss the complexity of interliterary contacts, especially on the global South (Spivak 2003: 108; see Arac 2002: 38). Finally, Jean Bessière (2010) and Tumba Alfred Shango Lokoho (2010), supporters of the liberal concept of littérature-monde, stand for those who believe that global mobility of capital and population, as well as the capacities of digital communication, render the very notion of the center meaningless. Franco Moretti’s materialist concept of a one but unequal world literary system has been rebutted by critics who refuse to come to terms with the dependent position ascribed by the systemic concept to the community in whose name they speak. On the other hand, his concept is opposed by the metropolitan academic elite, who, due to their liberal textualism and humanism, find it difficult to accept the systemic concept itself and its geopolitical stratification of symbolic impact. Critical voices were raised even against the cosmopolitan, aesthetic, and humanistic notion of world literature as represented by Damrosch’s dialogic concept of reading as an “elliptical refraction” between linguistic and culturally heterogeneous literatures of the world (Damrosch 2003: 15, 283–300).

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Damrosch’s ­explanation of the experience of a foreign text, in which the aesthetic mode of reading anesthetizes the political and cultural otherness to fashion a medium for the reader’s self-reflection, appears to export Western aesthetic discourse as a universal model of literariness. Through world literature, the radically different social modalities of linguistic practices of the Third World are compelled to adapt to the Western notion of literary art and what Arjun Appadurai calls “Eurochronology” (Appadurai 2000: 30; see Prendergast 2004: 6; Apter 2013: 57–69). Moreover, according to Emily Apter, the translated world literature canon, although intended to expand horizons of Western students, effaces the singularity and linguo-­cultural situatedness of the original texts by turning them into fragmented items of the aesthetic museum (Apter 2013: 320–329). The international publishing, the producer of contemporary global literature in translation as well as world literature anthologies, only adds to the tendency to wipe out vernacular particularity in order to achieve general understanding. In Pieter Vermeulen’s words, it is also able “to convert singularities into marketable differences, and to design niche markets for experiences that may initially seem too insignificant to count” (Vermeulen 2016: 80; see Apter 2006: 97–99). To sum up, the concept of world literature haunts critics due to its Western-centrism. In its materialist-systemic interpretation relying on the center/periphery tension, world literature is said to reinforce the cultural model of modernity with which Western capitalism has conquered other parts of the planet. Nonetheless, world literature, as interpreted from the perspective of liberal cosmopolitanism, causes no less concern. It is accused of reproducing Western-centrism by privileging global English as the language of translation, globalizing the aesthetic mode of reading, and imposing the Eurochronology to the study of global literary history. Various trends have arisen as an alternative to the center/periphery model of world literature, ranging from the substitution of the concept of world literature with other notions (such as transnationalism, cosmopolitanism, postcolonialism, or Francophonie), through the pluralization and decentralization of world literature, to an affirmation of the periphery. Pluralism claims that there is no single world literature because it is always already perspectivized (see Juvan 2011: 85–86, 2012: 213–222, 2013). With their translation repertoires and canons, the various national literatures reproduce different versions of world literature. Perspectivism assigns world literature a plurality not only as a phenomenon but also as an idea. In fact, the universality of the idea of world literature cannot hide

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the traces of the particular loci in which it has taken shape. As mentioned above, Goethe launched the notion of Weltliteratur into the European cosmopolitan community because he felt that the coming era of world literature, with its growing intercultural exchange on the European market, might help German literature obtain a more central position in the international relations. There have been many other instances of stressing a particular perspective on world literature (see Lawall 2012), such as Richard G. Moulton’s 1911 opinion that the essentials of Hellenic and Hebraic civilizations (which he regarded as fundaments of AngloAmerican culture) implied an “English point of view” on world literature (Moulton 2012: 31, 34). Similarly, Richard Meyer provided his contemporaneous 1913 book on the twentieth-century world literature with the subtitle “from a German perspective” (Meyer 1913). Today, John Pizer also emphasizes that world literature “presupposes a specific national perspective” and thus “conjures inevitably different visions, and will inspire quite different canons, in China, France, England, and Japan” (Pizer 2006: 89–90). Arguing that concepts of world literature themselves are “geopolitically or ‘semiospherically’ conditioned,” Ilya Kliger suggests that the theory of the world literary system—with its focus on Western cultural industries—results directly from Moretti’s academic placement in the US (Kliger 2010: 259–263). As an alternative, Kliger draws attention to “a second-world, or (semi-)peripheral, view of world literature” (259) such as Yuri Lotman’s semiotics, which focuses on the proclivity of the periphery for innovation. Dionýz Ď urišin, a pioneer of the theory of world literature, is another example of a view from the Second-World margins. Unlike Casanova or Moretti, Ď urišin does not confine interliterary relations to international or economic struggle. Instead, he foregrounds cultural complementarity within the interliterary communities of Central Europe, Slavic nations, the Mediterranean, or the former Yugoslavia (Ď urišin 1992: 160–172). In place of laments about lagging behind the center, he stresses the irregular and accelerated development of minor literatures (179–183). As an antidote to influence, he proposes a dialogic notion of creative reception of metropolitan patterns (93–95). However, due to the “traveling concepts” (Bal 2002) and the cosmopolitan claim endemic to theory, the place of uttering does not per se determine one’s theorizing. For example, although identified with a perspective on world literature from the global center, Moretti’s world-­system theory draws not only on the US-American theorist Immanuel Wallerstein

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(see Wallerstein 1976, 1991, 2004). Equally inspiring to him is Itamar Even-Zohar’s polysystem theory, which, placed in Tel Aviv, seems to be no less geopolitically peripheral than Ď urišin’s Slovak school of comparatistics. Moreover, two significant non-Western predecessors—Russian Formalism and (Prague) structuralism—inspired the way Even-Zohar affirms the role of the periphery in the literary process. Even-Zohar admits that at the time of their emergence, peripheral literatures rely heavily on the already established centers, thus building their repertoire and an institutional basis. In so doing, however, they do not act as passive recipients because their relationship to interference from the center is strategic and responsive (Even-­Zohar 1990: 24–25, 48, 53–72). Still, by emphasizing the acts of selection and transformation of the literary import, the dependence of peripheries becomes even more evident. Peripheral literature does choose elements from abroad according to its needs, but its choices are not free. The attractive, fashionable, and wellselling supplies on the international book market have an impact a peripheral demand for metropolitan products. Using the cross-national cultural trade, centers disseminate new patterns that elicit consumerist desire worldwide. As a result, metropolitan literary structures become an object of peripheral imitation. In the nineteenth century, for example, the demand for domestic novels “in the manner of Scott” spread across Europe, while some thirty years ago, the imported brand of metafiction helped Second-World writers, longing for the Western postmodern, to become visible to the cultured audience of their countries (see Spiridon 2005). In his typology of “(inter)literary dependency,” Andrei Terian would class the examples listed above as belonging to what he terms “mimetic literatures.” The term denotes a category of peripheral literatures that “replicate literatures written in countries on which they do not depend in any way, politically or linguistically”; their voluntary mimetism, different from the imposed mimicry of (post)colonial literatures, “often acts as a catalyst that stimulates the construction of an ethnocultural identity” (Terian 2012: 28). Stating the preponderance of diffusionist unidirectionality threatens to undermine the self-esteem of weaker literatures. Somehow anticipating frustrations triggered by his model of literary inequality, Moretti hastens to admit that it is margins that, being in the majority, actually instantiate the rules of literary evolution, and not centers: “The ‘typical’ rise of the novel is Krasicki, Kemal, Rizal, Maran—not Defoe” (Moretti 2013: 53).

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Moreover, Moretti does not deny peripheries innovation, for which he is wrongfully reproached: Cultures from the center have more resources to pour into innovation (literary and otherwise), and are thus more likely to produce it: but a monopoly over creation is a theological attribute, not a historical judgment. … The fact that innovations may arise in the semi-periphery, but then be captured and diffused by the core of the core, emerges from several studies on the early history of the novel …, which have pointed out how often the culture industry of London and Paris discovers a foreign form, introduces a few improvements, and then retails it as its own throughout Europe. (Moretti 2013: 112–113)

Such observations allow for a revaluation of peripheries that might do away with the trauma of deferred imitation. Inspired by Yuri Tynyanov’s and Mikhail Bakhtin’s respective affirmations of the evolutionary value of marginal, uncanonical, or subcultural genres (such as the parody), Itamar Even-Zohar is among those who argue that the central, representative and dominant zones of a particular literary polysystem would petrify without their tensions with and regenerating influx from non-canonized, marginalized, or subcultural repertoires (Even-Zohar 1990: 14–17). Likewise, Yuri Lotman’s semiotics emphasizes that the periphery, because of its tension with the center, produces “an excess of information” and a “perpetual reservoir of semiotic dynamism” (Kliger 2010: 266). The relationship between central and peripheral discourses within individual literary systems finds its equivalent at the level of contacts between literatures. Dominant literatures can reproduce and evolve not only due to their internal center-periphery dynamics but also because of the influence of peripheral cultural systems. The nineteenth and twentieth centuries bear witness to this fact by the international success of Nordic ballads, Icelandic sagas, South Slavic folk songs, Ibsenian dramas, Japanese haiku, Latin American magic realism, and African and Caribbean literature. In contrast to the above consolatory concepts favoring the marginal, Casanova (1999: 343 passim), Gisèle Sapiro (2016), Sarah Brouillette (2016), and Stefan Helgesson and Pieter Vermeulen (2016) all stress that the global impact of a particular work depends on the consecration procedure that takes place predominantly in metropolises. It involves metropolitan cultural elites (recognized translators, critics, editors, and writers of prefaces), strategies of major publishers on the international literary market, topical issues of public discourse and the media, as well as

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internationally renowned literary prizes. Cosmopolitan networking of peripheral writers, their mobility, and taking positions near the global centers of decision-­making further increase their opportunities for an international breakthrough. On this basis, a global city may recognize and acclaim the formal innovation of a peripheral work, insofar as the latter is considered au courant with metropolitan perceptions of modernity; the work, however, is expected to remain saturated with cultural otherness and traces of the historical particularities of its original locus (see Casanova 1999: 127–138; Thomsen 2008: 48). A text imported from the margin becomes attractive provided it oscillates between synchronization with the arts of the center and its proper alterity so that the center is unable to translate it fully into its categories. Moreover, metropolises have secured their cultural privilege due to the economic and colonial exploitation of the periphery. Parallel to Western museums, their influential repertoires have been renovated by the appropriation of the cultural heritage of the Third-­World cultures (see Apter 2013: 325), by attracting outstanding authors from “exotic” milieus, as well as by the assimilation of distant poetics. In the metropolises, these have often been made to evoke otherness anonymously, without being reimbursed for refreshing the aesthetic pleasures of the West with the authorial function in the world canon. Thus, the imparity within the world literary system corresponds to the division Vladimir Biti observes in cosmopolitanism between the “agencies … entitled to conduct the dialogue of equals, and the non-political enablers, excluded from this dialogue in order to procure its prerequisites” (Biti 2016: 1 passim). Galin Tihanov’s recent observation is a case in point. Writing on the existence of minor literatures, Tihanov points out that peripheral Slavic literatures, such as Bulgarian, first attracted the attention of the Western core in the context of the post-Enlightenment “anthropological curiosity” for folklore—that is, a per definitionem anonymous, unauthored creativity of a collective body. In Tihanov words, this interest for European margins “was lifting entire ethnic communities from the obscurity of mere exoticism to that of benign cultural insignificance within the emerging framework of shared European values” (Tihanov 2014: 173). Consequently, considered unable to present a universally valid message, Bulgarian culture entered Europe with the translation of its specific folklore to provide further exciting details to a post-Herderian cosmopolitan gaze. Tihanov underlines that translating a peripheral folklore in the West represents “an asynchronic adoption, where cultural forms long gone are domesticated

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once again as a manifestation of anonymous (and thus already softened) exoticism; folklore reveals a previous archaic stage of cultural evolution that cannot be sustained, or indeed, recommended any longer in the West” (Tihanov 2014: 173). In addition to the affirmation of the periphery, the opposition to Eurocentric diffusionism resulted in highlighting interliterary contacts between the peripheries. According to Pier Paolo Frassinelli and David Watson, literary traffic between the regions surrounding the Indian Ocean circulates not only through the global centers but also direct exchanges between the margins (Frassinelli and Watson 2011: 206). Granted, it is hardly possible to deny that the waves emanating from the cores shape the global physiognomy of literature, but regional cultural watersheds and capillary osmosis between neighboring semiospheres play a no less important role in the structuring of the world literary system. A nineteenthcentury episode I am going to discuss in the seventh chapter may serve as a case in point. In the context of the 1833 language and political controversy called the “Slovenian Alphabet War,” the literary historian and philologist Matija Č op commented at length on the review of the Slovenian poetic almanac Krajnska čbelica that a prominent Czech poet František L. Č elakovský (1799–1852) had published in 1832  in the Prague journal Č asopis českého Museum. Č elakovský’s sample translations and praise of France Prešeren’s poetry as an achievement that, speaking to a broad community of Slavdom, transcends backward conditions of its home literature represented a foreign (i.e., international) argument that Č op made use of to support his Romantic and cosmopolitan version of Slovenian cultural nationalism. The Slovenian-Czech Romantic alliance forged by criticism and translation was an instance of interliterariness through which, in the Austrian Empire, three types of literary systems emerged concurrently along with their respective centers and subcenters (Vienna, Prague, and Ljubljana). In addition to the nascent modern national literatures and the coming epoch of world literature, a regional literary circuit among literatures in Slavic languages came into being. Regional interliterary relations of the kind established what Ď urišin’s school of comparative literature terms interliterary communities and centrism. Ideologically based solidarity among literatures related by linguistic kinship and the same rulers served political needs—mutual support of stateless nations in their strivings for recognition and autonomy within the Habsburg Empire (see Tihanov 2014: 175–176).

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Furthermore, the sources of international currents are not exclusive to established metropolises. The “temporary subcenters” that Mads Rosendahl Thomsen writes about (2008: 33–60) are less influential in terms of authors and emanate influence into their proximity for shorter periods than do large metropolises. Nonetheless, they may be temporarily more influential. Thus, from 1860 to 1880, a European echo was aroused by Russia’s Turgenev, Tolstoy, and Dostoevsky; between 1880 and 1900, by Scandinavia’s Ibsen, Strindberg, Hamsun, Jacobsen, and Brandes; while, at the turn of the twentieth century, this role was taken by Viennese Modernism (Thomsen 2008: 34–39). In their verbal commitment to the symbolic elimination of global literary inequality, the approaches I have listed so far remind of Freudian denial (Verleugnung). Multicultural humanism, textualism, and liberal cosmopolitanism adopt the deceptive view that texts move freely, and that they can be attributed global importance irrespective of their origin, the pressures of the economic and political system, and the mechanisms of the international publishing industry. As a system that has evolved from the end of the eighteenth century until the present day, world literature is a relevant analytical category. In my opinion, it should be accepted, as it helps us to understand the very economic, political, and linguistic-cultural overdetermination of global interliterary exchange. The asymmetries of the global literary circuit are structurally (but not geographically) analogous to the economic division of the central, semi-peripheral, and peripheral countries of world capitalism. The role of an intermediary between the global economic and literary systems goes to the international book market (see Steiner 2012) and the world-system of translation, which are overdetermined by the geopolitical status and historical prestige of world languages. The relationship between center and periphery is both reversible and transitive: every center was once a periphery, a periphery constitutes a center as much as the opposite is true, a center can change to a periphery and vice versa, a periphery may become a (sub)center. In his seminal paper “Do ‘Minor Literatures’ Still Exist,” Galin Tihanov gives more historical precision to the center/periphery opposition that Moretti and Casanova themselves already treat historically—that is, as pertaining to the modern world literary system or space that began to evolve in the eighteenth century together with the international book market. The term ‘world literature’ has been around for almost two centuries, but we still do not know what world literature is … Perhaps, because we keep

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collapsing under a single term two distinct world literatures: one that precedes the eighteenth century—and one that follows it. The ‘first’ Weltliteratur is a mosaic of separate, ‘local’ cultures …. The ‘second’ Weltliteratur (which I would prefer to call world literary system) is unified by the international literary market. (Moretti 2013: 134–135)

Although Moretti underestimates regional coherence of literary circulation in premodern and early modern world-systems, his distinction between two historical types of world literature is pertinent. What Tihanov adds to the notion of peripheral or minor literatures within the modern world literary system (whose infrastructure is an international literary market) is his observation that peripherality comes into existence (in Europe) only as a byproduct of Western modernity: The true history of ‘minor literatures’ in the sense of small and poor relatives of the mainstream European literatures commences only with the end of the ‘exotic phase’ and the arrival of the more or less synchronized literary movements of the fin-de-siècle and later the avant-garde, the many isms (Symbolism being one of the most recognizable such phenomena) which begin to coordinate the map of literary Europe and entangle the smaller literatures of the Balkans (and of East-Central Europe) into a larger landscape of shared conventions and styles. (Tihanov 2014: 173–174)

Let me conclude with a case study on an innovative author from the periphery and his difficult and lingering posthumous way toward consecrating centers of world literature. The author under consideration perfectly fits the pattern Tihanov describes as pertaining to the period in which minor literatures of East-Central Europe synchronized with Western modernist isms. In his short life, the Slovenian modernist poet Srečko Kosovel (1904–1926) did not witness any published collection of his poems, while his landmark poetic “constructions” of the 1920s remained mostly unknown until 1967 when their publication astonished Slovenian neo-avant-garde circles. Since Kosovel did not succeed to segment his abundant, imbalanced, and heterogeneous oeuvre by organizing it in a succession of collections, literary history—dazzled by the variety of his styles and forms—ended up in an aporia regarding its periodization. Kosovel almost synchronically wrote in the styles of lyrical Impressionism and Symbolism, Expressionist catastrophism, and revolutionary Constructivism. Whereas his poetic works that followed traditional conventions of the lyrical discourse gained full recognition after Kosovel’s death, his avant-garde constructions published in 1967 were a discovery

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that shook the image of Kosovel as a subtle lyrical poet of the Karst region and an ethically committed expressionist seer of the downfall of the West. Although being a young and unrecognized poet writing in a minor language of minor literature, Kosovel was keen to address global literary-­artistic and political conflicts, attempting to bring into line his essayistic and poetic work with transnational modernist currents. Primarily, he responded to the troubled condition of Slovenian literature, whose mainstream was languid in its provincial bourgeois complacency, although the nation, divided between the four states (Italy, Austria, Hungary, and Yugoslavia), found itself exposed to the pressures of Italian fascism in the Littoral region and an increasingly authoritarian rule within the boundaries of the Yugoslav Kingdom. In addition to his indigenous space, Kosovel’s poetry interiorized transnational chronotopes of the emerging crisis of global capitalism spanning India, Russia, the Balkans, and America. In 1924, he thus daringly proclaimed his creative work to be “mine, Slovenian, modern, European and everlasting” (Kosovel 1977: 320). Kosovel and his circle frequented public and university libraries where they carefully studied the available coverage of European avant-garde, particularly Balkan Zenithism, Italian Futurism, Russian Constructivism, German Expressionism, and transnational Dadaism. With their holdings stemming partly from what Venkat Mani calls “bibliomigrancy” (Mani 2012), local libraries functioned as the hubs of world literature and heterotopias through which a marginal from minor literature was able to get access to the network of the world’s cultural spaces and actors (see Nethersole 2012). As a modernist cosmopolitan from the Central European “in-between peripherality” (Tötösy de Zepetnek 1999), Kosovel crossbred avant-garde styles with which he became familiar through his extensive reading. Using the citation fragments of contemporary politics, science, art, and economics, Kosovel’s poetic texts mingle the local sense of place with global scenes marked by the proximity of the October Revolution, the ascendance of totalitarianism, and the crisis of the capitalist democratic order. To take an example, in his poetic construction “Ljubljana is sleeping,” Kosovel juxtaposes the local and the global, the nationally particular (represented, symptomatically, by the newspaper title) and the universally world-historical, the private and the public. The poet’s love discourse clashes with political visions, artistic reminiscence flanks the Biblical imaginary of the deluge, close-ups of the parochial urban life in Ljubljana confront the panoramas of the Untergang of Western civilization, while petty-bourgeois inertia finds its counterpoint in the coming of “new humanity” radiating revolutionary energy:

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In the red chaos the new humanity is coming! Ljubljana is sleeping. Europe is dying in a red light. All telephones have been cut. O, but there’s the cordless one! A blind horse. [Your eyes are like those in Italian paintings.] White towers are rising from brown walls. A deluge. Europe is stepping into a tomb. We are coming with the hurricane. With poisonous gases. [Your lips are like strawberries.] Ljubljana is sleeping. The tram conductor is sleeping. In the Europa Cafe they are reading the Slovenian Nation. A rattle of billiard balls. (Kosovel 2008: 101; transl. by Bert Pribac and David Brooks)

The very space of Kosovel’s text sublates the world-systemic opposition, center vs. periphery, in which the poet as an actor in the Slovenian literary field found himself caught. Aware of the center/periphery divide, Kosovel’s text transcends it by dramatizing the contrasts this opposition produces in his environment. Kosovel adopts a poetic metaposition that can grasp the global from the emotional perspective typical of peripheral locality. As an alternative to the bourgeois metropolises and the literary mainstream, European avant-gardists generally created their transnational networks and promoted their proper hubs, such as Zurich, Berlin, Petersburg, Prague, Milan, Trieste, Belgrade, and Zagreb (see Dović 2016). In the constellation of the European avant-gardes, the Slovenian cultural space in the time of Kosovel had not yet boasted a center from which Kosovel, with his original contributions, could actively address at least the Central European or Balkan regions. Unlike Ljubomir Micić (1895–1971), a Yugoslav Zenithist, Kosovel failed to join any transnational avant-garde network (see Dović 2011, 2012: 306–307, 315–317, 2016). He communicated with the global modernist initiatives solely in the privacy of his minority language, in his unpublished manuscripts.

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Kosovel’s poetic singularity arose in the copresence of heterogeneous poetics. Such irregularity is impossible to affix firmly in the scheme of a belated following the regular development driven by central literatures exclusively. The discourse of Modernism and the avant-gardes was polycentric and globally paratactic, with various directions simultaneously intertwining and mutually permeating at an accelerated pace (see Eysteinsson and Liska 2007: 1–3; Friedman 2007, 2015). I agree with Fredric Jameson’s critique of the assumption that there exists “a norm for the development of modernism and its aesthetics” or “some master evolutionary line from which each of these national developments can be grasped as a kind of deviation” (Jameson 2002: 182). He recalls Marx’s description of capitalism according to which “there is no ‘basic’ historical paradigm, all the paths of capitalist development are unique and unrepeatable. From the perspective of Marxian dialectics, the very universality of Modernism, too, is enacted only through its particulars, all of them ‘specific and historically unique’” (Jameson 2002: 183). The coexistence and interlocking of several stylistic directions can, therefore, be seen not only as Kosovel’s youthful quest for personal expression but also as a symptom of global modernism: its hybridity. Kosovel’s acceptance into the hyper-canon of world literature is difficult to imagine due to Slovenia’s weak participation in the global distribution of cultural capital, its economic semi-peripherality, and meager influence in international politics. If the opposite were the case, Slovenian writers would stand a better chance of being catapulted into the world. Otherwise, writers from minor literatures may win international recognition due to contingent circumstances and temporary niches on the book market, such as the need for an authentic experience or testimony of the critical events that occupy global media (e.g., the collapse of socialism, the wars in the Balkans, refugee crisis). The first obstacle to Kosovel’s active presence abroad is, of course, his native language. Spoken by roughly 2.5 million people worldwide, the Slovenian language allows for a minimal audience, especially if we take into account Sarah Brouillette’s remark that engaging in writing, circulating, and reading literature on the national or global scale is an elitist activity (Brouillette 2016). The problem is that language is central to poetry and, compared to prose fiction and drama, renders its translatability difficult or even impossible. The argument of untranslatability that Emily Apter (2013) uses against world literature is valid, sensu stricto, only with regard to the symbolic position of the translated authors; the connotations their texts prompt in the audience depend

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on their embeddedness in a particular semiosphere (culture). Therefore, no translation can reproduce a semiosis equivalent to that of the original text in his home tradition and social context. In the same vein, Kosovel, who, from the inner perspective of the Slovenian literary field, represents today the pinnacle of modern poetry, is unlikely to evoke equivalent associations in any translation or foreign literary system. The first French translation of Kosovel belonged to the poet Marc Alyn who printed it in 1965 in the prestigious collection Poètes d’aujourd’hui (Kosovel 1965). It was in Alyn’s translation (and not in the original) that Kosovel’s most radical poetic constructions appeared in public for the first time. A series of German translations of the selections of Kosovel’s poetry by minor publishers follows from the Munich edition of his avant-garde Integrals (Kosovel 1976), whereas English book publications in the US and the UK start only with Wilhelm Heiliger’s translation of 1989 (Kosovel 1989). However, among Kosovel’s existing book translations into major languages (eight in English, one in French, three in Spanish, thirteen in German, twenty-seven in Italian), no major international publisher has included Kosovel in its program so far. On the other hand, Slovenian translators, editors, promoters, and publishers have played a vital role in persistent attempts to make Kosovel known internationally. Moreover, symptomatic of the functioning of the global literary system is the marketing strategy one can recognize on the cover of Kosovel’s selection The Golden Boat (Kosovel 2008), translated by Bert Pribac and David Brooks. Here, Kosovel features as the “Slovenian Rimbaud.” In the end, the international promotion of a peripheral poet has to rely on the consecrating power of a star in the canonical constellation of world literature. The reader is invited to discover parallels with the opus deemed epochal and of central value (see Thomsen 2008: 139). To conclude, Kosovel’s case confirms my observation that the asymmetric structure of the modern world literary system reflects the economic, political, and linguistic-­cultural overdetermination of the global interliterary exchange.

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Meyer, Richard. 1913. Die Weltliteratur im 20. Jahrhundert. Vom deutschen Standpunkt aus betrachtet. Stuttgart: DVA. Moretti, Franco. 2000. Conjectures on World Literature. New Left Review 1: 54–68. ———. 2013. Distant Reading. London and New York: Verso. Moulton, Richard. 2012. The Unity of Language and the Conception of World Literature. World Literature the Autobiography of Civilization (1911). In World Literature: A Reader, ed. Theo D’haen, César Domínguez, and Mads Rosendahl Thomsen, 28–35. London and New York: Routledge. Nethersole, Reingard. 2012. World Literature and the Library. In The Routledge Companion to World Literature, ed. Theo D’haen, David Damrosch, and Djelal Kadir, 307–315. London and New York: Routledge. Pizer, John. 2006. The Idea of World Literature: History and Pedagogical Practice. Baton Rouge: Louisiana University Press. Prendergast, Christopher. 2004. The World Republic of Letters. In Debating World Literature, ed. Christopher Prendergast, 1–25. London and New York: Verso. Sapiro, Gisèle. 2011. Comparativism, Transfers, Entangled History: Sociological Perspectives on Literature. In A Companion to Comparative Literature, ed. Ali Behdad and Dominic Thomas, 225–236. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell. ———. 2016. Strategies of Importation of Foreign Literature in France in the Twentieth Century: The Case of Gallimard, or the Making of an International Publisher. In Institutions of World Literature: Writing, Translation, Markets, 143–159. Eds. Stefan Helgesson and Pieter Vermeulen. New York: Routledge. Shango Lokoho, Tumba Alfred. 2010. Edouard Glissant et la problématique du centre. In Histoire de la littérature et jeux d’échange entre centres et périphéries: Les identités relatives des littératures, ed. Jean Bessière and Judit Maár, 151–168. Paris: Harmattan. Spiridon, Monica. 2005. Kronika napovedane smrti: postmodernizem. Primerjalna književnost 28 (1): 1–13. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. 2003. Death of a Discipline. New  York: Columbia University Press. Steiner, Ann. 2012. World Literature and the Book Market. In The Routledge Companion to World Literature, ed. Theo D’haen, David Damrosch, and Djelal Kadir, 316–324. London: Routledge. de Swaan, Abram. 2001. Words of the World: The Global Language System. Cambridge: Polity. Terian, Andrei. 2012. Is There an East-Central European Postcolonialism? Towards a Unified Theory of (Inter)Literary Dependency. World Literature Studies (Bratislava) 4 (3): 21–36. Thomsen, Mads Rosendahl. 2008. Mapping World Literature: International Canonization and Transnational Literatures. New York: Continuum.

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Tihanov, Galin. 2014. Do ‘Minor Literatures’ Still Exist? The Fortunes of a Concept in the Changing Frameworks of Literary History. In Reexamining the National-Philological Legacy: Quest for a New Paradigm? ed. Vladimir Biti, 169–190. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Tötösy de Zepetnek, Steven. 1999. Configurations of Postcoloniality and National Identity: Inbetween Peripherality and Narratives of Change. The Comparatist: Journal of the Southern Comparative Literature Association (Virginia Commonwealth University) 23: 89–110. Vermeulen, Pieter. 2016. On World Literary Reading: Literature, the Market, and the Antinomies of Mobility. In Institutions of World Literature: Writing, Translation, Markets, ed. Stefan Helgesson and Pieter Vermeulen, 79–92. New York: Routledge. Wallerstein, Immanuel. 1976. The Modern World System. In The Modern World System: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century, 229–233. New York: Academic Press. ———. 1991. Geopolitics and Geoculture: Essays on the Changing World-System. Cambridge University Press. ———. 2004. World-Systems Analysis: An Introduction. Durham in London: Duke University Press.

CHAPTER 4

The Birth of National Literature from the Spirit of the Classical Canon

Canon and Representation In the broadest sense of the term, there exists an infinite number of canons. Everyone has a list of the books for a solitary island, every historical period, nation, or civilization appeals to its corpus of sacred or eminent writings, dominant and subjugated classes make use of their respective norm-giving repertoires and counter-repertoires, every artistic trend creates its proper register of most valuable precursors and allies. From such a perspective, canons appear to be sets of texts selected to figure as measures of values and embodiments of preferences that are thought to inform the lives and deeds of individuals or communities. Contrary to the pluralistic understanding of canons, notorious expressions like the Western canon or the national canon indicate a much more uniform, totalizing variety of canonicity. In this case, the canonic selection is a collective process (see Assmann and Assmann 1987; Guillory 1993; Cornea 2000). What is selected as representative results from an unpredictable compromise between the popular vote (many of today’s classics found favor with readers and spectators), the ongoing critical and academic acclaim (visible in prestigious literary awards, celebratory reviews, professional essays, textual criticism, and literary history), and, finally, the consecrating gestures of the ruling political power. Through these acts, the authorities and their transmissions in the literary field position their favorite writers close to the centers of symbolic authority or ideological influence during their lifetime or posthumously. Several © The Author(s) 2019 M. Juvan, Worlding a Peripheral Literature, Canon and World Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-32-9405-9_4

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options for a politically conditioned consecration exist: the authors entering the canon may be ennobled, awarded the title poeta laureatus or membership in the national academy of arts, they may take up prominent public offices, their public word may be believed to have a particular weight, or they become national icons only when they die. As national icons, they provide a fixed point of reference to the posterior political discourse. Composed of authors and works chosen in the name of the community, the hegemonic sort of canon is meant to oblige the entire nation, culture, or civilization notwithstanding their internal frictions, heterogeneity, and contradictions. For instance, it would be interesting to learn how Shakespeare defines the identities of Third-World migrant workers who, as a low-cost labor force, enable the reproduction of Western high culture along with its Elizabethan icon. As normative constructions underpinning dominant ideologies and helping to gauge the current artistic production, literary canons of the hegemonic kind exceed their textual presence within the literary field. With their quasi-universal, transcendental perspective encompassing the nation, civilization, or similar imaginary totalities, literary canons are often evoked to give meaning, evaluate, or justify particular social roles and practices inside and outside the literary. In a given historical period, the texts that the community recognizes as exemplifying their ideological tenets and goals are incorporated into to the old norm-giving corpus while the latter may also change its composition, accents, and interpretation in order to adapt to significant changes of mentality. The relative permanence of the exemplary selection depends on the successive popular and critical editions of primary texts, the growing body of their interpretations, their inclusion in anthologies and textbooks, as well as on widespread allusions to their prominent characters, images, motives, or phrases. The reproduction of the canon would not be possible without the mediation of commentary and interpretation. Mainly institutionalized, the interpretative discourse bridges the temporal gap between the primary historical conjuncture from which a text arose before its canonization and each and every posterior conjuncture which reuses its canonicity. Combining the received knowledge with contemporary frames of reference and topical terms, commentary and interpretation keep reinventing the universal centrality of canonic works. The exemplary textual corpus mediated this way addresses the reading public with the help of ideological apparatuses and ritualized practices of cultural memory; the school plays a pivotal role.

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With this in mind, it is difficult to ascertain to what degree a national literary canon is instrumental to national ideology. On the one hand, the nineteenth-century national movements apparently considered their literature and classics the backbone of their collective body, while, on the other hand, national poets and their masterpieces were, in fact, often reduced to a rhetorical ornate through which nationalist politicians displayed their patriotic literacy (see Dović and Helgason 2017: 9–96). Similar to canons of world literature (see Damrosch 2006; Carravetta 2012), national corpora of representative texts consist of few allegedly timeless masterpieces safely deposited in the core and more extensive, the historically variable repertoire on the margins. What glues this constellation together, negotiating its temporal variation in terms of hierarchy, focus, and prominence, is a persistent meta-discourse composed of commentary, interpretation, and intertextual reference. For decades, canonizing discourses circulate through national institutions, such as education, publishing, theater, university, academy, and public media. National canonic repertoire and the accompanying meta-discourse are regularly recalled on public holidays and at other communal rituals in order to strengthen collective belonging to the tradition and refurbish the topoi of cultural memory. Continually adapting to the changes of dominant ideologies, the canon provides prototypes and measures of grammaticality, eloquence, stylistic perfection, literariness, genericity, and themes deemed nationally relevant. With its supply of emblematic models, the national literary canon is thus able to proliferate the aesthetic, ethical, or cognitive ideals that are central to the community; in this way, canon recycles essential ideologemes, such as the notion of the nation. Although national literary canons usually represent what a particular national community finds representative, they may themselves become the subject of representation. In Slovenian poetry from the Enlightenment to Post-Romanticism, for instance, one may trace a thread of self-referential poetic metatexts that depict poetry in the course of an ethnocentric canon formation. These meta-poems depict models, ideals, goals, and strategies of canonization. Toward the end of the eighteenth century, they show how literary canon in Slovenian literary language was imagined as a goal. Around the mid-nineteenth century, meta-poems allegorize how the national classic was acquiring contents and structure while the emerging literary system1 in Slovenian evolved toward a twofold autonomy—the 1

 On the concept of literary emergence, see Domínguez 2006.

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aesthetic and the national. In imagining, planning, forming, and appealing to the national literary canon, these poems, significantly, drew on universal imagery evoking canonicity—the topoi of Parnassus and Elysium.

Canon and Autopoiesis From the systems theory point of view, poetic comparisons, allusions, motifs, and narratives that intertextually refer to the topics of Parnassus or Elysium illustrate literary self-referentiality and systemic autopoiesis. Practices of the kind engender elements and develop more complex structures not only out of the system’s pre-existing constellations but also through the absorption of elements and structures from the neighboring, kindred, or parent systems—other literatures (national, imperial, and those deemed universal), religion, folklore, political rhetoric, and others. In doing so, they differentiate the system from its environment, set up its negotiable boundaries, and adapt its structure to the changes of other systems surrounding it; furthermore, self-referential practices provide for the systemic internal regulation by selecting repertoires through which the system is capable of responding to stimuli from and alterations of the environment (see Schwanitz 1990: 7–66; Schmidt 1989: 29–63). Hence, the elements of the literary system, such as poetic texts containing the imagery of Parnassus and Elysium, refer to this very system and its socio-historical milieu. Literary tropes and fictional narratives thus figure as the means with which it is possible to stage the goals, conventions, texts, agents, and actions involved in inventing and structuring the system that produces these poetic devices. Whereas the poetic function, in Roman Jakobson’s famous definition, implies self-referentiality of the structural and syntactic kind (since a structural pattern calls attention to the structuring of the text), the semantic kind of self-reference—which is the subject of the present study—operates at the thematic level of the text. It takes the form of a fictional or figurative discourse about textuality, literature, style, the position of the writer, reader response, social status of literature, and similar. Literature about literature is a self-regulatory strategy that gained in importance during the Enlightenment and Romanticism when several European letters emerged as autonomous social subsystems (Schmidt 1989: 25). In Romanticism, poetry thus intertwined with a theory to reflect on how artistic high literature as a nascent meta-genre striving for ontological and axiological autonomy engendered individuality and subjectivity (see Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy 1988: 1–18). As such, ­

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meta-poetry was an essential vehicle of what Jerome McGann (1983) once termed “the Romantic ideology”: in the contingent conditions of the evolving literary market and the bourgeois public sphere, literary articulations of the Romantic ideology helped the writers to establish themselves as relevant public figures and to speculate before their readership about how their artistic work, socially marginalized as it predominantly was, transcends the contradictions and realities of their time. In Slovenian literature of the period, the self-referential poetic use of the topics of Parnassus and Elysium mostly recalled the imagery of the sacred mountains, Apollo, the Muses, Pegasus, laurel, and fountains of inspiration. Both topoi often connoted the rhythms of cultural fecundity and decline by drawing on the symbolism of the circle of seasons or day and night. The phrase slovenski “Slovenian” (or kranjski “Carniolan,” naš “our,” domači “domestic,” etc.) Parnas “Parnassus” even turned into a cliché that virtually flooded the nineteenth-century discourse on literature in various genres, ranging from public oratory, critical review, and essay through private letter to poetry, satire, parody, and epigram. For instance, Franc Malavašič (1818–1863), one of the first Slovenian literary critics, wrote about the “new dawn on the Slovenian Parnassus” in the 1840s as he referred to the another poetic almanac in Slovenian, Krajnska čbelica (The Carniolan Bee; Slodnjak 1984: 100–143). The commonplace acquires iconic, animated, and dramatized qualities in literary texts. Narratively full-blown allegories of Parnassus and Elysium or poetic allusions to them attempt not only to represent canon formation but also to endorse the social importance and canonical impact of literary discourse in Slovenian.

Topos of Parnassus, Literary Self-Reference, and the Emergence of a Peripheral Literary System The continuation of this chapter is about the transfer of Parnassian imagery into the emerging literary system. A panoramic gaze on a process taking place between the 1780s and 1870s shows that the intertextual appropriations of Parnassus and Elysium in Slovenian poetic texts were involved in broader nation-building initiatives and socio-ideological tensions. References to the classical topoi depicting chosen artists are symptomatic of the transition from a multipurpose and multilingual older literature in Slovenian lands into a modern monolingual Slovenian literature. At the same time, they illuminate the dialectical interdependence of the national and global literary spaces. The poets identifying themselves as Carniolan or

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Slovenian2 found the topos of Parnassus a universal matrix allowing them to allegorize particular problems that were arising in Carniola, a hereditary land of the Habsburg Empire, during the foundation and gradual formation of the vernacular canon. In the beginning, Parnassus signified the idea of cultural canonicity as such. Through the lens of this topos, the early Slovenian-writing literati reflected their endeavors and perceived them against the normative background of the Antiquity. Within the realm of the imaginary, rewriting of and allusions to Parnassus represented a self-legitimizing strategy through which the emerging vernacular poetry, subjugated to the public dominance of the German language, attempted to come in for a share of the “cultural capital” accumulated in the universal canon of classical Antiquity (see Guillory 1993: 41–43, 97–101). The adoption of the Greco-Latin topoi, on the other hand, allowed for the affirmation of ethno-lingual distinctiveness of modern poets who took up to produce the aesthetic discourse in Slovenian. In the Enlightenment, the imagery of Carniolan literary canon was meant to symbolically envision and encourage cultural emancipation of a specific Slavic ethno-linguistic identity within Inner Austria. Anton Feliks Dev (1732–1786), the late Baroque classicist and the protagonist of the first Carniolan poetry almanac Pisanice od lepeh umetnost (Writings of Beautiful Arts, 1779–1781), is a case in point. In the early phase of the period of the so-called national awakening, Dev poetically imagined a cultural program that starts with the grammar and vocabulary of the Slovenian vernacular. In his utopian vision, Carniolan belles-lettres, grown from a newly established literary language, would begin to flourish and, imitating the universal pattern of the Greco-Latin Parnassus, give birth to homegrown Carniolan classics. Dev thus drafted a vernacular literary system, which was emerging in the Austrian periphery, with an eye to cosmopolitan literary structures of Latinity. In the heyday of the Slovenian national movement, the topoi of Parnassus and Elysium acquired different meanings. They did not only metaphorically exhibit the cultural output of the national community but also signaled 2  Until the mid-nineteenth century, the ethnonyms slovenski and kranjski often appeared as synonyms although the latter (Carniolan) prevailed; Carniola was a Habsburg hereditary region in which the majority of population spoke the Slovenian language. The ethnonym Slovenian, however, whose usage achieved prominence after the revolutionary year of 1848, had been used as early as the Reformation period to denote the Slovenian-speaking population of the Inner Austria, which included not only Carniola but also Styria, Carinthia, the County of Gorizia, and Trieste with parts of Istria.

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its internal ideological divides. They were evoked in the debates about hot issues, such as the questions of who deserves canonization and who does not, what is the appropriate linguistic standard of the verbal art, what literature is for, which literary groups are essential to the nation, and the like. Central to these developments is, again, the figure of the Romantic poet France Prešeren, who was among the driving forces behind the poetic almanac Krajnska čbelica (Carniolan Bee, 1830–1834, 1848), a successor edition of the eighteenth-century almanac Pisanice. In his poems of the 1830s,3 Prešeren often alluded to classical images stemming from the Antiquity. When he polemicized with the adversaries of his Romantic concept of verbal art, he used the topoi in a parodic and satirical key, whereas he gave the imagery of Parnassus a sentimental and elegiac touch when reflecting on the unfavorable socio-historical conditions impeding his poetic work and Slovenian verbal art in general. His intertextual appropriation of the mythological singer Orpheus, however, foretells the figure of a national poet. In the 1860s, prominent representatives of the liberal nationalist literary intelligentsia used Prešeren’s ambitious self-portrait as the Slovenian Orpheus to canonize him as the national poet who deserves to enjoy the eternal pleasures of Elysium in the company of the classics of world literature. In parallel with the final stages of Prešeren’s national canonization at the turn of the century, the process in which monolingual aesthetic literature becomes a national institution finished: cultural nationalism perceived literature as a fundamental social bond uniting the imagined community in the public sphere notwithstanding internal class antagonism and regional, administrative-political, or dialectal divisions.

Genealogy of the Parnassus/Elysium Imagery The above narrative belongs to the European tradition in which the topoi of Parnassus and Elysium iconized cultural canonicity, artistic calling, or the state of being chosen, elevated, and collectively remembered. As is known, Mount Parnassus and Elysium are topoi of mythological origin, whose attributes have often been mingled or confused with those of the 3  In this period of Prešeren’s creativity dubbed “the Romantic classic,” classicist proportion, historicist use of Romance, Germanic, and Oriental forms, and imagery borrowed from the Western canon usually merge with modern Romantic sensibility and vernacular stylistic features.

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two other Greek sacred places, Mount Olympus and Mount Helicon. They all contain imagery of the divinely inspired, elevated artists or poets. The earliest and highly influential formulation of the topos comes from the proem to Hesiod’s Theogony (approx. 700 BC). Here, Helicon is depicted as the mountainous landscape, embellished by holy springs, idyllic meadows, and inhabited by the dancing Muses who, praising Zeus and other deities, sing about cosmogony and the genealogy of gods. Such is the setting for Hesiod’s initiation as a poet. In a self-mythologizing narrative, Hesiod reports how Muses choose him, an ordinary shepherd, to rise above the basic needs of ordinary people (“mere bellies”; Hes. Th. 1, 27; Hesiod 1914) and open to the transcendent knowledge in their possession. They not only teach Hesiod to compose poems but also breathe into him the “divine voice” together with their secluded knowledge of cosmogony, the past and the future. Having endowed Hesiod with the gift of the godly speech, the Muses committed him to eulogize the gods and award him “a rod, a shoot of sturdy laurel” (Hes. Th. 1, 31), a symbol of cultural power originating from Apollo. The symbol given by the Muses also reminds a scepter, the emblem of the secular political rule, what introduces another equivalence between the cultural and political authorities. Explaining the genealogy of Muses, the daughters of the supreme god Zeus, Hesiod points to the ethical values, charismatic power, and eloquence they confer on the chosen: next to rulers, Hesiod mentions artists as persons that possess equally exceptional virtues and powers with which they are able to control the people, settle their passions and conflicts. Moreover, the poet’s speech has a consolatory function: [H]appy is he whom the Muses love: sweet flows speech from his mouth. For though a man has sorrow and grief in his newly-troubled soul and live in dread because his heart is distressed, yet, when a singer, the servant of the Muses, chants the glorious deeds of men of old and the blessed gods who inhabit Olympus, at once he forgets his heaviness and remembers not his sorrows at all; but the gifts of the goddesses soon turn him away from these. (Hes. Th. 1, 97–100)

Mount Helicon and Parnassus, the mountain of Apollo, the Muses, Pegasus, and the mythic poet Orpheus, embody places of the sacred initiation of persons chosen by the gods as poetic transmitters of their voice and truth. Concurrently, a more mundane selection, dependent on public ­recognition of the mastery of their poetic performance, may also entail

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a privileged social ranking of poets. Thanks to their impact on their polis and the Panhellenic space, their authority may become equal to that of semi-gods, the greatest war heroes, and rulers. The motive of the poetic agon in the anonymous Contest of Homer and Hesiod from the second century AD is a case in point. According to this narrative about an imagined tournament of Hesiod and Homer,4 those who select the highest among the poets are not deities but the ruler and the general public of a polis. While watching their battle of verses (stichomythia), the exchange of tricky questions and witty answers, and hearing to the recitation of their most achieved passages, the public and the ruler can compare Hesiod and Homer during their live performance. Consequently, they can decide whose eloquence, intelligence, wit, and poetic power deserve the victory. Whereas the popular audience prefers Homer’s depiction of a battle from Iliad, the ruler finally decides to award Hesiod for his calm description of the harvest, tillage, and sowing from Works and Days. With its story, the Contest of Homer and Hesiod allegorizes the logic of canonization that takes place within the state. It shows that canon depends on two kinds and agencies of selection: the popularity among the audience and adequacy to the ideological needs of the ruling class. Moreover, the Contest of Homer and Hesiod illustrates attributes of canonicity, such as literary awards, memorials devoted to the cult of poets, and the tendency of communities to arrogate celebrated poet to themselves. Contrary to the imagery of Helicon or Parnassus that symbolizes the origins of canonicity and the act of being chosen to speak the divine ­language of poetry, Elysium figures as a topos allegorizing the posthumous collective memory of persons who entered the canon because of their everlasting importance to the state or community. Elysium differs from the underworld of the dead ruled by the god Hades, in that it has idyllic, heavenly features and hosts the immortal heroes. Fragmentary depictions of such a place find their place in Homer’s Odyssey (IV, 516–519) and Hesiod’s Works and Days:

4  Created in the mixture of prose and verse during the rule of the emperor Hadrian (AD 117–138), this Greek narrative rewrites an older tradition going back to the sophist Alcimadas’s work Mouseion (fourth century BC); its origin is an episode from Works and Days, where Hesiod writes how he won a poetry contest (without mentioning Homer). He was awarded a tripod, which he later dedicated to the Muses of Mount Helicon.

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But to the others father Zeus the son of Cronos gave a living and an abode apart from men, and made them dwell at the ends of the earth. And they live untouched by sorrow in the islands of the blessed along the shore of deep swirling Ocean, happy heroes for whom the grain-giving earth bears honey-­ sweet fruit flourishing thrice a year, far from the deathless gods, and Cronos rules over them; for the father of men and gods released him from his bonds. And these last equally have honor and glory. (Hes. WD 1, 167–173; Hesiod 1914)

The motive of Elysium received classical formulation only in the sixth volume of Virgil’s Aeneid (approx. 23 BC). Located in the underground, across from Tartarus, the place of condemned souls, Elysium boasts the features of an ideal landscape (“long extended plains of pleasure,” “beneath a laurel shade”) populated by the immortals (“happy souls” around the mythic poet Orpheus, the “Thracian bard”). Heroes, priests, poets, and inventors that are deemed central to the existence and prosperity of their country are enjoying themselves in various ways: “Their airy limbs in sports they exercise, […] / some in heroic verse divinely sing; / others in artful measures led the ring”; “Some cheerful souls were feasting on the plain; / Some did the song, and some the choir maintain.” Canonized as central figures of the country, they are remembered and venerated: Here patriots live, who, for their country’s good, In fighting fields, were prodigal of blood: Priests of unblemish’d lives here make abode, And poets worthy their inspiring god; And searching wits, of more mechanic parts, Who grac’d their age with new-invented arts: Those who to worth their bounty did extend, And those who knew that bounty to commend. The heads of these with holy fillets bound, And all their temples were with garlands crown’d. (Virgil, Aeneid VI)

According to Bettina Bosold-DasGupta, it was in Roman literature (Virgil, Eclogue VI; Statius, Thebaid VI, 355–367) that Parnassus began to replace Helicon and Olympus as the dwelling of the Muses and Apollo, whereas Helicon continued to figure as the site of poetic inspiration surrounded by mythical personifications of the arts. Bosold-DasGupta claims that the present commonplace association of Apollo, Muses, and the inspired artists with Parnassus emerged from a relatively meager tradition

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stemming from the Late Antiquity. The tradition continued with few medieval commentaries and encyclopedic compilations to flourish only in the fourteenth century when poetry came to be regarded as comparable to theology. To Dante (Divina Commedia, Purgatorio XXVII, 139–144; Paradiso I, 13–36), Petrarch, and their descendants, Parnassus illustrated not only the landscape of the chosen poets, their divinely inspired poetry, and eternal glory, but also the rebirth of the Roman Classic (Bosold-­ DasGupta 2005: 21–26). During the early modern period, the imagery of Parnassus saw proliferation and significant modulations. Its religious, mythological background turned to a secular allegory interlaced with paradisiac or idyllic images of Olympus, Arcadia, and the like. At times, Parnassus was given local color and adapted to contemporaneity, so that Apollo, Orpheus, and the Greek and Roman cultural heroes such as Homer or Virgil got the company of medieval and early modern poets and artists. Raphael’s 1510–1511 fresco The Parnassus in the Vatican Stanza della Segnatura aptly demonstrates the transformations Parnassus underwent in the Renaissance. Raphael renovated the ancient topos (sitting among the Muses, Apollo plays a contemporary string instrument) and adapted it to portray the extended artistic canon that includes even Raphael’s compatriots and contemporaries. By the side of the Greek and Roman classics (Homer, Anacreon, Sappho, Horace, Virgil, Plutarch, Terence, and others), he depicted medieval and modern vernacular authors—Dante, Petrarch, and Sannazaro, the author of Arcadia and Raphael’s contemporary. According to Bosold-DasGupta (2005: 134–136), Traiano Boccalini’s satirical Ragguagli di Parnaso (Reports from Parnassus) of 1612, one of the most successful texts of Italian Baroque (with 120 editions and translations and 200 imitations), marked the beginnings of a prolific genre. It employs the Parnassus imagery (ideal landscape of the arts with Apollo, Muses, and the immortal writers from various epochs) for representing and commenting on literary canons and contemporary literary, cultural, or political issues.

The Emergence of the Vernacular/National Literary Ecology and the Universal Canon Raphael’s Parnassus is significant because it influenced subsequent uses of the topos within and beyond the visual arts. Moreover, it shows a turning point in the process Ulrich Schulz-Buschhaus describes in his paper on the early modern canon. As early as Renaissance in the Italian lands and other places in Europe, individual local writers creating in vernacular comple-

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mented the universal Classical-Christian catalog of paradigmatic texts in the cosmopolitan Latin language. In the beginning, vernacular authors were not perceived as representative of a specific community but remained in the shadow of the Greco-Latin auctores (Schulz-Buschhaus 1988: 52–58). In the following centuries, the vernacular corpus began to expand, trying to overcome the patronage of the classical canon, in particular during the famous querelle des Anciens et des Modernes. According to Schulz-­ Buschhaus, two separate ingredients of previously syncretic canon crystallized at the end of the Enlightenment century and in Romanticism. The first one was named world literature, in which the Antiquity lost its normative dominance and was reduced to a period in the extended multinational and multilingual canon; the so-called national classic, the second kind of the canon, was formed individually in every national literature (Schulz-Buschhaus, l. c.). Bearing Schulz-Buschhaus’s valuable observation in mind, it is nevertheless necessary to pose the following question: how has the national literature come into being and become regarded as the primary building block of world literature? Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who in the 1820s disseminated the notion of world literature among the European men of the world, wrote in 1831 a brief essay entitled “Epochen geselliger Bildung” (The Epochs of Social Culture). Here, Goethe presents the world development of verbal art in terms of a historical sequence beginning with the “idyllic” era of a small, linguistically self-sufficient community and leading to the upcoming “universal” age of global cultural interaction (Goethe 1999: 554–555). In the twentieth century, the comparatists Dionýz Ď urišin (1984: 273–308; 1992: 109–138) and Irina Neupokoyeva (2012) similarly complemented the notion of national literature with other concepts. They designate the remaining units of literary communication, such as the tribe, the ancient and medieval city-state, the medieval ethnicity, the modern minority, the regional zone, or the interliterary community relying on a shared religion or ideology, geographical closeness, cognate languages, or the same political system. In the present-day antagonism between the transnational drive of neoliberal globalization and the right-wing resistance to globalization, Alexander Beecroft proposes categories similar to Ď urišin’s and Neupokoyeva’s. He, too, challenges the assumption that the basic elements of world literature have always been national literatures even though the nation is still the dominant frame not only of the literary institution but also of literary scholarship. In the history of the global

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north and south and east and west, Beecroft recognizes other “ecologies” of literary circulation in addition to the national one. He calls them the epichoric, panchoric, cosmopolitan, vernacular, national, and global ecology (Beecroft 2008, 2015). Beecroft’s ecological metaphor may raise doubts because it appears to pay tribute to a trendy return of the humanities to the nineteenth-­century biologism, ingeniously refurbished and updated by insights of contemporary natural sciences under the brand names of ecocriticism, evolutionary criticism, or cognitivism. However, it is difficult to find a more fitting set of interrelated metaphors if one wants to avoid, as Beecroft attempts to do in a highly self-conscious manner, inert textualism, ethnic or civilizational essentialism, and economic reductionism that threaten the present world literature studies. Moreover, even though suspicious about Moretti’s treatment of the international literary market as the driving force of the literary world-system, Beecroft’s ecologic metaphor allows him to work out in details what constitutes world literatures before the eighteenth century and even in centuries preceding the western dominance—that is, before nations and nation-states established themselves across the Earth as the dominant political structure adapted to the economy of the modern world-system. Thus, his monograph refines and corrects Moretti’s distinction between the first, premodern world literature, which does not build a unity on the basis of transnational cultural market, and the second, modern world literature which since the eighteenth century takes the form of a worldsystem governed by market principles (Moretti 2013: 134–135). At the same time, Beecroft’s taxonomy of literary ecologies provides a broader, elaborated, documented, and non-Eurocentric comparative historical background that makes us possible to articulate the nexus of national and world literatures better.5 According to Beecroft, the archaic, isolated communities, such as Greek polis or Chinese city-state, developed their specific, self-enclosed epichoric or local ecology (Beecroft 2015: 37–61). As their isolated literature and dialect began to associate with similar polities through the same script, shared mythological and historical imaginary, or another relatedness, a panchoric ecology was gaining ground. The circulation of artifacts among related communities gradually created an awareness of a joint cultural affiliation. Such a sense of belonging also grew from narratives that cataloged characteristic attributes of individual polities or particular regions  For the relation between national and world literature, see also Tsu 2012.

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and circulated them across the entire cultural ecosystem. Once the sense of belonging to a common, extensive panchoric ecology came into being, individual epichoric cultures acquired functions that transcended their location, for example in Panhellenism, with its system of regionally and dialectally connoted styles and genres (Beecroft 2015: 63–99). What Beecroft calls a cosmopolitan ecology, usually originates in a vast area where a single prestigious language, religious or imperial, prevailed for centuries and linked together numerous ethnicities speaking various local languages. Backed by the imperial power or faith of great civilizations, cosmopolitan languages enabled religious, legal, literary, and other texts to circulate across extensive areas (Beecroft 2015: 101–144). They were essential to the Roman Empire, the Islamic caliphate, and European medieval and early modern learned culture, to quote but a few Beecroft’s examples. Beecroft (2015: 145–193) pays attention to the emergence of vernacular ecologies in Europe, Asia, and elsewhere. Since the Late Middle Ages, in different parts of Roman Catholic Europe, individual dialects made themselves more valued than other varieties of the same language because they entered into the realm of cultured communication. Their socio-­ linguistic prestige on the rise, they started to compete with the cosmopolitan domain of Latin, then dominating the Church, the feudal polities, and learned culture. During this process, the educated classes across Europe were endeavoring to standardize their respective local spoken languages according to the patterns of Latin and attempted to introduce their vernaculars into written, learned discourse. Such a “literization” of previously mostly oral dialects and traditions went hand in hand with the efforts at what Beecroft, following Sheldon Pollock, calls “literarization” (Beecroft 2015: 148–155). Stimulated by a patriotic need to dignify their respective countries, the educated classes strove to elevate their mother tongues by endowing them with a linguistically standardized written form and making them operate in the realms of learning, religion, the arts, sciences, and, not least, literature. On the other hand, vernaculars saw literization and literarization because of religious needs, as illustrated by the cases of the Protestant Reformer Martin Luther and his adherent Primož Trubar (1508–1586), the founder and the first superintendent of the Protestant Church of the Duchy of Carniola and the author of the first two books printed in Slovenian (Catechismus and Abecedarium of 1550). In order to establish a personal, intimate, and unmediated contact of believers with the God’s word, Reformation needed to produce translations of the Bible into the

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languages that were daily spoken and understood by the people. Because of having the evangelization of the people on its agenda, Reformation became a period in which several European vernaculars, the Slovenian included, met the standard of a literary language. Vindicated by vernacular manifestos, as Beecroft calls Dante’s manuscript De vulgari eloquentia or Du Bellay’s apology La Défense and illustration de la langue française, the popular languages which used to be subordinated to Latin as the language of the cosmopolitan republic of letters began to emancipate themselves as literary languages. Such a literary language became a means through which it was possible to address and ideologically connect unequal social strata within an ethnic-linguistic or religious community that found itself in the process of the identity formation (Beecroft 2015: 159–178). Slovenian meta-poems of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that, drawing on the topoi of Parnassus and Elysium, allegorize Slovenian canon formation exemplify a transition from Beecroft’s vernacular ecology to his notion of the national ecology of literature (Beecroft 2015: 195–241). Influenced by the French revolutionary idea of the sovereignty of the people and German cultural nationalism, national ecologies arose from the vernacular ones after the Napoleonic Wars and spread across Europe; as a consequence of or reaction to European imperialism and the economic logic of the world-system, national ecologies conquered the world by the mid-twentieth century. According to Beecroft, national literatures are marked by a rupture with the cosmopolitan past, by the assertion of the national literary language as superior to its cosmopolitan antecedents, better suited to contemporary circumstances, or more a­ ccessible to a larger public. Pressures to reorganize the political realm into nation-­ states (whether driven by internal political dynamics or by colonialism and its resistance) tend to pull the understanding of literature toward a national model, where each nation is understood as possessing its own unique literary language with an extensive history. (Beecroft 2015: 200)

Once emancipated from their subjection to cosmopolitan ecologies,6 national ecologies began to compete with each other: “[N]ational literatures are from the beginning constructed as elements of an inter-national system 6  However, the status of Slovenian in the eighteenth century illustrates that even though a peripheral ethnic language succeeded to lay the foundations of a vernacular ecology, it remained subordinated to universal Latinity and the imperial language (in this case German, the official language of Austrian Empire).

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of literatures; English literature, in other words, can only exist as such if it can be set against French literature, German literature, and so on” (Beecroft 2015: 199). As the case of the imagery of Slovenian Parnassus will illustrate in the following, inter-national rivalry Beecroft is mentioning is in line with the national identity formation. Its pattern reminds of Freudian “family romance.” Many ethnic communities across nineteenth-century Europe embraced more or less the same repertoire of nationalist ideology, spontaneously imitating its symbols, institutions, practices, and rituals. However, they believed they were affirming their individuality and specificity as long they were differentiating themselves from both the “parental” cosmopolitan ecology and other, “sibling” ethnicities through a series of competitive comparisons. Finally, and just like in the family romance, competitive comparisons that aimed at the universal recognition of a newly established particular national identity resulted in an ambivalent and unstable mixture of international alliances, animosities, and ongoing struggles. Explicit or implicit nationalism of many prominent nineteenth-century literary works and authors notwithstanding, Beecroft maintains that it was rather the modes of reading and historical interpretation than literary creativity per se that successfully formed national ecologies: “[N]ational literature is one that reads and interprets texts through the lens of the nation-state, whether as that state’s embodiment, as the dissent tolerated within its public sphere, as its legitimating precursors, or as its future aspirations” (Beecroft 2015: 197–198). With their retrospective interpretations, nineteenth-­ century literary histories appropriated earlier literary production of the country to interpret it as evidence of a substantial, even ­perennial historical existence of the nation. Within this ideological constellation, inspired by Herder and Humboldt, what Yasemin Yildiz (2012: 1–4) calls the “monolingual paradigm” began to gain prominence. The national literary ecology thus relies on the notion of the “mother tongue” considered as the writer’s only natural expression. The mother tongue concurrently figures as an exclusive identity marker of the writer’s lineage. Accordingly, the mother tongue plays the identity-building role at the level of collective individuation—it comes to embody a unique character, “spirit” of a nation (see Yildiz 2012: 6–14). Modern national literature, in particular, if dependent or peripheral, typically arose in a process in which multifunctional, multilingual, and vernacular writing overshadowed by a cosmopolitan or imperial language morphed into monolingual literature (based on vernacular) with an aesthetic function. Somehow paradoxically, the literary language that began

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to serve in the national ecology as the identity marker of an emerging imagined community had been beforehand standardized with an eye to a cosmopolitan language such as Latin. According to Sheldon Pollock, standardization of vernacular implies “the historical process of choosing to create a written literature, along with its complement, a political discourse, in local languages according to models supplied by a superordinate, usually cosmopolitan, literary culture” (Pollock 2009: 23; cited in Beecroft 2015: 147). In this regard, the literarization of vernacular coincided with the dialectics of national and world literatures; through the discourses of science, art, and educational eloquence, national literary systems absorbed themes, registers, and imagery connoting international prestige, centrality, and universality.

Autonomization and Nationalization of Literature The Slovenian ethnic territory had been ruled by foreign rulers since around AD 745 when the predominantly Slavic Principality of Carantania became part of the Frankish Empire. It shared two complementary European processes since the late eighteenth century: autonomization and nationalization. According to René Wellek, whose insight was elaborated by Siegfried J. Schmidt, the two processes shaped the making of modern European literary fields (Wellek, cited in Widdowson 1999: 35; Schmidt 1989: 282–283). With the first process, called autonomization, the literary discourse was gradually being perceived by writers, readers, critics, editors, as well as in education as a relatively autonomous unit of social communication that follows its own, primarily aesthetic purposes. Conventions were established inducing boundaries between the new aesthetic field and other forms of cultural representation. Following Pierre Bourdieu, the ideology of aesthetic autonomy, which was reproduced by texts, practices, and agents in the literary field (writers, publishers, critics, readers, and others), actually compensated for the fact that—as shown by Balzac’s depiction of the 1820s in The Lost Illusions—literary life fell prey to the commodification of the public sphere and political interference in print media. Accordingly, the value of artistic products became contingent, dependent on the shifting interests of social networks and their tactical use of media (Bourdieu 1996: 20–21, 48–68, 81–85).7 The process of 7  To be true, Bourdieu is discussing the radicalization of this situation in the second half of the nineteenth century.

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nationalization, on the other hand, profiled literature as a central linguistic and cultural attribute of the national community. With nationalization, vernacular writing, which had already been successfully literized and literarized, took over positions the Latin used to have within the cosmopolitan ecology. The emerging national literary ecology was leaving the normative framework of the ancient classics and began to observe and find inspiration from other modern literatures. With its symbolic display of the capacities of the mother tongue, literature was believed to ground the nation’s historical and cultural identity. Accordingly, the post-Enlightenment national movements regarded the aesthetic literature as a unifying form of public discourse capable of representing heterogeneous sociolects or dialects and introducing symbolic ties to the reading public recruited from different social classes and regions (see Močnik 2006: 219–226). In the light of Benedict Anderson’s classical conception, it is primarily this reading public of literature and newspapers printed in standardized vernacular languages that gave birth to the nation as an imagined community (see Anderson 1991: 37–46, 67–82). Autonomizing and nationalizing literature invoked the “nation” as a cultural hero on the ruins of the ancient canon and, from its Eurocentric perspective, generalized this aesthetic and national attitude to all literatures of the world. Following the logic of identity construction, nations as imagined communities only became possible through their relations with each other: while emulating the same discursive repertoire of the cross-­ national ideological current of cultural nationalism, they sought their individuality through relentless comparisons with and differentiation from other nations (here, comparative methods in philology, folklore, and literary history were also instrumental). Hence, modern European nations were established within a new geopolitical reality perceived as international (Casanova 1999: 56–59); borders on the newly imagined map of Europe were now drawn almost exclusively by existing or emerging nation-states. European processes outlined above had an impact on the Slovenian ethnic territory since the mid-eighteenth century. Divided into hereditary lands ruled by Habsburgs and the Republic of Venice, the territory lacked influential cultural centers and institutions of its own, whereas the aristocracy and bourgeoisie mostly did not use the Slovenian language for a cultured communication, written or oral. Thus, Slovenian dialects were vulnerable to influences of more prestigious neighboring languages that figured as “high” and more formal; caught into a diglossic situation, Slovenian vernacular

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symbolized the language of the “low,” everyday oral communication (see Orožen 1996). From the Freising Folia (972–1039), the first Slavic manuscript in Latin script, to the appearance of the first Protestant printed book in Slovenian (Primož Trubar’s Catechismus of 1550), only a few manuscripts in Slovenian are known although the language was arguably used, occasionally at least, in religious writing, local administration, and even secular poetry. As mentioned above, Beecroft considers the Reformation period in Europe as a significant force instigating the processes of literization and literarization of vernaculars. The main reason for this is the Protestant religious principle of sola scriptura, which required translation of the Bible into the languages spoken by the community of believers. In the second half of the sixteenth century, Lutheran Protestants in Slovenian lands, too, initiated a vernacular literary ecology with their production of an extensive religious repertoire of printed books in Slovenian, ranging from the order of the Protestant Church organization through the grammar and dictionary of the Slovenian language (Adam Bohorič, Arcticae horulae, 1584; Hieronymus Megiser, Dictionarium quatuor linguarum, 1591)8 to Jurij Dalmatin’s integral translation of the Bible (1584). However, after the Catholic suppression of the Reformation movement in Slovenian lands the short-lived, albeit productive, vernacular literary ecology fell to pieces. The CounterReformation and Baroque period gave only a limited ­number of printed books, even though Slovenian was still circulating in private and semi-public manuscripts, while the efforts to produce grammars and dictionaries of the Slovenian language continued. Thus, the centrifugal socio-linguistic forces prevailed from the seventeenth to the mid-­ eighteenth century. Cultured classes in the Habsburg Duchy of Carniola were bilingual and right until the mid-nineteenth century, when public use of Slovenian signaled nationalist political commitment, it was common that even the most patriotic scholars who celebrated their homeland or attempted to awaken localized collective self-consciousness wrote in Latin or German. To quote but a few examples: Janez L. Schönleben’s Carniolan chronicle (Carniolia antiqua et nova, 1681) and his Jesuit drama Haeresis fulminata (1651), Janez V. Valvasor’s polymath work Die Ehre des Herzogthums Crain (1689), Anton T. Linhart’s modern “national” history Versuch einer Geschichte von Krain und den übrigen Ländern der südlichen Slaven Oesterreiches (1788–1791), or his 1781 poetry collection Blumen aus Krain. 8  These philological works about the Slovenian language were patterned on Latin or took Latin as a norm, what Beecroft considers as characteristic of a vernacular ecology.

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From the mid-eighteenth to the late nineteenth centuries, the Slovenian literary canon emerged, evolved, and differentiated on a socio-linguistic background. Canonization intertwined with the problems of standardization of the Slovenian as a literary language, its presence in education, public, and among the higher social classes. Canon was also involved in the issues of genre diversification and secularization of literature.9 Thanks to the activities of “culture planning” such as writing literary programs and manifestos, founding literary and cultural institutions, or editing print media (Even-Zohar 2008), the incipient aesthetic literature in the Slovenian language figured as a key medium of national ideology. It introduced a sense of community and ideological cohesion to the readership recruited from a relatively thin layer of the literate population, which had traditionally been conscious only of its provincial identity and the subjection to the absolutist monarch. Before achieving a broader social impact in the mid-­nineteenth century, these efforts were limited to circles of the educated class, in particular, the clerics. Ever since the Middle Ages, it was for the most part clergy that had a monopoly on literacy in Slovenian lands, whereas the Catholic Church preserved supra-­dialectal registers of the mother tongue, albeit exclusively for religious purposes. In the light of this legacy, it does not come as a surprise that the Slovenian-speaking clergy took on the task of animating and spreading the ethnic consciousness through language and literature in the period of establishing the vernacular and national literary ecologies (from the 1760s to 1840s). Priests and monks wrote grammars and dictionaries of the Slovenian literary language; they were also among the first Slovenian poets, writers, and translators. The processes of autonomization and nationalization led to a gradual emergence of a peripheral literary system that, using the Slovenian vernacular as its medium, separated from the surroundings of predominantly German literature in Austria. Adopting international cultural currents and literary stylistic formations (Baroque, Classicism, Enlightenment, and Romanticism) that emanated mostly from Western and Central European metropolises, the emergent and small-scale literary system founded on the Slovenian standard language evolved from the stage of vernacular literary ecology to that of the national ecology in less than a century. In the perspective of Ď urišin’s understanding of the 9  The connections between the literary canon and standardization of the literary language are emphasized, a.o., by Guillory (1993: 60–77).

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temporal relations between central and peripheral systems (Ď urišin 1992: 179–183), this represents a case of accelerated evolution typical of minor literatures. Among the kinds of Slovenian literature of the period in question (i.e., roughly 1780–1850), metrical poetry played the leading role.10 This is why it was mainly poetry that reflected the autonomization and nationalization of literature in various ways. Most indicative are the devices of literary self-referentiality that, drawing on the topoi of Parnassus and Elysium, intertextually relate the nascent verbal art to core literatures, classical and modern, in order to design future developments of Slovenian letters, including the formation of the national canon.

Poetry Almanac and “Domestification” of Parnassus Following the publication pattern of Viennese Musen-Almanach (1777–1830) and other similar editions in the German-speaking region that imitated the French model of Almanach des Muses (first volume appeared in 1765),11 the volume one of the Carniolan poetry almanac Skupspravlanje krajnskeh pisanic od lepeh umetnost (The Collection of Carniolan Writings of Beautiful Arts, 1779) marks the initial proclamation of the aesthetic autonomization in the Slovenian vernacular. The almanac’s title pointed out that the Carniolan written word or letters (pisanice) are becoming affiliated with the novel concept of the arts, beaux-arts (od lepeh umetnost). In the opening volume of Pisanice, Anton Feliks Dev (1732–1786), dubbed “the first Slovenian poet,”12 set in verse a demand 10  The dominance of the narrative prose fiction begins in 1866 with the first novel in Slovenian language. 11  On the frontispiece of the 1767 volume of the Almanach des Muses, a graphics represents the topos of the Mount Parnassus, with a temple on its peak and the flying Pegasus in the forefront. On the influence of these almanacs on Pisanice, see Legiša 1977: 377–378; Koruza 1993: 5–6. 12  On Dev’s contribution to Pisanice, see Koruza (1993: 7–9, 30–31, 63–67, 77–78, 85–162). Dev, a monk of the Discalced Augustinian Order and a member of the Enlightened circle of the restored Academia Operosorum in Ljubljana, was rightfully called “the first Slovenian poet” because he was the main author of poems published in the three succeeding volumes of Pisanice (Koruza 1986). This epithet challenges the canonized understanding according to which the founding father of Slovenian poetry was Valentin Vodnik (1758–1819), the author of the 1806 volume of poetry entitled Pesme za pokušino, and the Enlightenment multigenre writer, journalist, grammarian, and historian. As a matter of fact, Vodnik’s collection Poems for Tasting was not even the first printed single-authored book of

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for a crucial element in the program of the literization of Slovenian vernacular. To achieve the dignity of a standard language, the variant of language spoken in the central Carniola was in urgent need of a dictionary and orthography, in addition to the 1768 grammar of the Slovenian Landssprache in the Duchy of Carniola published in the new spirit of ethnoculturally oriented local patriotism by the enlightened cleric Marko Pohlin (1735–1801).13 In the “Preface” to his grammar, which contains elements of what Beecroft calls vernacular manifesto (Beecroft 2015: 159–178; see above), Pohlin argues that each language deserves its glory because the human society uses it to reveal its thoughts, immortalize the realities, verbally renovate what is antiquated and leave novelties to descendants in the form of written antiquities. His grammar of Carniolan is meant to glorify his homeland and restore the purity and correctness of the mother tongue, which does not deserve to be despised as a small and unimportant one. In a mythologizing historical narrative, Pohlin celebrates the quasi-biblical antiquity of Carniolan, encapsulated in its original name (Illyrian), its widespread and respected linguistic relatives (he lists several Slavic peoples from the North to the South), the ubiquity of Slavic toponyms, and the symbolizing expressivity of Carniolan language. Pohlin believes that Carniolan language can phonetically evoke the secret of the Holy Trinity through the sounds and declination of the word God (Buh—Boga). He assumes that grammar and dictionary epitomize the wings without which Carniolan language could not rise (Pohlin 1768: 3–16; Pohlin et al. 1970: 7–14). Dev’s allegorical Rollengedicht entitled “Krajnska dužela želi tudi svoj dikcionarium imeti” (Carniola Desires a Dictionary of Her Own; Legiša 1977: 28–33; Gspan 1978–1979: 191–192) features the speaking persona of Carniola. Presented as a mother figure crowned by a Parnassian laurel garland, she addresses her sons as “lubički teh Modric” (“darlings of the Slovenian secular poetry (a booklet of humorous, parodic, and vulgar poems written by a local teacher and organist Pavel Knobl was printed five years earlier, in 1801). With regard to Dev’s baroque classicism and references to Parnassus, it is important to know that he also contributed two translations from Ovid and Virgil to the Slovenian grammar Krajynska Grammatika (1768) published in German by Marko Pohlin, his comrade in the order, member of the restored Academia Operosorum, and the initiator of the early stage of Carniolan vernacular awakening. 13  According to Kozma Ahačič (2015), Pohlin aimed to encourage his countrymen’s proudness of their mother tongue by demonstrating that it was possible to standardize the vernacular through the generally acknowledged grammatical rules.

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Muses”), urging them to take up the work for the dictionary (“besedniše”) and the orthography (“pravopisnost”) of their mother tongue.14 Deprived of these standard works that make a language cultured, she feels shamefully exposed to scornful German accusations. In the eyes of German landsmen, she resembles a linguistic beggar whose poor vocabulary calls for borrowing or stealing words from the German language. Dev’s allegorical depiction of Carniola’s psyche traumatized by an inferiority complex is symptomatic of how peripheral literary actors perceived their position vis-à-vis dominant and influential cultural milieus. Moreover, Dev’s plastic and rough metaphors suggesting Carniolan (Slovenian) marginality and subjugation to predominantly German-speaking hubs of Austrian Empire precede a politer and modern economic vocabulary (e.g., loan, debt, borrowing) through which comparative linguistics and comparative literature in the nineteenth and twentieth century used to describe the international relations of influence and dependence. The reaction to the perceived lack of recognition from the authoritative Other is typical as well: Dev’s mother Carniola contests underestimation of Carniolan language by adducing metaphors that present her belief in its originality ­(saturated roots), expressive and communicative aptness, and richness of lexicon (Carniolan gold). The message uttered by the allegorical persona addresses the men of letters who aimed to restore the Baroque Academia Operosorum (1693–1725) in a new intellectual atmosphere of the Habsburg enlightened absolutism whose policy of raising the general education level encouraged literacy based on vernaculars. The Academy of the Industrious, their prestigious and productive precursor, was a Baroque learned society that the educated elite had founded in Ljubljana in 1693 after the model of the Italian early modern academies, with the intention to establish Ljubljana, the capital of the Duchy of Carniola, as a thriving regional center of the arts and sciences.15 Dev’s poetic text “Carniola Desires a Dictionary of Its 14  Marko Pohlin, Dev’s collaborator and coeditor of Pisanice, in fact announced his dictionary in his grammar where he also polemicized with prejudices about poverty and impurity of Slovenian, and its apparent dependence on loanwords. In the framework of the efforts to restore the Academia operosorum, the enlightened educationalist and philologist Blaž Kumerdej (1738–1805) read his rhetorically masterful foreword to his unfinished Carniolan orthography in 1779 before the audience of about 15 members of the academy, including Dev. Dev’s poem thus seems to echo Kumerdej’s position (Koruza 1993: 65–67). 15  In his monograph Ljubljana as the New Rome: The Academy of the Industrious and Baroque Italy, Luka Vidmar points out that the Ljubljana Academy of the Industrious

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Own” and his other contributions to Pisanice discussed in the following paragraphs are closely related to the endeavors of the enlightened circle of intellectuals in the 1770s to refashion the cosmopolitan Baroque academy in Ljubljana, which had shown hardly any interest in the local language. Now, it was to become a learned society focused primarily on the cultivation of the Slovenian vernacular. Dev’s texts self-referentially allegorize and plan the actions that were or needed to be taken to stimulate a rebirth of Carniolan in the appearance of the cultured language whose letters were intended to emulate the Classical Antiquity and the early modern European classicism. In the incipit of the poem “Carniola Desires a Dictionary of Its Own,” Carniola (the allegorical speaking persona) thanks for the homage already paid to her by patriotic men of letters. Carniola marshals arguments with which she encourages the members of the learned society (“darlings of the Muses”) to make good use of their familiarity with the mother tongue in order to provide its dictionary and orthography. These are meant to figure as universally recognized linguistic proofs of cultural dignity of the Slovenian mother tongue vis-à-vis other literary languages. With its metaphors of roots and gold, Carniola’s address suggests the notion according to which a language should grow naturally from its origins and specific lexicon. This idea is typical of the language policy advocating purism, which strongly marked the Slovenian Enlightenment tradition (Academia Operosorum) represents the beginning of an economic, cultural, and artistic flourishing in the Duchy of Carniola whose geostrategic location between the Italian lands, the Holy Roman Empire, and the Kingdom of Hungary fostered its openness to Italian influences. Many Carniolan aristocrats and clerics studied in Rome, Perugia, Sienna, Parma, Bologna, Padua, and Venice, while it also became a habit for young nobles to refine and cultivate themselves by going on Italian “grand tour” of all the major monuments of Classical Antiquity, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and the Baroque. Having gained knowledge and experience of prestigious cultural-artistic achievements in Italian cities, the Carniolan intellectual elite strove to introduce these models to their homeland when they took up important positions in the provincial and church hierarchy. They attempted to transform Ljubljana into a regional center following the example of Italian art centers, especially Rome and Venice. Among their strategies of emulating the renowned practices, institutions, and artworks of Italian centers, the foundation of the system of learned societies patterned after Italian academies was most important. According to Vidmar, members of the Ljubljana Academy of the Industrious (founded in 1693) gathered extensive background knowledge from their study or travels to Italy. They considered Ljubljana the successor of the Roman town of Emona which was believed to be founded by Jason and the Argonauts. Janez Gregor Dolničar (1655–1719), the main ideologue of the academy, was the prime mover for a new cathedral in Ljubljana; it was planned and its building chronicled in terms of a Carniolan remake of Saint Peter’s basilica in Rome (Vidmar 2013).

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and the national thought from the late eighteenth century right until the mid-nineteenth century. According to this perception, it was the language and culture of the peasantry that remained truly authentic, elementary, and uncorrupted by foreign languages or loan words after centuries of the rule of German-speaking nobility. Skeptical about the linguistic purity and the ensuing national consciousness of urban population, the programs that aimed to build the national community on peasantry were advocated by a series of leading personalities such as the baron Sigismund Zois (1747–1819), the patron of the arts and a vital figure of the Slovenian Enlightenment, his protégé and internationally renowned linguist Jernej Kopitar (1780–1844), and, not least, Janez Bleiweis (1808–1881), the influential politician, journalist, and editor, dubbed the “father of the nation” (see Pogačnik 1981: 299–303).16 The second volume of the almanac Pisanice od lepeh umetnost published in 1780 brought two pieces of poetry written in alexandrine in which Dev intertextually rewrote the imagery of Parnassus in more detail. These are the elegy “Krajnskeh modric žaluvanje čes tu predolgu goridržanje svojega Belina v laškeh duželah” (The Carniolan Muses’ Grieving because of Their Belin’s Overly Long Stay in Italian Lands) and the ode “Vesele krajnskeh modric na prihod njeh Belina” (The Carniolan Muses’ Joy at Their Belin’s Arrival) written in the classicist metric and style of Gottfried Benjamin Hancke, the late baroque poet from Silesia (see Koruza 1993: 8, 72). Similar to Dev’s opera libretto “Belin,” printed in the same volume, both poems are about the painful absence of Belin (a Carniolan substitute for Apollo the Musagetes) and his blessed and invigorating return to the company of Carniolan Muses (modrice).17 Parallel to Dev’s 16  In in his Grammatik der slavischen Sprache in Krain, Kärnten und Steyermark of 1808, which was the first modern scholarly grammar of Slovenian (that is, the language spoken by “a million of Slavs in the Inner Austria”), Jernej Kopitar adopted the Herderian concept of “folk language” as the only legitimate basis of the literary norm, while he regarded the Carniolan folk tradition as natural, pure, and realist foundation of further literary and cultural development. Kopitar’s purist views exerted deep influence on the codification of the standard Slovenian literary language and on “populist” cultural politics until the second half of the nineteenth century, even though as early as in the 1830s they collided with Prešeren’s cultural program relying on educated readers, townspeople, and cosmopolitanism. (See Orožen 1996: 16–21, 30–31, 46–47, 51–90, 121–133, 153–177, 207–225.) More on this below. 17  In his monograph on Pisanice, Jože Koruza took pains to identify the allegorical meaning of Belin. He concedes that the Carniolan deity that equals Apollo has a more general meaning: it represents the driving force behind the philological, scholarly, and literary revival

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Rollengedicht featuring mother Carniola and her desire for a dictionary of her language, the speaking persona in the ode and elegy about Belin is, again, allegorical. Carniolan Muses, a collective speaker of both texts, stand for literature and the arts in the Slovenian lands. Specifically, they allegorize the efforts at reconstructing a Carniolan learned and artistic society patterned on European academies, which was thought to open a royal way to the vernacular renaissance of letters. Emulating the model of classical topos, the two poetic narratives paint a picture of Carniolan literature in two opposite situations: in its sorrowful stagnancy on the one hand and its revival on the other hand. With its picturesque landscape descriptions, amplifications, flamboyant figures of speech, architectonic composition, and rational line of argument, the baroque allegorical elegy “Krajnskeh modric žaluvanje” (Legiša 1977: 46–55) introduces a Parnassian landscape of Muses, albeit different from the Greek topos. Dev alters the locations and personages traditionally anchored to the Greek topos by transferring them into a present-­day Carniola. He thus changes the Muses into Slavic-Carniolan fairies called modrice, whereas the Greek god of poetry and the arts Apollo becomes the allegedly Slavic deity named Belin. Dev further replaces the slopes of Mount Parnassus or Helicon by the avalanches above Ljubelj, the Alpine pass above his birthplace, and the fertile Greek plains by the Vipava Valley in the littoral region. Such a cultural transfer of the universal topos to the realities and spaces of Carniola exceeds mere translation of classical terms into Slovenian vernacular. As Jože Koruza aptly puts it:

of Carniolan culture, maybe even the need for the formative cultural impulse from Italy. However, several cryptic allusions along with the period and circumstances of publication allow for a more concrete historical reconstruction of the influential personality—Belin is an allegory of the Count Franz Adam Lamberg (1730–1803) who was appointed governor general of the Carniolan province in 1780 and arguably involved in the efforts at reviving the learned society Academia Operosorum in Ljubljana. As a member of the learned Dismus Society, Lamberg left Ljubljana around 1773, at the time when Pohlin and his philological circle commenced the cultivation of the Slovenian vernacular. Before his return to Ljubljana in 1780, Lamberg had great merits in the Italian Gorizia, the capital of Carniola’s neighboring county where the cultured life began to flourish around 1780, with the foundation of a branch of Roman Academia degli arcadi. Although Lamberg was not member of this academy, he was important for the rise of Italian language in this Habsburg province because he used his authority of the governor general to support the role of Italian in schools and public instead of German (for what he was blamed by the Austrian court) (Koruza 1993: 91–92, 95–101, 134–140).

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Dev does not represent a generally valued chorus of mythological creatures imagined by the Old Greeks, but represents specific “Carniolan modrice.” It is not a simple Slovenizing the mythology of the Antiquity (as goes the usual interpretation of Pohlin’s dictionary of mythological terms added to the metric chapter of his grammar which grounds the mythological terms in Pisanice) but the creation of the proper Slovenian Olympus and Parnassus by analogy to the ancient gathering places of gods. (Koruza 1993: 88)

The Carniolan modrice blame their insatiable Italian sisters for not allowing Belin to return to Carniola although he was only temporarily lent to them for six months. The poem opens with a descriptive cliché of the four seasons. Picturesque descriptions of the seasonal changes of nature and the agricultural cycle focus on emblematic-metonymic details (e.g., the melting of ice, glimmering dew, blossoming of apple trees, quail singing in the field, haymaking). They amount to a rhetorical periphrasis illustrating a six-month time span in which modrice longed for Belin. However, the mosaic of metonymic landscape descriptions also allegorizes the potential rise of cultural activities in the Duchy of Carniola, while creating a panoramic illusion of how vast Slovenian-­speaking territory may be. In short, they suggest that the Slovenian ethnoscape bordering on Hungary and the Italian lands lacks Belin to turn the potential into the actual. The Italian Muses keep Belin in their country for half a year and do not want to hear desperate calls of their Carniolan sisters demanding his return. Consequently, in the last part of the elegy Muses present their frustration, sorrow, and despair in a series of dissonant, dark, and antithetic tropes (e.g., the Muses are bedewed by tears; even though immortal, they want to die; their flutes threaten to split, their cithers crepitate; they creep through gloomy woods). Through such poetic devices, the poet amplifies the meanings of cultural deprivation, stagnation, creative impotence, and the desperate need for a uniting driving force symbolized by Belin. In addition to the displacement of the cosmopolitan topos and its familiarizing relocation in the vernacular ecology, the proto-national division of the Muses indicates the presence of the nationalizing process in literature. Traditionally deemed universal, the Muses split into two competing groups, Carniolan modrice and their greedy Italian sisters. The antagonist choruses of Muses, the Carniolan and the Italian, struggle for the possession of Belin, the allegory of the arts and cultural creativity. This dramatic conflict arguably exemplifies the competition between the

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nascent national literatures that starts with the dissolution of the Classical canon of the Latinity. To quote Koruza again: That “Carniolan modrice” accompanied by their leader and protector Belin represent a specific Slovenian Parnassus, is demonstrated by their quarrel with their Italian “sisters.” From this, it follows that in the understanding of the contributors to Pisanice and Dev, in particular, every national literature possesses its proper chorus of the Muses … as the allegorical image of this literature or national culture in its entirety. (Koruza 1993: 89)

Dev expresses the need for the future classics of the emerging vernacular literature more explicitly in his ode “Vesele krajnskeh modric” (Legiša 1977: 54–65). The chorus of the Carniolan Muses, the collective persona speaking the poetic text,18 dramatizes their sensations and feelings aroused by the news that Belin is on his way to the homeland. Intimately connected to the animated natural surrounding that Belin’s approaching increasingly invigorates, modrice, the fairies, sense his proximity, expressing their emotional states of impatient expectation through a figure of gradation coextensive with their simultaneous narration. Various plants, animals, valleys, mountains, the morning star, and the sun transmit the message of Belin’s return to each other (like in a chain of beings) and to the Muses who understand their language. Surrounded by the awakened vernal landscape, they gather singing, dancing, and playing joyful music. Changed in festive folkloric garb, they finally see the arrival of Belin riding on a carriage to which Pegasus is harnessed. Having stopped fast-moving Pegasus with repeated shouts, the Muses embrace Belin in ultimate, loving pleasure. Their burning eroticism acquiring rococo features, the Muses in love promise to the loving Belin to bear him Carniolan Ovids and Virgils: O sweet fire! Our heart will melt In your bliss. It will joyfully drown In joy, if Belin loves us in return. Love us, o Belin! Love us from your heart. Love us, o Belin! We will fervently love You forever. We will give you Ovids and Virgils. The entire Carniola, in joy, Will shortly, o Belin, sing your love. 18  Apostrophizing the Muses, the voice of a bodiless poet occasionally joins the first-person narrative of the collective which is anxiously expecting Belin’s arrival.

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And Ljubljana will join in singing your honor and praise, Since she sees the golden age thanks to you. You will be to her what to Rome Augustus was, The father of the Muses, her honor, her light. Her great-grandchildren will pay you homage Since they got a pure language from you. (Legiša 1977: 64–65; my translation)

The ultimate meaning of Belin is, thus, the energy that fuses cultured intellect and creative inspiration with patronage and political power to ignite the renaissance of the arts along with the cultivation and purification of the mother tongue. The final scene of Dev’s poem depicts the call for vernacular classics and the striving for the classical age of vernacular literature. It demonstrates that the vernacular literary ecology initially observes the cosmopolitan model: in Carniolan case, too, the envisioned vernacular canon and classic are modeled on Rome of the Augustan Age.19 Through his intertextual rewriting of the Parnassus topos, Dev imaginarily appropriated the notions of canonicity that had a quasi-universal validity and localized them into the emerging vernacular ecology. His adoption of elements belonging to the classical Greco-Latin foundations of the Early Modern European literatures reveals the strategy of coming in for a share of the symbolic capital accumulated in the canon of European Antiquity. In modernity, mastering and possessing this canon symbolized the aristocratic prestige of cosmopolitan cultured class. Getting a share in the symbolic capital of the European classical tradition was therefore instrumental to literati working in peripheral, dependent environments because it elevated the social importance of their efforts at introducing literature and high culture into a language that had so far figured as a second-class medium intended for daily communication of lower classes. From the perspective of Itamar Even-Zohar’s (1990: 24–25, 48–66) laws of literary interference, emergent literatures often domesticate the repertoire they borrow from the dominating cultural system. Dev’s texts thus materialize the “domestification” (Even-Zohar 1990: 93) of classical imagery of Parnassus. His adaptation of the topos takes the form close to 19  With this, Dev reiterates the Italophile classicist orientation toward Rome which, according to Vidmar (2013), characterized the Ljubljana Academy of the Industrious a few decades before.

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the intertextual genre of serious travesty: translocated into the poet’s home environment, the classical allegory of canonicity becomes familiarized, while the Muses are literally travestied, dressed in Carniolan folkloric garb. In other words, by domesticating and renaming the Greco-­Latin elements of the topos, Dev adapted its universal imagery to the particularities of his ethnicity, cultural space, and mother tongue. At the time when Dev poetically anticipated the literary institution of the national canon, it was not possible to count on a fully fledged literary production in the Slovenian language in the nearby future. Granted, the literary repertoire at that period was too weak to make the canonization of the Slovenian classics already possible. However, the purely ideational emulation of the classical canon encapsulated the ideological intention that came to inspire the growing number of actors in the emerging literary field. The image of a domestic Parnassus channeled their desire toward a commonly imagined goal—the twofold autonomization of Slovenian literature: autonomization (i.e., nationalization) in terms of the separation and progressive independence of the Slovenian literary system from the general cultural space of the Austrian Empire and autonomization in terms of the dominance of the aesthetic function. To summarize, Dev’s pair of antithetic poems about the Carniolan Parnassus allegorically represent the rise of a vernacular cultural awakening that prepared the ground for the nineteenth-century nation-building and the swapping of the traditional provincial name Carniolan with the ethnonym Slovenian. Dev is highly self-referential in that he allegorically addresses the intellectual-aesthetic and organizational conditions of his literary labor and discloses his aims. In a kind of mise-en-abyme, vernacular literature-in-the-making is synchronically presented through the device of the simultaneous narration. Moreover, Dev illustrates the working of systemic autopoiesis. One of the few texts produced in the embryonic literary system—which had only a couple of print media, around a dozen of producers, the institutional background of a learned society, and a meager amount of potential readers at its disposal—contains a utopian image of giving birth to vernacular classics. The element of the system thus (literally) engenders potential structures that will actualize only in the system’s future development, while informing the system’s actors and actions with the intentionality leading toward establishing a literary canon of its own, comparable to that of the Classical Antiquity. To put it metaphorically:

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Dev’s texts enclose a genetic code of the utopian program whose ideology influenced the subsequent evolution of Slovenian literature. Dev’s late eighteenth-century adoption of the Parnassus topos marks the gradual separation of the emerging and dependent literary system in the Duchy of Carniola from the universality of the Greco-Latin tradition. Such a process Even-Zohar (1990) identifies in the early stages of several early modern European literatures, including those that came to occupy core world-system positions at the time Dev wrote his ode and elegy. The incipient inter-national competition between modern literatures Dev suggests by his antithesis between the Carniolan Muses and their prominent Italian sisters, illuminates another generally European process—the split of the classical tradition into modern national literatures struggling for their prominence and canonicity within the space of world literature.

National Revival and the Canon of World Literature In the evolution of the Slovenian vernacular literary ecologies and its exposure to the nineteenth-century ideologies of national revival, the vernacular emulation of the Classics demonstrated the expressive capabilities of the mother tongue. It had long been considered as low, second-rate, or uncultured and only recently acquired the status of a grammatically standardized literary language deserving to be equal to imperial or cosmopolitan languages. However, to cultivate the vernacular in the context of European nationalist movements of the Vormärz period and display its refinement and expressive capacity required more than transferring the norms of the Antiquity and adopting the imaginary of the classical tradition. In the early nineteenth century, when the modern literary world-­ system was in the making and arrived at its concept with Goethe in the 1820s, it seemed equally important to test the vernacular against the more recent normative backgrounds—the first one included developed, internationally influential, and dominant national literatures of that period, while the second background consisted of the developing hyper-canon of world literature comprising Classical Antiquity, Middle Ages, and Early Modern vernacular literatures.

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Testing and displaying how cultured the mother tongue can be in relation to the cosmopolitan Latin and imperial German became even more imperative toward the mid-nineteenth century, when the so-called Bildungsbürgertum, the lay bourgeois educated class of lawyers, doctors, public officials, teachers, or politicians was gradually taking over the literary production and the ethno-lingual patriotism from the clergy. This class came under the influence of the Pre-March nationalist movements, in particular of the contagious concepts of European cultural nationalism. In Slovenian lands of Inner Austria, too, the educated class played the role of the protagonist of the transformation of the ethno-lingual provincial patriotism—characteristic of the Carniolan vernacular ecology and its narrow circles of predominantly clerical men of letters—into a genuinely national literary ecology. The latter relied on the modern concept of the nation as a collective political subject that defines itself by its history, ethnicity, language, culture, and territory. Such an accelerated transformation entailed a significant change observable in the growing predominance of the terms Slovenija, Slovenci, slovenski (Slovenia, Slovenians, Slovenian) over the provincial denomination Kranjska (Carniola) as well in a progressive social widening of the literary system, which was on its way to becoming national. The system was growing in the number of its participants (producers, mediators, readership), it was integrating all the social classes, and expanded the space of Slovenian literary culture to include, in addition to Carniola, other Slovenian-populated Habsburg provinces.20 As will be explained in more detail later, literature accompanied by educational, scholarly, and philological work seemed to many Slovenian intellectuals a reliable strategy for shaping the national consciousness. They were aware of the fact that the national movement did not establish political bodies of its own nor did it control a more significant number of cultural institutions and media developed enough to circulate a diversified public discourse in Slovenian standard language. Regarded as the founda20  Indicative of the spatial expansion of the Slovenian ethnic territory based on the modern notion of the nation is the 1852 map entitled Zemljovid slovenske dežele in pokrajin (A Map of Slovenian Land and Provinces) of the lawyer, businessman (brewer), and cartographer Peter Kozler (1824–1879), who was a Carniolan German by his ethnic origin but became a passionate adherent of the Slovenian national movement and its 1848 demand for the “united Slovenia” (zedinjena Slovenija). Whereas Kozler actually mapped the territorial claims of the national movement (which for the large part match the borders of the Kingdom of Illyria, a crown land of the Austrian Empire from 1816 to 1849), he argued for the equality of German- and Slovenian-speaking inhabitants of Slovenia.

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tion and highest expression of the national language, literature thus amounted to a crucial argument that legitimized the political claims of Slovenian national movement for cultural and administrative autonomy within the confines and under the rule of the Habsburg Empire. These claims matured during the 1848 Spring of Nations when Slovenian nationalist circles in Carniola, Carinthia, Syria, and Vienna proclaimed a political program entitled Zedinjena Slovenija (United Slovenia), which circulated across the ethnic territory as a massively supported petition. The declaration demanded the unification of all the territory populated by Slovenians into one single kingdom under the rule of the Austrian Empire and equal rights of the Slovenian language in the education, office, and the public sphere, while it resolutely resisted the plans of German nationalists to integrate the Habsburg Monarchy with the German Confederation.21 Administrative and cultural autonomy of Slovenian national community was meant to grow from establishing a widespread network of social and educational institutions intended for the circulation of the public discourse in Slovenian such as reading societies, publishing houses, literary journals, newspapers, theaters and theater societies. These institutions and practices gradually conquered the ethnic territory and formed the ideo-space of the national literary culture as a quasi-autonomous unit within the Austrian Monarchy (see Juvan 2016). What is constitutive of the national literary ecology according to Beecroft, is the historicist narrative that retroactively interprets the past in terms of the millennial continuity and individuality of a particular nation along with the progress of its singular language and culture, although the nation is, in fact, a post-1789 ideological phenomenon (Beecroft 2015: 197–198). However, such a mystifying narrative is not primarily a mode of reading or a product of national literary histories that thrived in the 21  Although Austrian authorities never allowed the demands of The United Slovenia to be fully realized, the program established a platform for the subsequent struggles of the Slovenian national movement right to the end of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy. The Habsburg authorities did not prevent the national movement from founding its institutions and media (albeit they, too, were subjected to censorship), with much demur they conceded Slovenian language to be introduced in the regional education system (since the 1860s in elementary schools, toward the end of the century in gymnasiums), while Slovenian politicians advocating the national program were represented in the regional assembly of the Duchy of Carniola since the Monarchy’s 1861 constitutional reform. The authorities tolerated massive meetings after the Czech example (so-called tabori) organized in Slovenian lands in support for the national program (including the demand for Slovenian as an official language) in the years 1869–1871.

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second half of the nineteenth century, as Beecroft seems to believe. With historical genres such as the historical novel or tragedy, the so-called national epic, or historical ballads, the literature of the Romantic period came before literary history to pave the way to nationalist narratives. In the aftermath of Anton Feliks Dev and the Enlightenment circle of the almanac Pisanice, France Prešeren was a key nineteenth-century figure in the process of transforming the vernacular literary ecology into a national one. His contribution to the autonomization and nationalization of the literary discourse in Slovenian language was posthumously canonized as decisive, what was essential for naming him the Slovenian national poet. In his poetry, which introduced a national historicist narrative and, as it was believed, elevated the Slovenian vernacular to the level of a world-­ class literary language, Prešeren made several references to the topos of Parnassus. These references—more about them in the continuation— manifest a prominent element of his vast intertextuality. In the 1830s, Prešeren’s fusion of the classical tradition with contemporary Romanticism relied on his historicist adoption of poetic forms, meters, topics, and imagery. He borrowed them from the Classical Antiquity, the European vernacular hyper-canon of Medieval and Early Modern masters of Romance literatures, as well as more recent celebrities of European national literatures such as Bürger, Schiller, Friedrich Schlegel, Byron, or Mickiewicz.22 As a writer from the Austrian periphery, he wedded the classical forms, universal imagery, and topics to the modern Romantic sensibility interlacing existential, erotic, and national-patriotic themes. Moreover, he introduced this universal repertoire into a minor, peripheral, and dependent vernacular language colored by his native sociolect. His intertextuality thus constituted the Slovenian as a literary language that tended to become equal to the established core literary languages of Europe and Austria. Besides, Prešeren’s intertextuality reflected the great transformation of the Classical Canon described above—that is, its split in 22  In a kind of Romantic postmodernism, Prešeren used, adapted, and gave a singular meaning to forms such as the Greek Anacreontic verse, Latin elegy, Arab ghazel, German ballad, Spanish romance, Italian sonnet, terza rima, and the wreath of sonnets, French triolet, or English Byronic verse tale. He employed erudite exempla or allusions to Classical Antiquity (including the Parnassus imagery with Muses, flowers, and Orpheus), the Christian literary tradition, and the masters of the Middle Ages, Renaissance, and Baroque (Dante, Petrarch, Camões, Tasso, and others). Mastered by architectonic principles, the style and composition of his poems draw on the universal repertoires of rhetorical topics or figures of speech and Petrarchan conceits.

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the emerging canons of world literature (the Antiquity became only one of its epochs) and national literatures of Europe. Prešeren’s poem “Glosa” (The Gloss), first published in the 1834 almanac Krajnska čbelica (Carniolan Bee), illustrates the working of the Romantic systemic self-reference and self-regulation. Against the background of the canon of world literature, Prešeren’s satire written in a fifteenth-­century Spanish court form glosa addresses the issue of the controversial autonomy of national literature in the marginal Austrian province of Carniola and its rudimentary capitalist society. In “Glosa,” Prešeren grasps the material conditions of his being and writing. He understands all too well that in the Habsburg province of Carniola, located on the south-­ eastern margins of European industrial capitalism, writing literature as a form of labor is marginalized and despised by the parochialism of the dominant classes: “Slep je, kdor se s petjam vkvarja, Kranjec moj mu osle kaže; pevcu vedno sreča laže, on živi, umrje brez dnarja.”

“He who sings is blind of eye, gibed by Carniolan throng, tricked by fortune’s siren song, penniless he’ll live and die.”

Le začniva pri Homeri, prosil reva dni je stare; mraz Ovidja v Pontu tare; drugih pevcov zgodbe beri: nam spričuje Alighieri, káko sreča pevce udarja; nam spričujeta pisarja Luzijade, Don Kihota, kákošne Parnasa pota— slep je, kdor se s petjam vkvarja.

Our rhyme with Homer starts, who was pressed to beg when old; Ovid bore the Pontic cold; read the tales of other bards: you may learn from Dante’s stars how a bard is cursed with plight; learn from men who once did write the Lusiads, Don Quixote: steep is the Parnassus slope— he who sings is blind of eye.

“Káj Petrarkov, káj nam Tasov treba pevcov je prijetnih?” slišim od butic neukretnih prašat zdanjih, prednjih časov. Kómur mar prijetnih glasov pesem, ki pojó Matjaže, boje krog hrvaške straže, mar, kar pevec pel Ilirje, mar Č ebelʼce roji štirje, Kranjec moj mu osle kaže.

“What’s the use of pleasant sound sung by Tasso or Petrarch?” I can still hear bumpkins ask, as they used to, clear and loud. Think of King Matthias proud— who cares for that pleasant song, frontier battles lost and won, lays of the Illyrian bard, swarms of “Bee,” is always hard gibed by Carniolan throng.

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Lani je slepar starino še prodajal, nosil škatle, meril platno, trak na vatle, letos kupi si grajšino. Naj gre pevec v daljno Kino, še naprej se pot mu kaže, naj si s tinto prste maže, naj ljubezen si obeta, vneti lepega dekleta, pevcu vedno sreča laže.

Yesteryear one fraud still sold curious, lugged round a box, measured yards of ribbon, cloth: now he’s buying a chateau. But a bard, though he should go to far China, wanders on; should he scribble all day long, should he hope to find the key to a beauty’s heart, he’ll be tricked by fortune’s siren song.

Vender peti on ne jenja; grabʼte dnarje vkup gotove, kupovájte si gradove, v njih živite brez trpljénja! Koder se nebo razpenja, grad je pevca brez vratarja, v njem zlatnina čista zarja, srebrnina rosa trave, s tem posestvam brez težave on živi, umrje brez dnarja.

Yet his music will not cease; you may well pile up a hoard, buy yourselves a castle fort, live in it in unmarred peace! Where the vaulted heavens reach, porterless the bard’s halls rise, and his gold is—clear dawn light and his silver—dew on grass: happy with this wealth amassed, penniless he’ll live and die.

(Prešeren 1965: 111–112)

(Manuscript, trans. Nada Grošelj)

Prešeren’s satirical and robust style with which he attacks the misunderstanding and disregard of poetry among his Carniolan compatriots (strophes 1–3) departs from the concluding stance from which all irony disappears—the last stanza is about the defense of the poetic vocation. By adducing an example of a Carniolan fraud that purchases a manor after a year of retailing goods, Prešeren defies parochial petty-bourgeois realities in which the speculative circulation of capital results in vulgar profitability and vertical class mobility.23 Even though parochial indolence and bourgeois disrespect of the literary profession threaten to undermine the endeavors to establish Slovenian literature as an aesthetically autonomous and at the same time nation-building social field, Prešeren decides to endure in his literary labor on the margins of the capitalist economy and, consequently, renounce his recognition or social promotion. Adopting the perspective of the Romantic ideology and its privileging the aesthetic realm over the rude reality and social tensions of the industrial capitalism (see McGann 1983), Prešeren buttresses his insistence on the poetic vocation by alluding to a set of classics of the newly established 23  In his official assessment of the almanac Krajnska c ̌belica, the Viennese court censor Jernej Kopitar accused Prešeren’s “Glosa” of libeling honest merchants of Ljubljana.

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canon of world literature: Homer, Ovid, Dante, Petrarch, Camões, Cervantes, and Tasso. At first sight, their exemplary biographies of blindness, poverty, psychic turmoil, and political persecution seem to justify the poem’s thesis that the art—in opposition to the logic of profit—is always bound to be marginalized. However, the allusive chain of examples of disregarded poets concurrently illustrates a list of the universally acclaimed literary authorities. Posthumously canonized as national and European classics, the cursed poets provide to Prešeren a quasi-universal background against which he can estimate the particularity of his unfavorable project in a consolatory perspective. They testify to sustainability, even the eternity of the aesthetic power of the literary language. The value of the poetic discourse proposes a radical and superior alternative to the randomness of the modern exchange value, for which a speculator can buy a manor and swiftly attain the aristocratic status otherwise linked to centuries of hereditary privileges. In the concluding verses of “Glosa,” it turns out that the poet, in fact, seems to be blind to reality if perceived from the perspective of his social environment. However, from an intra-literary point of view of the Romantic ideology, he can see what other people do not notice, for example, to glimpse in the sky an infinite castle of freedom. Prešeren thus accumulates intertextual references to the world classics in order to present imaginative substitute of the accumulation of the economic capital. By listing the world classics, the author imaginatively accumulates in his text their cultural capital which the “currency” of their canonic names metonymically denotes worldwide. Despite its imaginary character, the poet’s allusions to his great precursors prove to be an actual effect of the world literary canon and a contribution to the local diffusion of its social power. In the nineteenth century, promoting the supposedly transcendental aesthetic and moral values of the national and world literary canons began to figure as an ideological and institutional compensation for the subjection of the literary production to the cultural market and the contingency of the literary economic value that had to balance between the changes of supply and demand. The apologetic conclusion of “Glosa” presents a stylistic and semantic antithesis to the initial satirical diagnosis of the conditions that frustrated the Prešeren circle in the first third of the nineteenth century. Through the metaphorical force of the poetic language, Prešeren’s Romantic meta-poem tackles the generally accepted symbols of material power accumulated by the trade in goods. Employing a different, symbolic exchange (i.e., tropes), the poetic text transforms the bourgeois status symbols into images of individual freedom, beauty, and natural authenticity. These non-marketable values

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may only be suggested through the symbolic exchange, what is the exclusive domain of the literary system. Only in metaphors of literature, the sky is equal to the castle, the dawn to gold, and the dew to silver. To sum up, Prešeren intertextually transfers world literature in a Slovenian text written in a peripheral Habsburg crown land, thereby giving meaning to both his poetic labor and the nascent system of national literature. “Glosa” shows that the emergence of a peripheral national literary system in the early nineteenth century tends to imply a specific local understanding of the global nature of literature, as well as the world imagination and intertextuality. After Anton Feliks Dev, the first Slovenian poet, Prešeren may serve as a case of how national identity is established relationally, through self-referential positioning of the poet among literatures in other languages and within world literature understood as a common heritage of humankind. Even though Prešeren’s s­ trategy of national awakening24 relied on transforming a thin layer of Carniolan intelligentsia into a devout public capable of enjoying aesthetic literature printed in a cultivated Slovenian, in his “Glosa” he shows awareness of the material conditions that were impeding his plans to enculturate the imagined community of Slovenians through poetry. The prevailing peasant and Slovenian-speaking population was mostly illiterate and insufficiently educated to read high poetry, whereas the ruling classes were indifferent toward the Romantic notions of the aesthetic autonomy of art or the nation as a community based on the vernacular language, shared history, and culture. Such unfavorable circumstance of a peripheral capitalist society notwithstanding, Prešeren encourages himself to insist on writing aesthetic poetry in Slovenian. In “Glosa,” he invents his utopia of the aesthetic realm by adducing intertextual exempla of the world classics, appropriating their cultural capital, channeling it into a nascent literary field on the periphery, and metaphorically evoking the autonomy of art as the inversion of the economic capital.

24  Prešeren’s strategy, developed according to the Schlegelian ideas of his learned friend Matija Č op (1797–1835), was typical of the initial phases of dependent East-Central European national movements that took place in monarchies headed by foreign-speaking ruling classes. According to Hroch (1993), national awakening in countries like Carniola initially relied on philological, scholarly, and literary activities by a few intellectuals, who discovered, invented, raised awareness of, and provided evidence for the main attributes of these national communities and their historical continuity (language, literature, history, mythology and folklore, customs, territory, and religion).

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Competing Ideas of National Literature In only three decades, however, the autonomization and nationalization of the Slovenian literary system evolved to the degree that allowed a self-­ referential literary text to present Prešeren in the Elysian company of the world classics Prešeren himself had alluded to in “Glosa” with a secret wish of becoming equal to them. Before delving into this episode of establishing the Slovenian national literary ecology with an eye to the global ecology of world literature, let me return to the intertextual appropriations of the topoi representing mythical places of the chosen and canonized artists. Motifs and metaphors of Parnassus frequently occur in the Slovenian nineteenth-century poetry. In his self-referential poem entitled “Prijatlam krajnšine” (To the Friends of Carniolan, 1830), for instance, Miha Kastelic (1796–1868), the editor of the poetic almanac Krajnska čbelica (Carniolan Bee), in which Prešeren published his “Glosa” along with his other significant poems, pays his reverence to the “two times twenty-eight-year” old enterprise of the Pisanice circle, the late eighteenth-century predecessor of Č belica (Gspan 1978–1979: 131). Printed in the opening volume of the new almanac, Kastelic’s homage to the beginners of the Slovenian literary tradition features the domesticated Parnassian figure of “modrica krajnska” (Carniolan Muse) which he adopted from Pisanice. Kastelic’s narrative about the interrupted development of Carniolan belles-lettres and its long-lasting lethargy pictures the allegory of modrica in elegiac mode: desperate because of her efforts to awake the slumbering Carniolans, she flees to other Slavs (Poles, Serbs, and Czechs). It is through the nationalist fervor of the Slavs that the lost creative energy which used to emanate from Pisanice and the “sweetest song” (“narslaji pesem”) of Valentin Vodnik returns to Carniola. The tradition informs the national mission undertaken by the authors of the almanac Krajnska čbelica—at last, they “dare to sing to the nation again” (“naródu spet predrznemo se peti”; Gspan 1978–1979: 131). In short, this self-referential poem allegorically invokes both sources of the nation-building initiative to which its author proclaims to be committed: the incentives come from the present-­day Slavic national movements as well as from the scarce beginnings of the homegrown vernacular tradition. At the same time, Kastelic’s occasional poem indirectly suggests the editorial strategies of his circle. Editing and republishing the most prominent Enlightenment Carniolan predecessors such as Valentin Vodnik was among the priorities of Prešeren’s generation.

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With this, they not only began to form the Slovenian literary canon but also presented themselves as continuators of the Enlightenment national awakening. As early as the 1830s, the circle of Krajnska čbelica gathered around the poet France Prešeren and the philologist and literary historian Matija Č op began to form the national canon beginning with the Enlightenment beginners of the vernacular awakening. Hence, the vacant places of Carniolan Parnassus envisioned by Dev were becoming occupied by authors that the Romantic generation considered as the founding fathers of national literature. Kranjska čbelica thus published a series of epigraphs and poetic texts devoted to Valentin Vodnik (1758–1819) along with reprints of his celebrated poems. The canonization of Vodnik as the ­leading figure25 of Slovenian literature culminated in the 1859 bilingual volume entitled Vodnikov spomenik / Vodnik-Album (Vodnik’s Monument) that Etbin Henrik Costa (1832–1875), a German-speaking lawyer, historian, politician, and Carniolan patriot, edited to honor the centenary of Vodnik’s birth and the fortieth anniversary of his death. Among the various contributions to the volume,26 Blaž Potočnik (1799–1872), the priest, composer, and a passionate adherent of the national movement, devoted to Valentin Vodnik a poetic homage that draws on the topos of Parnassus. In a period when evocations of the millennial national past regularly circulated through various social discourses (history, philology, literature, politics) and, according to Beecroft, shaped the national literary ecology, Potočnik’s eulogium entitled “Vodniku” (To Vodnik; Potočnik 1859) places the first Slovenian poet into a mythologized narrative about Slovenian past.27 Even though Slovenians saw glorious ancient times (they sang hymns to God and their knights), their power weakened because of “evil strokes,” what led to their long-lasting decline (“The night fell”). Evoking the Helicon imagery in a domesticated adaptation, Potočnik 25  Vodník means “leader,” “guide” in Slovenian. This wordplay was often related to mentioning Vodnik as the first Slovenian classic. 26  The contributions to Vodnik’s Monument include his biography, surveys of his poetical, grammatical, journalist, and historical work, the history of his time, a study on his relation to the Slovenian language, and an anthology of Slovenian writers; many of their works pay homage to Vodnik. 27  The narrative of the medieval historical fall of Slovenians, their millennial stagnancy, and absence from the stage of universal history was almost a commonplace of Slovenian nineteenth-century nationalist discourse. Prešeren gave to it a canonical form in his major works in the 1830s.

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presents Vodnik as the poet who, coming at the crack of dawn, finally wakes up “the Slovenian Muse” (“Modrica slovenska”) from her centennial slumber. Aside from a change of ethnic adjective attached to modrica (i.e., from Carniolan into Slovenian) that joins Potočnik’s historical narrative in marking the transition from vernacular literary ecology into a national one, the author replaces the Hippocrene spring from Mount Helicon with the Slovenian waterfall Savica as the source of Vodnik’s poetic inspiration. The poetic homage, written in Vodnik’s favorite meter, depicts the revival of nature and Slovenian people through a patchwork of quotations and metaphors borrowed from Vodnik’s canonical texts. Domesticated in Slovenian literary texts, the Parnassian imagery not only allegorized unproblematic and consensual canonization of the first national classics such as Vodnik but also reflected a gradual expansion of the national literary ecology in terms of producers, readership, media, and institutions. With the growing number of writers and the appearance of literary reviewers and critics, however, the national literary system began to differentiate as early as the 1830s. Conflicting differences augmented in the second half of the nineteenth century when so-called mladoslovenci (Young Slovenians), a strong generation of liberal nationalists, critics, and advocates of the aesthetically more demanding literature, challenged the established generation of national awakeners who relied on a more utilitarian post-Enlightenment program.28 Representing different cultural plans, aesthetic principles, stylistic or genre orientations, and conflicting ideologies, groups of Slovenian writers began to compete with each other for their visibility or prestige within the national community, while they strove to occupy a dominant position in the literary field. Offering a convenient device for representing and commenting on the antagonistic cultural policies, linguistic ideologies, and aesthetic norms, the universal scheme of Parnassus thus became involved in quotidian fights for predominance in the national literary field. It was instrumental in the efforts to acquire an exclusive authority to define what should be considered as literary art and of national importance. In the process, the commonplace of Apollo and the Muses often turned in parody, profanation, and irony. Prešeren’s satirical dialogue “Nova pisarija” (New Writing) written in terza rima and published in the almanac Krajnska čbelica in 1831 is a case in point. Similar to Vittorio Alfieri’s satire I pedanti (The Pedants, 1804), a dialogue between a senior advocate of classicist purism and a freshman  Mladoslovenci of the 1860s and 1870s were inspired by the Young Czech movement.

28

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who is more open to modern tastes and vernacular language, Prešeren’s poem addresses the question of what kind of language, which genres and functions of writing are suitable to Carniolan literature at the time. With the ironic praise of the cocky poetic authority of a rigid, purist, and utilitarian narrow-mindedness of a scribe-writer (Pisar) who gives advises to his unlettered literary disciple (Učenec), Prešeren’s self-referential satire presumes the Romantic concept of the aesthetically autonomous, modern, and cosmopolitan national literature that his circle attempted to establish through the almanac Krajnska čbelica. The poetic almanac Krajnska čbelica, published by Miha Kastelic since April 1830, meant to Prešeren and his aesthetic mentor Matija Č op a useful print medium allowing to do away with the double marginalization of literature in the Slovenian language. Literature in Slovenian seemed to be weaker in number, the aesthetic quality, and genre repertoire than the local literary culture in German, which, in turn, appeared to be no less parochial in relation to Vienna and the German countries. Half a century after Pohlin’s and Dev’s Pisanice, a classicistic poetic almanac of the Carniolan Enlightenment, Č op, Prešeren, and the editor Kastelic regarded their almanac as a reawakening of the efforts of the Pisanice circle to pave the way to an autonomous national literary field. They expected Slovenian literature to establish the media and institutions of its own and form the public space with Ljubljana (Laibach, in German), the capital of the Habsburg hereditary land of Carniola, as its urban center. Influenced by Schlegelian Romantic universalism, Prešeren and Č op planned to ground national literature on universal principles of the aesthetic autonomy. In their view, poetic literature written in a cultivated vernacular language would figure as a central nation-building genre around which the entire national culture would start to evolve. By creating and publishing Slovenian poetry, in which the international aesthetic repertoire of forms, stylistic registers, and imagery intertwine with Romantic sensitivity, personal confession, local themes, and the free-thinking national idea, they intended to attract the scarce and bilingual educated readers of literature from among the Carniolan Bildungsbürgertum. These were thought as potential forerunners of the nationally conscious bourgeoisie. Contrary to Jernej Kopitar’s conservative idea of the gradual cultural development of Slovenians as the peasant nation, they hastened to start with the art of poetry that was intended for the cultured class, intellectually demanding, individualist, liberal, expressed in a literary language with an urban touch, and free from religious, educational, entertaining, or utilitarian purposes.

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In their view, the aesthetically autonomous poetry for the educated class provided for the fastest way in which the incipient, peripheral, and insufficiently developed Slovenian belles-lettres would internalize the quasi-­ universal aesthetic standards embodied in the older, more advanced, and influential literature of the leading European nations. It was the expected ability of the Slovenian language to achieve the status of other cultured languages through its aesthetic cultivation, that Prešeren and Č op believed to confirm Slovenians as equal to other modern nations in Europe. The main opposition to Č op and Prešeren’s initiative came from the highly influential Carniolan-born Viennese linguist, Slavic scholar, and imperial censor Jernej Kopitar and his Carniolan adherents among the rigorist clergy. According to Kopitar’s Austro-Slavic idea, the introduction of a unitary script would help create closer cultural relationships and foster integrative processes between the related Slavic languages and nations of the Habsburg Empire, even though they had been divided between Slavia Orthodoxa (with the Cyrillic script) and Slavia Romana (with the Roman script) ever since the Great Schism of 1054. Following Kopitar’s principles, the Carniolan priest and linguist Franc Serafin Metelko (1789–1860) proposed a new Slovenian script in his grammar of 1825,29 while Prešeren, with his satirical sonnet and “Nova pisarija,” soon became the most visible challenger of the reformed alphabet and Kopitar’s authority behind it.30 Kopitar proposed his Austro-Slavic program of the national awakening of the Austrian Slavs on the model of Herder’s notion that the peasantry, folklore, and the vernacular figure as authentic, uncorrupted, and autochthonous basis on which the young or small nations should standardize their literary language and cultivate their letters. Relying on their folk traditions and vernaculars as the natural origin of any further cultural development, these “infant” nations should gradually build their modern culture through progressive enlightening of the simple peasant people 29  Metelko, in fact, added only a few Cyrillic or newly coined graphemes to the Latin alphabet in order to denote affricates and palatal fricatives. 30  Holding Carniolan letters as his exclusive area of interest, Kopitar did not tolerate dissenters and opponents among his countrymen. Irritated by Prešeren’s satirical mockery of his views and Č op’s open opposition, he broke with his friendly mentorship of Č op and used his position of the court censor to obstruct the almanac Krajnska čbelica in 1833. Matija Č op publicly joined the adversaries of the reformed alphabet and Kopitar’s culture planning in his polemical treatise Slowenischer ABC-Krieg in the spring of 1833. See Chap. 7 for an interpretation of the conflict.

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that were considered the social ground of the emerging national community. Consequently, in Kopitar’s concept of the national literary ecology, Slovenian literature should begin with less demanding genres combining utile et dulce because it should be accessible to the simple peasant folk. Moreover, modern literature whose prime model should remain the folklore would have no privileged role in the national society; it would just complement the achievements of linguistics, history, ethnography, the sciences, journalism, and practical genres. Jernej Kopitar, with his supporters in Carniola, realistically saw the standardization of the Slovenian mother tongue and the development of the national culture as based on the peasantry because the rural commons were the only social layer that used Slovenian dialects in most of their speech positions; m ­ oreover, the Theresa-Josephine educational reforms significantly improved their literacy. Anchored in a conservative variety of Enlightenment, Kopitar’s cultural policy therefore logically planned the need for education of this most massive layer, which was supposed to become the social foundation of the imagined community of Slovenian native speakers. For this purpose, Kopitar’s conception of cultural nationalism favored educative literary genres, the collection of folk poetry, and the imitation of folklore, while defending linguistic efforts for the orthographic and grammatical standardization of vernacular. In Carniola, Kopitar’s Herderian program of national awakening was linked, through the idea of education, to the rigorous Jansenist clergy, which was concerned with the moral integrity of the people. The alliance of these two influential forces greatly hindered the opposing program of Č op’s and Prešeren’s Romantic circle (which was, to be true, much more utopian). In “Nova pisarija,” Prešeren attempts to make the educated class conscious of the difference between the art of literature and the more utilitarian functions of writing. Rejecting linguistic purism and the fetishization of the language spoken by the rural commons, Prešeren opens the question about the proper social basis of the literary language. He caricatures the ensuing conflict between the established utilitarian, educational, and religious repertoire of Slovenian letters on the one hand and the modern poetic genres and topics introduced by him and Krajnska čbelica on the other hand. His confrontation with the demands for poetry to be socially useful focuses on Carniolan ideological “trialism” of the enlightened physiocracy, Herderian nationalism, and Catholic rigorism. He ridicules the tenets of his opponents through the figure of a dull scribe-writer (Pisar) who emblematizes the teachings of Carniolan followers of Kopitar in a

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hyperbolic, exaggerated manner and leads them to absurd. As a comical persona of a pedant, Pisar reduces Horace’s famous imperative to utile only and advises his literary disciple (Učenec) to avoid morally harmful genres of the verbal arts such as the love sonnet, toast, romance, and tragedy because the “bashful Muse” (“muza sramežljiva”) hates them. Following the classical motif of the contest between the heroic Homer and the bucolic Hesiod, the Scribe proposes his recipe for the poetry that suits Carniolan needs—it should be about what is useful to townsmen or what peasants need at home, in the stable, and in the field (“Poj rajši to, kar treba je pri hiši, / za hleve treba, treba je na polji, / poj to, kar kmet in méščan s pridam sliši” Prešeren 1965: 105). In his literal understanding, the Disciple leads this teaching to a grotesque and banal c­ onclusion: he decides to sing about how to protect turnips from caterpillars, catch mice, grow the best potatoes, or heal mangy sheep and lousiness: Bog ti zaplati uk, po tvoji volji   bom pel: gosence kaj naj repo varje,   kak prideluje se krompir narbolji; kako odpravljajo se ovcam garje,   preganjajo ušivim glavam gnide,   loviti mišʼ učil bom gospodarje. (Prešeren 1965: 106)

Enraptured with the Disciple’s final literary decision, the Scriber concludes the poem with the exclamation: “O, the golden age is coming now to Carniolan Muses!” (“O, zlati vek zdaj Muzam kranjskim pride!” Prešeren 1965: 106). Its irony is striking: Prešeren uses the image of the national classic, which Dev had introduced in Pisanice half a century before, and foists it with a debasing reference to the utilitarian repertoire mentioned by the Disciple. In his tacit advocacy of a more cosmopolitan aesthetic autonomy of the national literary ecology, Prešeren’s text includes further ironic allusions to and parodic inversions of the imagery evoking the classical canon, such as the burlesque phrase “boorish Athens” (“rovtarske Atene”). Burlesque tropes of the kind underline the discrepancy between the banal particularism of the existing literary-educational endeavors in Carniola and the universal norm of the Classical Antiquity. Responding to Scriber’s lesson about how to rely on a pure speech of the people instead of practicing a decadent urban style, Disciple’s enthusiasm turns out to be an ironic inversion of Parnassus: “Sitting among the goatherds in the backcountry, / I’ll become a new Apollo and make myself immortal garlands” (“Apolon drugi bom jaz sred kozarjov / si v rovtah pletel neumrjoče vence”).

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Prešeren’s satire drew on the topoi of the Greek mountains of literary elevation to present combat between the post-­ Enlightenment and Romantic understanding of verbal art and literary language. On the other hand, Fran Levstik (1831–1887), the most influential writer and literary critic of the generation of Young Slovenians who challenged a moderately conservative national politics of the established generation of Old Slovenians, wrote two narrative versions of a lengthy satire entitled “Ježa na Parnas” (The Ride to Parnassus, 1854; 1861). They rewrite the motives of Parnassus to travesty the struggles of literary opinions for the dominance in the literary field and the contest between the candidates for national canonization.31 The famed dispute between the Old and the Modern in the French Academy at the end of the seventeenth century introduced a long-lasting model of the literary struggles between those who protected the established canon and those who—often with the help of satire— argued for a modern literary repertoire that suits contemporary sensibility. Conflicts between generations standing for the old or modern literary ideologies resurfaced with the advent of European Romantic circles, in Western and South Slavic literatures mostly in the years around the 1848 Spring of Nations. These disputes produced a series of para-literary polemics that often resorted to mock-heroic battles of books, poetics, authors, or critics. According to Karel Krejčí, Levstik’s Ride to Parnassus follows the genre model of Alexander Pope’s mock-­ heroic narrative poem The Dunciad (1728–1743), which, in its second book, includes scatological heroic games of poets, critics, and booksellers (see Krejčí 1964: 98–109, 175–176, 319–320, 401–406). Levstik, who had just begun his career as a poet and controversial literary critic, adapted the mock-heroic narrative about the competitions for literary primacy. He adjusted this pattern to the clichéd motives of Parnassus to interfere in the ongoing quarrels about who counted as the greatest Slovenian poet. At the time, Old Slovenians headed by the editor of the newspaper Novice (The News), Janez Bleiweis, took pains to canonize Valentin

 The first version of Ježa na Parnas was published in Levstik’s first volume of poetry (Pesmi, 1854; Levstik 1948: 73–90), whereas the 1861 version, much longer, remained in manuscript (Levstik 1953: 43–207). 31

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Vodnik as the first national classic,32 while among their contemporaries, they favored Janez Vesel-Koseski (1798–1884), a poet of Schillerian, bombastic patriotism, over the apparently subjective and sentimental work of his coeval Prešeren whom they nevertheless considered a great poet. These confrontations, which stirred up the national literary field, erupted soon after 1844 when Koseski became the most prominent poet of Novice. Prešeren, on the other hand, who had been famous since the 1830s for his book edition of the epic Krst pri Savici (Baptism on the Savica, 1836) and the contributions to the almanac Krajnska čbelica, the newspaper Illyrisches Blatt, challenged the audience and critics with his ambitious volume of poetry (Poezije) in 1847.33 In general, the literary reviews published in Novice mostly remained at the level of patriotic advertising and benevolent mentoring remarks thanks to Bleiweis’s editorial policy that aimed to encourage the growth of literary production in Slovenian (see Paternu 1960, 1989). However, with its formal mastery, a variety of poetic genres, and highly individualized expressivity, Prešeren’s Poezije incited literary critics to elaborate their argument carefully and take up evaluative discrimination between good and bad literature.34 Critics had to face the dilemma about who deserved the place on the top of the national Parnassus—Prešeren or Koseski. The critic Fran Malavašič, for example, defended literary tastes and priorities of Novice by arguing, in a Schillerian manner, that Prešeren appeared to be more sentimental, subjective, and occupied by the erotic theme (like a “hounded swan”) whereas Koseski, similar to “a clear-sighted eagle,” excelled in his objective, epic, and patriotic orientation (Paternu 1989: 5–6, 18). On the other side, the generation of Young Slovenians, with the critics Fran Levstik and Josip Stritar at the head, attempted to relativize the canonic primacy of Vodnik in the established literary tradition, while struggling against the canonization of Koseski as Novice’s prime ideal of contemporary national literature. In their polemics with the Old Slovenian establishment, Levstik and Stritar continuously appealed to Prešeren to ground their aesthetic opinions. 32  The endeavors of Old Slovenians to canonize Vodnik culminated in Costa’s VodnikAlbum (1859) mentioned above. 33  In the literary supplement Illyrisches Blatt of 1847, a reviewer of Poezije called Prešeren “the single poet of our present Carniolan Parnassus of poetry” (see Paternu 1989: 4). 34  For instance, Vinzenz Rizzi published in 1849 a critical assessment of Prešeren’s poetic achievement from the perspective of the universal literary values. See Chap. 7.

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In both versions of Levstik’s satire “The Ride to Parnassus,” the transplanted Parnassus experiences even greater debasement than in Prešeren’s “New Writing.” Levstik’s critical weapon is a mock-heroic allegory of his literary enemies, in which he lampoons their work, language, aesthetic outlooks, and main protagonists. Instead of the winged horse Pegasus, the highest of the Old Slovenian poets (Koseski) rides a donkey equipped with pig’s bladders, which cannot lift him into the sky. The remaining dilettanti who publish in Novice (their Muse is a crippled whore), try to reach Parnassus with even smaller, slower, or trivial animals such as a rat, a mouse, a snail, a mosquito, or a crab. Levstik introduces low style to the speech of allegorical persons and caricatures them by alluding to second-­ rate poets-artisans of Novice, their gawky style, and prosaic themes. He satirizes their dependency on the authoritative figure of the Newspaper (i.e., the editor of Novice Bleiweis) and fiercely attacks the predominance of the conservative Old Slovenians in the literary field in the name of what he holds to be progressive values. The narrative thrust of both versions of Levstik’s satire is the classical motif of the poetic contest. In the first version, Levstik follows the mock-heroic patters introduced by Pope—frail and sluggish minor poets ridiculously compete for a laurel crown from the hands of the Newspaper. Clumsy, slow, and burdened, they try in vain to climb on the top of the Parnassus Mountain, whereas the Poet (Pevec), the allegory of Prešeren, mounts Pegasus and ascends into the clear skies. The more extended version of the satire intensifies the grotesquery of the conflict between the established canon of Old Slovenians and Young Slovenians’ efforts at the canonization of what they hold as genuine poetry. Here, “The Ride to Parnassus” turns into a burlesque parody of the motives taken from Prešeren’s heroic introduction to his verse tale Baptism on the Savica: modern besiegers that allegorize Levstik’s notions of impartial critique and his radical nationalist liberalism fight to conquer the Old Slovenian fortress built from dictionaries and grammars. The winner proves to be the literary critique, what symbolizes Levstik’s conviction that the aesthetic level of the verbal art within the national literary ecology demands well-informed, honest, and impartial literary critics. To conclude, Levstik uses literary devices of satire and mock-heroic narrative poem to self-referentially comment on the institutional, medial, and ideological tensions between the generations of writers that compete for the dominant position within the national literary system of his time; hereby Levstik focuses on the battles for the canonization of the Slovenian “prince of poets.” The concluding paragraphs will show how the critic

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Josip Stritar, Levstik’s friend and a prominent Young Slovenian, complemented his “domestic policy” of the struggle for Prešeren’s canonicity with the dimension of “foreign policy” operating within the idea of the world literature canon. In general, the topoi of Parnassus, Olympus, or Helicon figured in the mid-nineteenth-century Slovenian literary discourse as clichéd metaphors or allegorical narratives involved in the literary self-reflection and self-regulation. As such, they illustrated ideologically laden battles between competing generations or literary groups who strove to canonize their candidates as national classics and conquer the public sphere with their particular notions about what kind of literary language, which aesthetic norms and themes, and what kind of genre-stylistic repertoire best suited the needs of the national community.

Canonization of the National Classic Prešeren, who became the favorite of Young Slovenians, had made the first step toward his status of the national poet in his self-referential poems on poetry. In these works, he follows the narrative pattern introduced as early as Dev’s domestification of Parnassus: against the background of the long-­ lasting cultural stagnation of Slovenians, he portrays a utopian advent of a nationally redeeming strong poet. He alludes to emblematic elements of the imagery of Parnassus and Helicon to stress the poverty of Carniolan literary tradition and vanities of the existing cultural milieu. He does this either in satirical or elegiac mode. With its burlesque and parodic overtones, the former mode characterizes not only his satire, The New Writing, discussed above but also his epigrams (e.g., the substitution of Pegasus with a snail or the image of the lipogrammatic Hippocrene spring), whereas the elegy sets the tone to his allusions to Parnassus in the 1834 “Sonetni venec” (Wreath of Sonnets). Here, he compares his poems with tear-bedewed flowers growing in a hostile climate of the homeland Parnassus. Prešeren aligns the stagnation of Carniolan culture with forsaken Muses or poor Camenae who feel inferior to their German-speaking sisters adored by Carniolan compatriots. Prešeren thus transcends the conventional topos of Parnassus by imbuing it with Romantic subjectivity that engenders organic metaphors through which he unites the clichéd fragments of the Parnassus landscape with words evoking subjectivity, emotion, and deeply personal poetic creativity. In his “Wreath of Sonnets,” inspired by Jan Kollár’s 1824 monumental Pan-Slavic sonnet cycle Slávy dcera (The Daughter of Sláva), Prešeren

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turns the virtuoso Italian mannerist composition (14 sonnets plus a master theme) into a Romantic symbol of poetic subjectivity. Evoking Petrarchist imagery, he thus interlaces his sentimental erotic longing and public address of the beloved, inaccessible woman of higher rank with an Orphic mission of the national poet, whose ideal task is to cultivate and politically unite his compatriots. Alluding to Parnassus, the author presents a historical diagnosis of the backward dependence of his country that he feels to repress his creative desire: Viharjov jeznih mrzle domačije bile pokrajine naše so, kar, Samo! tvoj duh je zginil, kar nad tvojo jamo pozabljeno od vnukov veter brije.

Inclement home where icy storms chastise Has been our land e’er since your spirit brave, O Samo, vanished; your forgotten grave Beswept by bitter winds since your demise.

Oblóžile očetov razprtije s Pipínovim so jarmom sužno ramo od tod samó krvavi punt poznamo, boj Vitovca in ropanje Turčíje.

From when our fathers, rent by conflicts’ cries, Knew how the yoke of Pippin did enslave, The Turks’ attacks, revolt with sword and stave Vitovec’ battle—these our times comprise. ʼ

Minuli sreče so in slave časi, ker vredne dela niso jih budile, omólknili so pesmi sladki glási.

The joyful years of glory long ago Through valiant labours never were regained, And songs’ sweet voices we no longer know.

Kar niso jih zatrle časov sile, kar raste rož na mladem nam Parnasi, izdíhljeji, solzé so jih redile. (Prešeren 1965: 144)

Yet by the force of time still unconstrained On young Parnassus for us flowers grow; Commingled sighs and tears these blooms sustained. (Prešeren 1999: 95)

This lyrical narrative interprets the subalternity and stagnation of national literature, which was attempting to establish itself under the Habsburg dominance, as historical consequences of the medieval loss of sovereignty. It is then Prešeren, a poet, and not some historian that first introduced the historical interpretation of the past through a coherent national narrative, what is, according to Beecroft (2015: 197–198), constitutive of the national literary ecology. In his 1836 Byronic verse tale Krst pri Savici (Baptism on the Savica), too, Prešeren symbolizes his distress and existential dilemmas through a historical narrative about the eighth-century collapse of the medieval Principality of Carantania and the ensuing German hegemony replacing the rule of Slavic ancestors of the modern Slovenian nation.35 The elegiac and stormy historical fresco of the eighth sonnet focuses on enslavement. With it and similar to nineteenth-­ century nationalist sacrificial  See Chap. 6.

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narratives, messianic in particular, Prešeren rewrites the biblical story about Jewish slavery and ascribes historical continuity to the nascent community (see Perkins 1999: 155–174). The depiction of the remote downfall of the nation intends to entice its rebirth and restoration of its historical subjecthood. Alluding to the universal mythical story of Orpheus and Eurydice, as he knew it from the classical canon, Prešeren boldly creates the allegory of himself as the coming Slovenian national poet who brings the defunct, unhistorical nation back to the stage of world history after the millennial hiatus of slavery. In the seventh and ninth sonnets, he calls for a poet, modeled on the semi-divine power of the Parnassian singer Orpheus, who would reunite and cultivate the Slovenian people, just like Orpheus did by enchanting wild animals and barbarians. According to Prešeren’s vision of the Slovenian nation, it is the universality of high literature (Orphic poetry) that saves the emerging community from fragmentation and unresolvable contradictions: Obdajale so utrjene jih skale, ko nekdaj Orfejovih strun glasóve, ki so jim ljudstva Tracije surove krog Hema, Ródope bile se vdale.

Midst circling mountain-cliffs malevolent, As once amid the sounds of Orpheus’ lyre, To which round Haemus and Rhodope entire Did yield the Thracian people violent.

De bi nebesa milost nam skazale! otajat’ Krajna našega sinove, njih in Slovencov vseh okrog rodove, z domačmi pesmam’ Orfeja poslale!

O may the iron will of heav’n relent! And may, in order Slovenians to inspire, And Carniolan hearts to melt with fire, With native songs an Orpheus be sent!

De bi nam srca vnel za čast dežele, med nami potolažil razprtije, in spet zedinil rod Slovenšʼne cele!

That he enflame our love of fatherland And comfort our dissension so unwise, Anew unite the Slovenians, firm to stand!

De b’ od sladkóte njega poezije potihnil ves prepir, bile vesele viharjov jeznih mrzle domačije! (Prešeren 1965: 143)

That through his dulcet songs we realise An end to strife; that joy may fill our land, Inclement home where icy storms chastise! (Prešeren 1999: 93)

Prešeren’s “Orphic” sonnet quoted above is linked to a decisive act of his national canonization by way of a commented edition of his work in a library of the Slovenian classics. According to the literary historian Ivan Prijatelj (1961: 150–205), the Young Slovenians Josip Stritar, Josip Jurčič, and Fran Levstik planned the collection “Klasje iz domačega polja” (“Classics from the Home Field”) in April 1866. The title of the series

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contains a pun (klasje literally means “ears, spikes”) which, in fact, domesticates the universal notion of the classic. The objective of the envisioned library of collected works was to prove the equality of Slovenian classics to those of other nations and demonstrate their strength and quantity to denigrators of Slovenian letters.36 The concept of collected works of national literature is a corollary to the modern split of the universal classical canon into canons of national literatures and the hyper-canon of world literature. With its unitary idea of presenting Slovenian literature as a historically evolving totality, the planned library of national classics intended to surpass earlier, more random editions of individual classics (or their selected texts), which were appearing ever since the efforts of the Krajnska čbelica circle. With commented editions of Prešeren, Fran Levstik, Simon Jenko, and Valentin Vodnik, the series Klasje was intended to ground and materialize the emerging national canon. Because of the bankruptcy of the publisher, the editors succeeded to publish only the first planned book— Prešeren’s Poesies introduced by a biographical and interpretative essay marking the beginning of prešernoslovje (Prešeren studies) as an example of a literary-historical discipline devoted to highly canonical authors.37 In the introduction to the Klasje edition of Prešeren’s Poesies (1866), the writer and critic Josip Stritar (1836–1923) commented on the poet’s Romantic rewriting of the Orphic myth (“Wreath of Sonnets”) and turned it into an explicit sacrificial narrative.38 Recasting Prešeren’s classicist self-­ 36  Miran Hladnik (1992) reports about an infamous anecdote that helps understand a polemic gesture of the Young Slovenian concept of Klasje: On 12 February 1866, the liberaloriented Carniolan German poet Anastasius Grün (pen name of the Count Anton Alexander von Auersperg), argued in the Carniolan Land Assembly that, with the exception of the religious education, Slovenian language did not possess other necessary textbooks and thus could not be equal to German as the language of instruction in Carniolan secondary schools. During his speech, he apparently showed two translated textbooks saying: “Es ist aber für den lernbegierigen und namentlich den im Unterrichte in der Selbstbildung weiter vorrücken wollenden Schüler wirklich traurig, im Besitze dieser beiden Bücher sagen zu müssen, wie der griechische Philosoph: Omnia mea mecum porto.” The next day German newspapers reported that Count Auersperg brought all Slovenian literature to the Carniolan Land Diet (Landtag)—in his pocket-handkerchief. 37  Prešeren studies represents a prolific branch of literary history focused on the life and works of Prešeren (Levstik, too, contributed to this field in the early 1860s). Analogous to, say, Shakespeare studies, this discipline represents a typical phenomenon of the canonization of major authors through biographic scholarship and critical editions. 38  The dismemberment of Orpheus—the Dionysian sparagmos that Prešeren’s Apollonian interpretation of the myth suppressed in the name of national utopia—might have influenced Stritar to depict Prešeren as sacrifice.

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mythologization in messianic terms, Stritar portrayed the Slovenian national poet as imitatio Christi: “A poet is a true martyr of humankind because he takes upon himself all our misery by chanting about it in sweet poems, which thaw our numbed hearts—he suffers to give us pleasure. Prešeren is such a poet!” (Stritar 1955: 27). In Stritar’s post-Romantic view, being a poet already demands a sacrifice—suffering outside the given bourgeois order, enduring one’s difference from “the ordinary man” and the Romantic “disharmony between the ideal and the world” (Stritar 1955: 27).39 What qualifies Prešeren as the redeemer of the nation, ­however, is not his anguish but the Christological idea of suffering for others as an act of redemption. Stritar secularizes this idea by hybridizing it with post-Romantic aesthetic ideology and Goethean classicist universalism. He ascribes to Prešeren the capacity to sublimate his pain and suffering for others through poetry. Stritar believes Prešeren’s poetry to be universally human and thus capable of the symbolic exchange between a self-sacrificing individual and the community. Only because of this poetic exchange, the poet as a socially marginalized individual takes upon himself the suffering of the nation and humanity at large and virtually redeems them by speaking for and to them. Transforming affects into verbal symbols and back to affects, Prešeren’s poetry acquires a redemptive role. Prešeren’s poetry is redeeming because it reworks the traumatic lack of the community to produce consolatory aesthetic pleasure and a sense of social coherence. In return for the poet’s aesthetic healing of the communal trauma, the community posthumously elevates his sacrifice by canonizing him. Significantly, Stritar’s enthronement of Prešeren as the Slovenian national poet circumscribes his saintly status within the cosmopolitan horizon of the international literary canon: Every nation has a man whom she imagines with a holy, pure nimbus above his head. What Shakespeare is to Englishmen, Racine to Frenchmen, Dante to Italians, Goethe to Germans, Pushkin to Russians, and Mickiewicz to Poles—this is Prešeren for Slovenians. … If the nations were assembled on Judgment Day to prove how they had managed their talents and how every one of them had participated in universal, human culture, the small Slovenian nation could fearlessly prove itself among others with one small book, Prešeren’s Poezije. (Stritar 1955: 48) 39  Although Prešeren was a lawyer, neither his profession nor literary work earned him respect. Frustrated by his failed mobility toward the nascent Carniolan bourgeoisie, he leaned toward bohemianism.

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In Stritar’s view, Prešeren’s position in relation to both national and world literature is equivalent to hyper-canonic European writers. With his act of installing Prešeren into the national and global canon simultaneously, Stritar represents the quintessence of the imaginary worlding of Prešeren within the Slovenian literary system. Seen against the background of the world literary canon and its aesthetic universality, Prešeren stands for the value of the nascent Slovenian literature. Stritar’s celebration of the Slovenian world-class genius thus confirms Nemoianu’s observation that a national poet is usually a summary of the achievements of a nation in the context of world literature (Nemoianu 2002: 254–255). Indeed, in his essay on Prešeren, Stritar does not mention the term “world literature,” but he nevertheless considers Slovenian literature and its national poet with an eye to other national literatures that share the universals of the human culture. As a consequence, his interpretation of Prešeren’s oeuvre inaugurates the methods of comparative literature in order to prove that Prešeren was a genuine, original artist rooted in the milieu of his country; according to Stritar, Prešeren “had no teacher other than his own heart and—the nation” (Stritar 1955: 33). However, influenced by Goethe’s cosmopolitanism, Stritar strives to provide arguments grounding Prešeren’s singular poetic identity in the universality of world culture. Avoiding a possible degradation of the national classic to a mere imitator of foreign examples,40 Stritar attempts to reconstruct Prešeren’s worldwide horizon. He mentions that Č op “acquainted … Prešeren with Spanish and Italian literature” (36) and that Prešeren “learned and cultivated himself with regard … to the ancient Greek and Latin classics and the best modern classics of all the cultured nations.” By learning from the classics, Prešeren “educated his … taste,” and thus, in Stritar’s conclusion, he achieved the classical measure in the aesthetic, cognitive, and ethical dimensions of poetry (45). Having recalled this intellectual background, Stritar undertakes a comparative interpretation of Prešeren’s sonnets with which he aims to convince his readers of the poet’s originality and authenticity. Stritar’s key argument results from his comparisons of Prešeren with Petrarch. This approach demonstrates that Prešeren was not a passive imitator subjected to Petrarch’s influence but rather a self-conscious author able to use deliberate intertextuality. Stritar contends that Prešeren consciously imitated 40  On the other hand, Stritar also refrains from patriotic exaggerations portraying local authors as, say, the Slovenian Goethe, Schiller, or Petrarch.

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“the patriarch of the new lyrical poetry” without hiding this from his readers. This is why “the imitation of his teacher did not in any way weaken his individuality” (Stritar 1955: 39–43). The individuality of the poetic expression, which Stritar demonstrates by comparing Prešeren with Petrarch, amounts to the main criterion for the placement of Slovenian national poet in the world literary space on terms of equality: “Just like Petrarch, Prešeren was the son or the flower of his time, his nation, and this is the greatest glory an artist can achieve” (39). Based on the key arguments he had used as a literary critic and literary historian in the essay on Prešeren, Stritar the poet canonized his great precursor as the classic of both national and world literatures in his poetry as well. In his satire aimed against the Old Slovenian skepticism about Prešeren’s primacy in the national literature, Stritar intertextually evokes the topos representing the immortalized classics—that of Elysium. In a way, he thus contributes the closing episode to the narrative commenced by Dev: whereas Dev called for national classics in a period when none of them was on the horizon, Stritar finally installs Prešeren into the national and international literary pantheon as the highest among the growing number of Slovenian literary producers. In his satirical dialogue “Prešernov god v Eliziji” (Prešeren’s Name-­ Day Party in Elysium) published in the almanac Mladika of 1868, one of the prominent manifestations of the Young Slovenian generation, Stritar hybridizes poetry with a somewhat journalistic style to address topical controversies (Stritar 1953: 125–131). He mocks the established views and discourse of Old Slovenians who, more prudent and less radical than Young Slovenians, dominated the literary field ever since 1848. Loyal to Habsburgs and advocating a gradualist national program stemming from Zois’s and Kopitar’s Enlightenment concept of Bildung, Bleiweis and Old Slovenians were inclined to marginalize the aesthetic function of literature. Even though Bleiweis held Prešeren in high esteem and regularly published his poems in the newspaper Novice, he did not regard Stritar’s favorite as the unquestionable peak of the national canon. He and his adherents thus frequently expressed skepticism about the youthful enthusiasm with which Young Slovenians elevated Prešeren as the national icon and the apogee of art. In a polemical reply to this position, Stritar adopts Elysium, the canonical image of the eternal canon, as the place where Prešeren deservedly enjoys immortal glory. As a satirist, Stritar carnivalizes the eternal afterlife of the classics through a low-style parodic patchwork of contemporary idiolects sub-

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jected to his refined irony. His dialogue is a domestification and travesty of the classical imagery of Elysium. For instance, the immortals invited to Prešeren’s name-day party eat Carniolan sausages, frolicsomely toast to each other with light red wine from Lower Carniola, and, tipsy as they are, sing patriotic songs in the style of Slovenian reading societies. Valentin Vodnik, the first among Slovenian guests, recites his laudatory poem to Prešeren, which ends with quotes from Levstik’s eulogy entitled “Na grobu Prešerna” (At Prešeren’s Tomb) and a cento of Prešeren’s verses, phrases, and titles. Reusing Prešeren’s words, Stritar illustrates the authenticity and popular nature of the poet he is quoting. Vodnik, followed by Primož Trubar, Žiga Zois, Anton Tomaž Linhart, Matija Č op, Jernej Kopitar, and Franc Serafin Metelko render homage to Prešeren, what allegorizes the structure and hierarchy of the national canon in Stritar’s understanding. In addition to this gesture of “domestic policy” confirming Prešeren’s national primacy, Stritar ventures a kind of “foreign policy” to place Prešeren into the global literary ecology, at least in his imagination. He depicts the Slovenian national poet as entering into “a holy round dance of singers”; the greatest classics of world literature come to pay tribute to Prešeren, beginning with Homer, changed in a Serbian guslar (fiddler). Petrarch and Goethe also admit that Prešeren is chosen by Apollo and crown him with laurel. In a word, Stritar’s criticism and poetry enthroned Prešeren as the national poet, placing him at the peak of world literature’s canon. Drawing on Stritar’s post-Romantic understanding of Prešeren, the modern literary theorist Dušan Pirjevec (1921–1977) proposed his concept of the “Prešernian structure” a century later, during the revolutionary year 1968.41 In his literary-historical narrative about the mission of Slovenian poetry from Romanticism to postwar avant-gardes, Pirjevec ascribes the role of sacrifice to the individual authors and their poetry. According to him, the greatest Slovenian writers are “victims of their time and environment,” whereas poetry “devours its children” (Pirjevec 1978: 59). Suffering unrecognized during their lifetime, poets must first be destroyed to become sacred—their poetry is “a rehabilitated, elevated, sacralized sacrifice and thus untouchable” (61). Pirjevec admits that other national literatures also have victims, but only in Slovenia is posthumous 41  For a critical assessment of the concept of Prešernian structure and a similar notion of “Slovenian cultural syndrome,” see Dović 2008; Juvan 2008; Dović and Helgason 2017: 144–148.

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veneration “so exclusively connected to ill-fate” (61). Moreover, the presumed essence of the poetical is sacrificed as long as poetry—together with the Slovenian language—serves as “an instrument of national assertion and self-­confirmation” (69). The totality of existential dimensions that poetry evokes universally must be sacrificed to the particularity of nationalist understanding. To summarize, Prešernian structure developed from Prešeren’s self-­ understanding that his poetry, expressing his suffering and patriotic commitment, symbolically grounds the nation. As a stateless community under the Habsburgs, the nation could only exist as a group-in-movement hindered by a foreign power. In these circumstances, Prešeren’s self-­ ­ understanding evolved into a generally accepted “fundamental structure” (Pirjevec 1978: 56) that shaped Slovenians’ historical being until the beginning of the twentieth century. From the perspective of Prešernian structure, literature replaced the state and political institutions, sciences, media, and other social discourses that were either established by foreign rulers or emerging as Slovenian within the national movement. Because the Habsburg Empire contained Slovenian nationalism, the movement needed a stronger ideological coherence. The ensuing “totalitarian” character of the movement (Pirjevec 1978: 66) kept nascent Slovenian-­ speaking society from internal differentiation, leading to reductive appropriations of poetry. In the final analysis, such appropriations result from the working of the national canon.

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CHAPTER 5

World Literature in Carniola

Literary Transnationalism and Cultural Transfer Goethe’s notion of world literature recently inspired transnational literary studies to remap the research fields previously shared by national literary histories and comparative literature (see Goßens 2011: 1–13). With its focus on circulation, exchange, and interliterariness, transnational approach develops Goethe’s cosmopolitan idea through a critique of its nationalist presumptions. In the words of Pier Paolo Frassinelli and Robert Watson Transnational studies displaces the national framework for the analysis of literary works, genres and histories, and repositions them within a larger, global literary context that matches with what comparative literature describes as world literature. In this formulation, world literature marks a series of intersections between diverse literary works and traditions, between different bodies of literature, and between literature and the planet. It also functions as a contact zone between various area studies and the field of comparative literature in its most expansive, rather than narrowly European, sense. (Frassinelli and Watson 2011: 193)

Over the past thirty years, transnational comparatistics has attempted to go beyond the approach Ulrich Beck termed “methodological nationalism,” a seemingly impartial scholarly legacy of the nineteenth-century nationalist fervor. Methodological nationalism interprets each society as an autonomous unit contained within the borders of a nation-state, thus accepting the phenomenon of the nation-state as a self-evident ground © The Author(s) 2019 M. Juvan, Worlding a Peripheral Literature, Canon and World Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-32-9405-9_5

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allowing for theoretical generalizations and comparisons (Beck 1997: 115–121; 2006: 24–33). Focusing on the study of a particular nationstate, this method disregards the history of how the society under scrutiny interacted with nearby and remote spaces and how the entangled transnational processes contributed to self-fashioning of individual nations (see Sapiro 2011: 231; Škulj 2013).1 To be sure, the transnational perspective does not discard national framework as irrelevant or imaginary tout court. It instead adopts a comparative approach to observe how the category of the nation has been produced ideologically in the first place and how it has affected the historical process. Communities that understood themselves as nations and collective subjects of sovereignty resulted from a shared history of Post-Enlightenment Europe, through a contagious spread of ideas, symbols, practices, and institutions (see Conrad 2004: 55; Haupt and Kocka 2004: 33–34). In contrast to the tradition of comparative literature, which did not seriously question the Romantic ideology of world-historical narratives featuring national literatures, the present-day transnational literary historiography does not consider national literatures as linguo-cultural, ethnic givens, or the basic units of analysis.2 Accordingly, transnational comparativism is also interested in the interaction, transfer, and appropriation of ideologemes, cultural goods, topics, forms, concepts, behavior, mentalities, or practices which circulate across subnational or supranational areas, such as cities, historical lands, border zones, micro- and macroregions, or civilizations. What has seemed to be a unified, clearly circumscribed entity called the nation, turns out to be a heterogeneous, flexible, and loosely bounded ideological system, the identity of which always already depends on “bilateral” or “multilateral” intercourse with other comparable ­entities. In contrast to particularism of national literary histories, nations are studied 1  A telling example is the shared history of Graeco-Latin legacy in the Post-Classical Europe. In the Middle Ages and Modernity, the canon of the Antiquity continued to be recalled as a quasi-universal treasury of motifs, themes, and linguistic-structural patterns that individual vernaculars intertextually absorbed in their efforts to achieve the status of a cultivated literary language (see Sapiro 2011: 231–232). Even though the classical tradition began to lose its impact during the nineteenth-century nationalization of literature and the concomitant formation of the literary world-system, it remained at the heart of the translation repertoire and the universal hyper-canon. More on this below. 2  As a matter of fact, even though the concept of nation-state habitually underlies the humanities and social sciences including disciplines of literary studies, nation-states were not common globally before the end of WWII (Osterhammel 2003: 444).

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within the framework of what recent historiography calls “shared history” or “entangled history” (l’histoire croisée), known in the historical lands (Silesia, Styria, Carinthia, or Istria), regions (Scandinavia, Central Europe, or the Balkans), macroregions, or civilizations (Europe, the Arab world, Latin America).3 Transnational perspective discloses that the alleged particularity of given literature proves to be a variety of a general pattern. As the below paragraphs will demonstrate, the notion endemic to Slovenian literary history that Slovenian literature was peculiar in its sense of being belated and underdeveloped was, in fact, parallel to the inferiority complex that emerged in the process of nationalizing German literature from the late eighteenth century on.4 Contained by methodological nationalism, comparative and national (literary) histories have so far been inclined to treat such varieties of broadly diffused patterns as singulars (Sonderweg). Contrariwise, transnational literary studies research the circulation of representations, institutional models, or cultural products across national and linguistic boundaries in order to get the big picture, that is, a systemic panorama of a specific region, civilization, or the world as a whole (see Espagne 2003: 436–437). In addition to the changed perspective of the postnational paradigm in the humanities, the understanding of contacts between literatures has also changed in literary studies, as witnessed by the reinterpretation of influence or its substitution with terms such as intertextuality, interference, creative reception, interliterariness, and cultural transfer. In the following paragraphs, I summarize my discussion published elsewhere (Juvan 2008: 54–69). Since the 1970s, the theories of intertextuality have reassessed the understanding of the semantic structure, the epistemological background, and the value assumptions of the concept of influence. In comparative literature, intertextuality deconstructed the positivist premises of influence, that is, the causal-genetic understanding of interliterary contacts. Likewise, intertextuality came to problematize the implicit norm of originality, which, from the eighteenth century onward, figured not only as an aesthetic measure but also as a parameter of international importance and 3  On transnational cultural and political history see Cohen and O’Connor 2004a; Conrad 2004; Espagne 2003: 423–437; Haupt and Kocka 2004: 31–34; Schriewer 2003: 36–41; Sluga 2004: 103–109; Werner and Zimmermann 2004. 4  Moreover, the delayed and aesthetically reduced reception of foreign influences that was regarded as Slovenian idiosyncrasy is but an actualization of Even-Zohar’s principle of structural simplification of the interferences of core literatures typical of dependent, smaller literary systems (Even-Zohar 1990: 21–22, 71).

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factor conditioning the literary market and copyright legislation. As an alternative to influence, the intertextual approach introduced more precise concepts for analyzing the forms and functions of foreign interference in the existing literary repertoire. With its sense of dialectics of adoption and rejection, the glossary of intertextuality aptly reflects the complexity of reworking linguo-cultural otherness. Finally, intertextuality undermines methodological nationalism’s study of influences in terms of dependency relations between nations. Notwithstanding their metropolitan prestige, the allegedly original and compelling sources themselves turn out to be intertextual transformations of pre-existing individual origins or the transnational repertoire of topoi whose beginnings cannot be determined. It is, then, no surprise that intertextuality has encouraged revisions of influence in accordance with postmodern notions of cultural identity. In this understanding, every identity, be it individual or national, establishes itself through ever-changing discursive relations to the other. For instance, Jola Škulj explicitly links the identity formation of national cultures or literatures with cross-cultural intertextuality: “As any individuality, cultural identity is a meeting point of several cross-cultural influences. It is of a complex plurivocal character, open to its own changes in order to preserve its own being in a new context of interests. Our cultural identity is our intertext. … Forming itself and existing through cross-cultural interactions, cultural identity exposes its inevitable intertextual character” (Škulj 2003: 149). The perspective of intertextuality thus appeared to have finally reconsidered interliterariness beyond the boundaries of methodological nationalism in which the concept of influence—with its subtext of hegemony, dependence, and debt—figured as a symbolic weapon of international politics and global economy. It was hoped that the postmodern liberal dialogism would democratize the understanding of influence, a fundamental notion of comparative literature. Intertextuality raised even higher hopes, in particular, if interpreted as a creative strategy by which the authors signal to their model readers against what semiotic background their literary texts are expected to be perceived. Through its allusive references to and derivative rewriting of various pre-texts, intertextual citationality is meant to evoke to the reader what position in the sphere of the already said the textual subject assumes, including her or his relations to the cosmopolitan, national, or global literary ecologies.5 5  As it will be explained below, Goethe materialized his conception of world literature through citationality and intertextual transformation of multilingual sources of the world.

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Ever since Harold Bloom (1997), however, intertextual theories have also highlighted the dark side of the influence—its symbolic authority involved in the formation of literary identities. As an instance of the Other, the influence encapsulates a symbolic force that sparks the subject’s desire and its ambivalent oscillation between the need for identification with or recognition of the Other and the resistance to or disavowal of its paternal authority. The subjecting dominance of influence works beyond the textual boundaries. It transpires the inspiring cultural product not only because of the alleged value of the creative work it manifests but also because of the product’s relation to the supply-and-demand ratio on the international market and the share of its original language and literary system in the global distribution of cultural capital. Thus, in addition to its perceived intrinsic value, the influence of a given work of art results from its marketability or the canonicity of its author as well as from the translatability of the language and the prestige of the literature from which it is considered to originate. Introduced in the 1980s, the concept of cultural transfer links the textual and extratextual aspects of transnational influence.6 The term transfer as such is widespread in the world of finance and banking, transport, information technology, psychoanalysis, and social policy, whereas it appears in literary studies in various contexts, from the traditional metaphor theory through intermediality to the concepts of the body as a text (Vojvodić 2012). Terminologically more fixed, the concept of cultural transfer belongs to this word family. It has not yet wholly established itself in ­literary studies, although it has recently joined the repertoire of comparative literature (Sapiro 2011). Significantly, the concept of cultural transfer presupposes—without acknowledging this—traditional methods of literary comparatistics such as the research of mediators, literary horizons, ­linear and concentric study of influence (see Ocvirk 1936: 110–182), or the hermeneutic and reception-theory approach to the processes of adopting imported patterns (see, e.g., Ď urišin 1984: 159–160). In ­ exchange for this unrecognized loan, however, the term cultural transfer offers to comparative literature a conceptual framework that places intertextual relations between literatures into the spatiotemporal dynamics of the entangled history of ideologies, social institutions, actors, and practices. 6  See also Cohen and O’Connor 2004b: xiii; Conrad 2004: 53–55; Haupt and Kocka 2004: 31–32; Kaelble and Schriewer 2003; Middell 2000; Tilly 2005; te Velde 2005: 207–211; Werner and Zimmermann 2004: 19–20.

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The cross-cultural transfer is, therefore, a decisive factor in establishing the world literary system as well as its contradictions and developmental self-regulation. The objects of cultural transfer are not limited to texts only. For instance, the nineteenth-century national movements transferred various elements from a shared European nationalist repertoire into their home environments and adapted them to their particular needs. Such cross-­cultural elements that, constituting the entangled history of the region, circulated between Germany, Italy, Scandinavia, Central and South-­Eastern Europe included literary themes and forms (nature poems, patriotic oratory, historical epics, novels and dramas, national anthems, etc.), the types of literary media, associations, and institutions (almanacs, public libraries, reading societies, reading rooms, national learned societies), key personalities (national poets), practices of public gathering and commemorating (meetings, celebrations, worship of cultural saints), typical behavioral patterns and dressing (national costumes), ideological self-denominations (Young Italy, Young Germany, Young Czechs, Young Slovenians), and nationally representative public buildings (national homes, national museums, and theaters). Any national individuality thus shaped its purportedly unique physiognomy through a complex of cross-­cultural transfers from a shared repertoire of models. Improving the notion of influence, the concept of cultural transfer demands a detailed examination of the receiving environment, including the entire process of the adoption of outer models. As a rule, the transfer process begins with the awareness of the difference between the repertoire of the domestic cultural system and the potentials of an external system. After the comparison with the potential source culture has produced the feeling of a lack, a pressing need for an import occurs. The transfer process itself is not unilineal. It has several steps entailing multilayered activities and contradictory tendencies, such as struggling with the defense mechanisms by which the home environment meets the alien body, explicit comments on the vagaries of importation, the structural and semantic transformation of the imported patterns, and their adjustment to the needs of the receiving system. Finally, the transfer process often leads to the naturalization of a foreign body, which eventually becomes perceived as an autochthonous structure. In the receiving environment, the incoming material passes through the procedures of rejection and appropriation, while interacting with inland ideological horizons and semiotic repertoires. What is essential to the concept of the transfer is to study “the

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forms of re-appropriation and re-interpretation of circulating works and models according to the specific issues at stake within the reception space in a given socio-historical configuration” (Sapiro 2011: 234).

Language and Metalanguage of Romanticism Being Romantics of small European literature who were active during the early, philological-cultural phases of the Slovenian nationalist movement, Matija Čop and France Prešeren entered the “age of world literature” Goethe was announcing in Weimar in the 1820s and 1830s through their concepts and practices of the aesthetic cultivation of Slovenian vernacular ecology. Their cultural transfer of German literary cosmopolitanism, which Goethe and the Schlegel brothers, notwithstanding their urbanity, succumbed to a nationalist desire to assert their literature internationally, was aimed at establishing a kind of the world-classical period already at the very start of Slovenian national literature. Paradoxically, they employed a German literary strategy to emancipate Slovenian letters from their dependence on the predominantly German public sphere of the Habsburg Empire. Čop and Prešeren, the main actors of the transfer process, started from self-evaluation of their native literature by comparing it to other modern national literatures and the world literary canon. Eliciting the feelings of inferiority, their initial act of worlding of modern Slovenian literature diagnosed its critical lack—the seemingly uncultivated vernacular had not yet emancipated from its subordinate position in public, the office, and culture, while it appeared to be far from achieved literary languages of prominent European literatures. Whereas German occupied the position of the official and cultured language in the Habsburg province of Carniola, the cosmopolitan horizon of German writers such as Goethe and the Schlegels brought about similar inferiority complexes in the German lands as they compared their national literature with more influential French, English, or Italian letters. As the following pages will demonstrate, Čop and Prešeren transferred Goethean and Schlegelian model of worlding semi-peripheral literature into a peripheral and much smaller literary system. The philologist, literary historian, and librarian Matija Č op and the poet France Prešeren seem almost inseparable in Slovenian literary-historical narratives. Their relationship has been interpreted as one of a figure and its background: the mentor’s passive, bookish knowledge appears as the background to the creativity of the artist. However, the inseparability

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of their theoria and poiesis is not a coincidental feature in the development of Slovenian belles-lettres, but rather part of a broader pattern connected to the modern universalization of the privileged role of the aesthetic within the democratized knowledge system and the establishment of belles-lettres as the symbolical nucleus of modern imagined communities. The modern literary field came to be cognitively organized into a relatively autonomous whole of social communication, also thanks to the metalanguage that referred to literary texts. Along with descriptive poetics, literary criticism, and literary history, literary theory grew from the traditions of post-processing the texts considered literary. On the other hand, literary texts remained the primary referent of theory right until the last third of the twentieth century. Granted, the expressions theory and literature are known as early as in ancient Greek and Latin. In some European languages such as English, the word theory was attested in the late sixteenth century, in the sense of “spiritual, conceptual observation, contemplation,” “conception or thought scheme, principles by which an activity behaves,” and especially “systems of ideas and assertions that explain a group of facts or phenomena.” The present notions of (literary) theory and literature, however, designate specific cultural units, which developed only during the Post-Enlightenment modernization. As I explain elsewhere (Juvan 2011: 29–31, 65–78), their interaction relied on the nineteenth-century ideology of the aesthetic, which attempted to safeguard quasi-autonomous islands of art within the capitalist market and the bourgeois society.7 Seized by the aesthetic ideology, writers intended to create their texts of beauty, spiritual transcendence, and imagination, while the “intellectual intuition” figuring as “the categorical imperative of any theory” (Schlegel 1991: 27) explained how literature achieved the aesthetic quality and what the sense of this endeavor was supposed to be. In their seminal book The Literary Absolute, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy demonstrate that the bond of literature and (literary) theory came into existence at the beginning of the nineteenth century, in Jena Romanticism. The early works of the Schlegel brothers, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, Georg Friedrich Philipp von HardenbergNovalis, Ludwig Tieck, Friedrich Schleiermacher, and others were labeled “theoretical romanticism,” “the inauguration of the theoretical project in literature” (Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy 1988: 2). Theoretical Romanticism conceptually established literature as an absolute genre and  See also the interpretation of Prešeren’s poem “Glosa” in Chap. 4.

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an autonomous field of discourse—it created an awareness of literature as an art that was realized through words according to its proper principles (Lacoue-­Labarthe and Nancy 1988: 3, 11). Alluding to post-revolutionary democratic principles allowing for free self-determination of citizens, Friedrich Schlegel characteristically defined “poetry” as “republican speech: a speech which is its own law and end unto itself and in which all the parts are free citizens and have the right to vote” (Schlegel 1991: 8).8 On the one hand, the Jena Romantics shaped the nascent cultural entity called literature with the help of criticism and theory (they were fond of this word), whereas, on the other hand, literature, with its self-reflection, was to “produce its own theory” within itself (Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy 1988: 12, 16). Thus literature, as verbal art, and its philosophical, aesthetic theory, established themselves in interaction and mutual entanglement at the beginning of German Romanticism. Writers expected philosophy to realize and complete itself as poetry (Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy 1988: 13, 28, 35), seeing in modern poetry “a running commentary on the following brief philosophical text: all art should become science and all science art; poetry and philosophy should be made one” (Schlegel 1991: 14).9 In his fragments—which introduced modern hybrid philosophical-poetical genres—Friedrich Schlegel specifically called for the interaction or synthesis of the two types of discourse: All art should become science and all science art; poetry and philosophy should be made one (Schlegel 1991: 14). … Romantic poetry is a progressive, universal poetry. Its aim isn’t merely to reunite all the separate species of poetry and put poetry in touch with philosophy and rhetoric … (ibid.: 31). The more poetry becomes science, the more it also becomes art. If poetry is to become art, if the artist is to have a thorough understanding and knowledge of his ends and means, his difficulties and his subjects, then the poet will have to philosophize about his art … (ibid.: 54)10 8  “Die Poesie ist eine republikanische Rede; eine Rede, die ihr eignes Gesetz un ihrere eigner Zweck ist, wo alle Teile freie Bürger sind, und mitstimmen dürfen” (Schlegel 1972: 15). 9  “Die ganze Geschichte der modernen Poesie ist ein fortlaufender Kommentar zu dem kurzen Text der Philosophie: Alle Kunst soll Wissenschaft, und alle Wissenshaft soll Kunst werden; Poesie und Philosophie sollen vereinigt sein” (Schlegel 1972: 22). 10  “Alle Kunst soll Wissenschaft, und alle Wissenschaft soll Kunst werden; Poesie und Philosophie sollen vereinigt sein (Schlegel 1972: 22) … Die romantische Poesie ist eine progressive Universalpoesie. Ihre Bestimmung ist nicht bloß, alle getrennte Gattungen der Poesie wieder zu vereinigen, und die Poesie mit der Philosophie und Rhetorik in Berührung

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To Schlegel, therefore, poetry’s approaching the essence of art is, paradoxically, also the path to the ideal of science, which at that time figured as the opposite of the art’s free play of imagination. By reaching for its other, poetry directed itself toward theory while forming its proper identity. With theory, the writing subject becomes aware of her or his expressive means and the ends of writing. One of the possible ways for the writer to philosophize about her or his art is also offered by self-­reflection, grafted in a hybrid way within poetry itself—that is to say, by the self-reference of meta-poetry.11 What Schlegel calls Transzendentalpoesie unites “preliminaries of a theory of poetic creativity … with artistic reflection and beautiful self-mirroring” (mit der künstlerischen Reflexion und schönen Selbstspiegelung); its task is to be “simultaneously poetry and the poetry of poetry (Poesie der Poesie)” (Schlegel 1972: 50, 1991: 50–51). It follows that, on the threshold of Romanticism, the concept of the artistic essence of poetry established itself precisely through its theory, within or next to poetry. In the Post-Enlightenment and post-­revolutionary Modernity, the different disciplines and kinds of knowledge, free from traditional masternarratives imposed by the Church and the Empire, thus mutually legitimized each other’s autonomy. In her Friedrich Schlegel and the Emergence of Romantic Philosophy, Elizabeth Millán-Zaibert argues that Schlegel challenges “philosophy in terms of mathematical and scientific models of necessity and certainty” and moves “toward incorporating history into philosophy and of bringing philosophy closer to poetry” (Millán-Zaibert 2007: 4). In the place of a coherent speculative system of philosophy deduced from general first principles and serving as the master-narrative of all the other disciplines, Friedrich Schlegel and his proto-avant-garde Athenäum circle stressed the role of the poetic fragment, the Romantic logic of inconclusiveness, and the principle of the mutual confirmation of different kinds of knowledge. This inter-discursive legitimization of knowledge is what the German term Wechselverweis refers to (Millán-Zaibert 2007: 19). In contrast to the philosophy of German Idealism, the Jena circle embraced art and literature as the medium of theoretical self-reflection. Friedrich Schlegel zu setzen … (Schlegel 1972: 37). Je mehr die Poesie Wissenschaft wird, je mehr wird sie auch Kunst. Soll die Poesie Kunst werden, soll der Künstler von seinen Mitteln und seinen Zwecken (ihren Hindernissen und ihren Gegenständen gründliche Einsicht und Wissenschaft haben,) so muß der Dichter über seine Kunst philosophieren …” (Schlegel 1972: 54). 11  See Chap. 4.

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thus “considered novels, poems, and other literary forms to be fertile sources for examining the structure of knowledge, in particular, to examine how humans justify beliefs” (Millán-Zaibert 2007: 9). Accordingly, the Jena Romantics expanded the meaning of the word poetry. As Frederick Beiser notes, poetry in their “holistic” understanding includes not only literature in verse form but also other arts, sciences, and the life itself—it incarnates a “holistic spirit” that establishes “the unity of arts and sciences,” “art and life” (quoted in Millán-Zaibert 2007: 8–9). Moreover, Schlegel respected Schiller’s idea that poetry shapes society in a cohesive whole (ibid.: 14). Hence, literature is attributed not only centrality within the modern restructuring of the knowledge system but also a vital role in the formation of societies or communities. According to Max Weber’s sociological research, the poetic theorization such as Schlegel’s is a symptom of the rationality that, during the process of modernization and functional differentiation of the post-­revolutionary capitalist bourgeois society, was also present in other fields, from everyday life, through economics and technology, to state administration, politics, and science. Rationalization is a type of legitimization that shook off the traditional dominance of various transcendental (religious, magical, metaphysical) justifications (see Weber 2001: xxxviii–xxxix, 30, 86, 95). It became the guiding light of the “disenchanted world,” which during the political, economic, and industrial revolutions of the nineteenth century broke with traditionalism in which everything had always seemed self-evident and given in advance. Whereas literature had its place in the lap of the ceremony, conventions, sociability, and the esprit de corps of separated social states until the eighteenth century, its position changed in the nineteenth century. It had to invent languages and seek allied discourses on which it could base the sense of its autonomous existence in the capitalist marketplace and cultivate the feeling of its singularity in the eye of the general, anonymous public. The connections between literary language and metalanguage as introduced in the early Romanticism were instrumental not only to the establishment of the aesthetic discourse that informed the Post-Enlightenment literatures of Europe but also to the rise of national literary ecologies within the emerging literary world-system. Again, Romanticism is a period in which national literatures began to world with the assistance of the metalanguage, in particular, literary history and the aesthetic evaluation. From the legendary French Querelle des anciens et des modernes on, literature saw a gradual decline of the universal authority of the Ancient canon and progressive assertion of a modern aesthetic rooted in particular his-

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torical and linguo-cultural circumstances. From the Enlightenment on, the tendency of vernacular literary fields to cultivate their apparent singularity went hand in hand with Johann Gottfried Herder’s and Wilhelm von Humboldt’s cosmopolitan notion of the nation as a collective individual whose linguo-cultural individuality contributes to the chorus of different but equal fellow-nations that all shape a universal human culture (see Koch 2002: 83–143). Still, as the Weimar Classic and Schlegelian Romanticism testify, the Antiquity did not lose its appeal during the process of nationalizing literatures. The enthusiasm of Winckelmann’s history of the Ancient Greek art and Goethe’s example of how to apply the aesthetic universality of the Antiquity to the efforts at mastering subjective arbitrariness of the moderns captivated the young Friedrich Schlegel, a protagonist of early German Romanticism. Accordingly, he adopted Goethe’s idea of synthesis of the Antiquity and Modernity, albeit with a national turn. Authors of Friedrich Schlegel-­Handbuch describe that Schlegel attempted to bridge the gap between the ancients and the moderns by adjusting the classical ideal to the open, “progressive” totality of Romantic subjectivism. In his ambition to become “Winckelmann of the Greek poetry,” Schlegel expected a modern theory of literature to become a contemporary equivalent of the allegedly natural objectivity endemic to the Greek classics. His theory of literature, which projects Kant’s and Schiller’s notions of the aesthetic autonomy back on the Antiquity, replaces the latter’s inherent norm with an explicit argument about the principles that were supposed to legitimize modern national literatures such as German. In the same vein, his privileging the exemplarity of the Greek verbal art over that of the Roman letters aimed to propose a German and Romantic counterweight to Napoleonic Post-­Enlightenment and imperialist fascination with the Roman Empire (see Endres et al. 2017: 40–43, 70–71, 83–87).

Poetry in/as Nation-Building As already mentioned, recent nationalism studies has shown that nations— regarded as modern, post-Enlightenment type of imagined communities— built their sense of identity through comparisons with other ethnicities, that is, they arose as an international phenomenon by following the same nation-building repertoire notwithstanding their particular belief in their unrepeatable Sonderweg (see Leerssen 2006a, b). In this sense, nationbuilding entailed the process of worlding the emergent national litera-

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tures, both through self-referentiality of the literary discourse itself and through literary aesthetics, criticism, and histories. According to Miroslav Hroch, both “objective” and “subjective” factors conditioned the process of the nation-building in nineteenth-century Europe. On the one hand, national communities resulted from the existing economic, political, linguistic, religious, geographical, or historical needs for a closer connection, and on the other hand, an ideology that shaped the sense of communal belonging supported such integration. In Hroch’s view, the key to the social cohesiveness of nations is their collective memory, the density of verbal (oral and written) communication within the group, and the Enlightenment ideal of the equality of citizens who are thought to be the agency of the national politics (Hroch 1993: 4–5). To him, nations are not merely a nineteenth-century invention in the sense of “imagined communities.” The ideological imagination of the collective body was only possible if based on the existing memories and material leftovers of premodern modes of ethnic consciousness such as the vernacular tradition, folklore, social habits and conventions, the sense of belonging to a country, monarch, or feudal rulers, and the narratives about some primordial state sovereignty (Hroch 1993: 8–9, 13). In Hroch’s view, European ethnic communities found themselves in an unequal position during the nineteenth-century nationalist tide. East-­ Central and North Europe were mostly populated by the peoples which, subject to the imperial rule, were long lacking even cultural autonomy. Contrariwise, the European West saw more powerful communities of “old” or “historical nations” whose monarchs and nobility controlled extensive territories or even overseas colonies; in the aftermath of the bourgeois revolutions, the bourgeoisie of these countries gradually established their nation-states in parallel with the transformation of the former absolutist regimes into modern constitutional monarchies or republics (Hroch 1993: 5). Dubbed “unhistorical” or “new,” Central and East European nations such as Slovenians originated from the nineteenth-­ century national movements in the process of so-called national awakening. As a rule, national movements evolved through three successive phases, according to Hroch. The phase A starts with the philological, scholarly, and literary endeavors of a limited circle of the educated class to gather, study, and demonstrate the main cultural attributes defining their nation as a collective subject with historical continuity. Their interest focuses on the ethnic territory, vernacular language, literature, mythology and folklore, customs, or religion. In its phase B, a national movement attracts

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broader strata of the population thanks to the participation of nationalist politicians or spokespersons who formulate in public the demands for a sort of cultural, administrative, or state autonomy. Finally, the phase C introduces mass nationalist gatherings and political movements catalyzed by the vertical mobility within the dynamical bourgeois society, the crisis of the old regime, the waning influence of the traditional religious institutions, and growing class tensions that tend to be displaced in terms of inter-ethnic animosity (Hroch 1993: 6–7, 9). During the final phase, it is the print media covering the entire ethnospace with the public discourse in the national literary language, the expansion of the newly established cultural, educational, and scholarly institutions, widespread reading societies, and political rallies that, enhancing the cohesion of a national movement, gradually build a socially and professionally fully differentiated national community (Hroch 1993: 11–13). In Hroch’s view, the Slovenian national movement—comparable to Lithuanians, Latvians, Croats, Slovaks, and Ukrainians—belongs to the second evolutional type, in which phase B begins under the old regime (i.e., in the 1840s in the case of Slovenia) and develops into a mass movement only after the Habsburg introduction of constitutional reforms (Hroch 1993: 8). Regardless of the above typological differences, both the stateless national movements and the nations with a pre-existing statehood fashioned their particular individualities in an almost uniform way during the nineteenth century, since they were all exposed to the epidemics of European cultural nationalism. In conformity with this ideological matrix, national communities cultivated their respective mother tongues as literary languages, drew on their collective memories through historical narratives, collected and studied folk art, and produced literature, arts, humanities, and the sciences to justify their existence and demonstrate their creativity and intellectual capacity (Leerssen 2006a: 146–147 passim, 2006b). As already noted, no nation was formed in isolation but rather through comparisons with other communities, that is, through an ongoing differentiation, rivalry, disputes, or alliances with other nations (see Casanova 1999: 56–59).

Nation and the Circulation of World Literature Thus, Manfred Koch stresses that “the shaping of consciousness about national literatures is always already taking place from the perspective of world literature” (Koch 2002: 14). In Goethe’s time, the world and the

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nation represented two sides of the same ideological coin. On the one hand, the early nineteenth-century cosmopolitan ethics and aesthetics were meant to sublate the growing tensions between particularist Romantic nationalisms of the Restoration period by providing a purportedly universal human synthesis enabling mutual understanding and peaceful coexistence and unity of European nations (see Strich 1949: 32–40). On the other hand, the idea of the nation remained the premise and the ultimate objective of all the cosmopolitan talk about the European spirit, world civilization, and world literature. Even though Goethe prophesized noble ideas about world literature as the common property of the humankind, he plead in the same breath for the visibility of Germans in the world literary arena and urged his fellow writers to revive their national literature by drawing on worldwide literary resources (see Eckermann 1998: 164–167; Goethe 1974: 457–459). To Goethe, the cosmopolitan openness toward linguistic and cultural otherness—mediated and universalized through Eurocentric aesthetic discourse—was a necessary condition for the development of national literatures. In a new “epoch of World-­literature,” it seemed essential to Goethe to go beyond national self-sufficiency (Eckermann 1998: 165). In the coming epoch of world literature, the industrialization and the global expansion of the capitalist market were expected to collect the various national traditions of the world, making them accessible to European consumers and art producers (see Koch 2002: 3–4). Among the words with which Goethe denoted cosmopolitan exchange among the educated elite, scholars, and writers of different nations, the expression “circulation” (Zirkulation) plays a prominent role. He used it as early as in Chapter Ten of his Bildungsroman Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship (1795–1796), in which a merchant named Werner begins to educate the “beautiful soul” (schöne Seele) of the title hero. Speaking in quasi-philosophical terms, Werner attempts to familiarize Wilhelm with the joy of trading, an economic profession bringing cultural pleasure. He tries to persuade the young Wilhelm to model himself on those who know how to make a profit from the global circulation (Kreislauf) of wealth and speculative investments that take advantage of the random changes of supply and demand: Believe me, you want but to look upon some great scene of activity to make you ours forever; and when you come back, you will joyfully enroll yourself among that class of men whose art it is to draw towards themselves a portion

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of the money, and materials of enjoyment, which circulate in their appointed courses through the world. Cast a look on the natural and artificial productions of all the regions of the earth; consider how they have become, one here, another there, articles of necessity for men. How pleasant and how intellectual a task is it to calculate, at any moment, what is most required, and yet is wanting, or hard to find; to procure for each easily and soon what he demands; to lay-in your stock prudently beforehand, and then to enjoy the profit of every pulse in that mighty circulation. This, it appears to me, is what no man that has a head can attend to without pleasure. (Goethe 1917: 30; emphases added)

By these expressions, Werner enthusiastically evokes the joy of a wealthy liberal-cosmopolitan European tradesman taking advantage of a globalized market.12 Enrapturing Wilhelm for the charms of the large trade towns and ports where the phenomena of the world market metonymically condense, Werner concludes his argument by another variation of the metaphorical intersection of the commodity and biological circulations: Do but visit one or two great trading-towns, one or two sea-ports, and see if you can withstand the impression. When you observe how many men are busied, whence so many things have come, and whither they are going, you will feel as if you too could gladly mingle in the business. You will then see the smallest piece of ware in its connexion with the whole mercantile concern; and for that very reason you will reckon nothing paltry, because everything augments the circulation by which you yourself are supported. (Goethe 1917: 30–31, emphasis added)

The word “circulation,” which Friedrich Schlegel ironically ranked among the five deities of the modern era (in addition to credit, fashion, industry, and luxury) in his Heften zur Philosophie (Philosophical Notebooks; Koch 2002: 56), was used as early as in the eighteenth-century German cameralism. It was an essential term denoting the flows of goods and money, both in the internal and the external trade; moreover, the thinkers of the European Enlightenment recognized the circulation not only in the economy but also in the cultural field and communication (Koch 2002: 56–74). According to Jochen Hörisch, Goethe’s metaphorical analogy between the “intellectual exchange” and Adam Smith’s liberal economic idea of the 12  Werner’s terms hybridize the intellectual world of humanist cosmopolitanism with the capitalist market, what foretells Goethe’s famous economic metaphors deciphered by Marx and Engels (1998: 39).

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free circulation of goods on the world market might have even indicated a kind of “semantic inflation” caused by an excess supply of printed literature (quoted in Koch 2002: 15).13 In his Weimaraner Weltbewohner, Manfred Koch distinguishes three aspects of Goethe’s notion of world literature: first, it is a historical diagnosis of the industrial age characterized by a globalizing cultural market and the increased international exchange of intellectual goods; second, it is a cosmopolitan ethical call for intercultural understanding among nations and their political reconciliation; and finally, it is an aesthetic principle that opens to the modern poet a worldwide horizon of a multitude of historically and spatially heterogeneous traditions available simultaneously (Koch 2002: 4). At each of these levels, Goethe relates Herder’s concept of Nationalliteratur to his term Weltliteratur which he—probably ignorant of the earlier uses of the term by Wieland and Schlözer—coined by analogy of derivatives based on the root Welt-; this word group was relatively popular at the turn of the century (Koch 2002: 2; D’haen 2012: 5). In his eyes, world literature entailed transnational networking of literati, the accelerated cross-­national circulation of literary works through translation, theater performances, review articles, globalized imagination, and worldwide intertextuality, as well as the cosmopolitan spread of intercultural understanding. As such, world literature represented to Goethe a nascent space that provided opportunity to a semi-peripheral national literature such as German for asserting itself internationally as original literary producer and competent mediator. Taking into account the notions of intellectual exchange and literary circulation, Koch identifies a promising realization of a modern version of classicism based on world literature resources in Goethe’s lengthy collection West-östlicher Divan (West-Eastern Diwan, 1819–1827) inspired by Hammer-Purgstall 1812 German translation of the fourteenth-century Persian classic Hafez (Koch 2002: 177–229). Through its intercultural emulation of Hafez, poetical self-reflection, and orientalist intertextuality, Goethe responds to the challenges of the global circulation of ideas, forms, and texts. Fritz Strich underlines that one of Goethe’s main principles is the observation of the self through the gaze of the other and through objectifying the merely subjective in the “mirror of the world.” In the 13  Goethe’s (and Marx’s) parallels between the world intellectual traffic of literature and the international capitalist market, currently so widely commented on (see Casanova 1999; Moretti 2000, 2013; Damrosch 2003, and many others), were noticed by Strich already (Strich 1949: 31).

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light of his principle of transcending subjectivism, Goethe daily practiced his idea of world literature—he monitored foreign translations and reviews of his works and included foreign literary patterns into his creativity. Based on such experience, he advised the Germans and every other nation to overcome the inert self-sufficiency and narcissistic subjectivity by opening to otherness (see Strich 1949: 18–20). In other words, Goethe put his ideas of world literature into action through his globalized imagination and intertextuality that allowed him to render his subjective speech in a refashioned word of the other. According to Todd Kontje, Goethe referred to or creatively rewrote not only Hafez, but also Shakespearean drama, Pindaric odes, Roman elegies, and many other source texts; his cosmopolitan intertextuality, in turn, made him even more interesting to international audiences (Pizer 2006: 21). Goethe’s West-Eastern Diwan manifests an intertextual homage to Hafez that hybridizes the Western and Islamic civilizations in order to achieve a trans-subjective cosmopolitan synthesis displaying the universality of a modern world classic (see Pizer 2000: 218). In Goethe’s model of the modern classic, the individuality of the writer does not originate from a self-sufficient subjectivity or autochthonous literary tradition but is instead a product of interaction with cross-national repertoires, including the non-European. Goethe’s cosmopolitan, albeit Eurocentric version of the modern classic made a strong impression on Matija Č op, the mastermind of Slovenian Romanticism. In a letter to Francesco Leopoldo Savio of 13 December 1822, Č op includes an annotated quote from Goethe’s Diwan (Book of maxims) that encapsulates Goethe’s universalistic notion of European culture (i.e., the “western” Calderón) based on the apprehension of the ­generally human essence of artworks produced by other civilizations (the “eastern” Hafez): Herrlich (zwar, heißt es im Divan) ist der Orient Übers Mittelmeer gedrungen, (Doch) Nur wer Hafis liebt und kennt, Weiß, was Calderon gesungen! (Č op 1986: 54)14

 With force far-flung the Orient rose, And passed the Midland Sea! Alone For him who Hafiz loves and knows Ring right the songs of Calderon. (Translated by Edward Dowden; Goethe 1914: 87)

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Putting it in the context of his report on his latest multilingual reading, Č op amends Savio’s quotation from Goethe. He admits to his friend that, in addition to studying his proper discipline, that is, the Classical Antiquity, he could not resist enjoying more delicious literary novelties such as Goethe’s West-östlicher Divan, Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre, Tieck’s poems, August Wilhelm Schlegel’s Indische Bibliothek, Lamartine, Manzoni, Byron, Walter Scott, or Thomas Moore. He agrees with the anti-Eurocentric idea of Savio’s quote from Goethe’s Diwan by claiming that the Orient represents the true homeland of the tones of Hesperides, the Nymphs of the West. Even though relegated to a periphery, Č op’s cosmopolitan reading—documented in this and dozens of other letters— perfectly matches Goethe’s horizon of world literature, including its tendency to reach beyond Eurocentrism. No doubt, Goethe’s cosmopolitan idea of world literature claims universality (to wit, Goethe persistently equips the substantive Weltliteratur with the adjective allgemeine) even though he understood it from his particular perspective. Specific socio-historical circumstances of German literature and the ambivalence of his author function molded his insight into the current world-historical developments. Despite his urbane rejection of the nationalist fervor of German Romantics, Goethe grounded his author position in the sense of belonging to the German nation, which he felt was politically disunited, self-enclosed, lacking a major cultural metropolis, and lagging behind the Italians, Englishmen, or Frenchmen (Strich 1949: 32–36; Pizer 2006: 18–46).15 As a matter of fact, the early nineteenth-­ century German literature developed in bulk of German-speaking Central European polities since the 1815 Vienna Congress loosely connected into the German Confederation (Deutscher Bund). Lacking a shared capital and exposed to the long-lasting Austro-Prussian struggles for dominance, the German Kleinstaaterei obviated the inner cohesion of the national  According to Pizer, the transnational concept of Weltliteratur emerged from Goethe’s perception of his position in a “subnational,” “liminal,” and fragmented state of German collective identity; albeit a citizen of the word, Goethe considered himself a representative of German belles-lettres (Pizer 2006: 7, 33). At the end of the eighteenth century, the inferiority complex of German writers who compared themselves with their English or French colleagues was quite common; it also underlies Friedrich Schlegel’s first book (Die Griechen und Romer) of 1797, in which he remarks that the overall crisis of modern literature (which may be cured by modeling after the Ancient Greeks) is more pronounced in a weak literature— that of Germany (Endres et al. 2017: 84). 15

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literary ecology and thwarted the establishment of a common tradition. Consequently, German literature felt to be backward in comparison with more prestigious and centralized literatures of the West (Strich 1949: 28–29, 45–47; Pizer 2006: 18, 24; D’Haen 2012: 11). On the other hand, as a German writer and virtually a living classic in his Weimar period, Goethe established close links with the cross-national network of cultured elites. Networked within the European republic of letters, Goethe carefully followed the international impact of his works and ideas. He was aware of his growing European reputation ever since the 1774 triumph of The Sorrows of Young Werther. All this contributed to his intuition of the nascent epoch of world literature in which he, as an internationally acclaimed author, expected to consolidate his position within the national literary ecology and, on the other hand, help promote German letters across the national borders. Moreover, spreading his notion of Weltliteratur through written and personal contacts with European literary celebrities such as the Scottish essayist Thomas Carlyle, Goethe attempted to establish his resident town, a semi-peripheral Weimar, not only as the spiritual capital of fragmented Germany but also as European cultural hub. It is through Weimar that he expected German literature to productively penetrate the nascent system of world literature. Or, in Strich’s enraptured wording: For that is what the world literature which developed during Goethe’s later years really was, the world-wide expansion of the little circle round Goethe. Goethe remained the central point round which the literatures of Europe revolved, and Weimar became the intellectual capital of Europe. Writers of every nation acknowledged their debt to Goethe, honoured him as their intellectual father, the leader of the intellectual life of Europe, and Weimar was the spot to which not only the writings of European authors came, but to which they themselves made pilgrimage. The Goethe-house in Weimar was the focal point at which converged writers from France, England, America, Italy, Scandinavia, Russia and Poland. The little worldsystem, the microcosmos Weimar, had grown to a great worldsystem, a macrocosmos, in which the planets of the intellectual universe revolved round the fixed star, Goethe. (Strich 1949: 50–51; emphases added)16

16  Curiously foretelling the world-system vocabulary, Strich uses and paraphrases the expression kleine Weltsysteme Goethe proposed in 1794 to designate the intellectual circles influencing cultural life.

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As early as in his 1795 essay “Literarischer Sansculottismus” (Literary Sansculottism), Goethe recognized that Germany required “a common national culture” and “a center of the cultivation of social life in which writers would gather.” In his opinion, centrifugal developments prevailed because of this lack; Germany could produce neither its true “classical national author” (klassischer Nationalautor) nor its proper classic (Goethe 1963: 240–242; see Strich 1949: 45–47; Pizer 2006: 24). Thus, it appears that Goethe invented world literature not least because he wished to establish himself as both international writer and national classic. In his late essay on the philosophy of culture entitled “Epochen geselliger Bildung” (Epochs of Social Education, 1831), for instance, Goethe conceives a brief eschatological narrative in which he gives meaning to his cosmopolitan repudiation of German purism and Romantic petty-­nationalism. According to Goethe, the socio-historical evolution of culture begins with the “idyllic” epoch characterized by particularism of self-contained educated circles of the “mother tongue” enthusiasts to gradually progress toward the “universal” epoch along with the growing intercourse among the hitherto separated communities (Goethe 1999: 554–555; see Birus 2003: 19). Notwithstanding its utopian envisioning of universality, Goethe’s late essay, too, originates from his particular uttering position—he speaks in the name of the national collective or, to be precise, the cultural elite self-authorized to speak on behalf of the nation. Theo D’haen emphasized that Goethe introduced the term Weltliteratur by taking advantage of the historical “window of opportunity” that opened up during the European Restoration following Napoleon’s defeat (D’haen 2012: 11). As is known, in the aftermath of the Vienna Congress of 1815, the Concert of Europe reestablished peace on the continent, restored absolutism, settled the inter-state borders, and, suppressing radical liberalism and nationalism, established a conservative monarchic inter-state system that prevailed until the revolutionary year of 1848. The political circumstances of the Pre-March Period boosted capitalist production, modern transportation, and international trade, which contributed to a renewal of cosmopolitan discourse; it was visible in the increase of translation and the emergence of European-oriented literary journals (see Strich 1949: 32–35; Koch 2002: 8–9; Pizer 2006: 15, 24–29, 40–41). However, as it will be explained in more detail below, cosmopolitanism acquired aristocratic, purely cultural, and conservative features as it began to figure in the Vormärz period as an antidote to radicalism and the escalation of

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revolutionary nationalist movements. This attitude also characterizes Goethe. Venerated as the classic of Weimar, he occupied prominent functions at the court of Charles August, the Duke of Saxony-Weimar-Eisenach, from 1776 to 1828, and reserved his idea of world literature to the privileged elite of the cultured (see Pizer 2006: 18, 22, 24; D’haen 2012: 6).

Literary Cosmopolitanism and World Histories To sum up in D’haen’s apt wording, Goethe’s localization of the universal and universalization of the local, inscribed in his idea of world literature, express “the kind of identitarian realities operative in his own immediate context” (D’haen 2012: 11). Goethe expected German literature to become a world-class player because of its cosmopolitan wordling,17 its intellectual hubs such as Weimar, and the capacities of German as the language of translation and cross-national mediation. The idea of Germans as a cultured and cosmopolitan nation that takes up the role of cross-national mediator was a leitmotiv around 1800. Based on the experience of the growth of Pan-European translating, reviewing, and networking of the educated elites, the newborn discourse of world literature corresponds to post-revolutionary cosmopolitanism thriving in Germany and Austria. In her meticulous study of cosmopolitan concepts at the turn of the nineteenth century, Andrea Albrecht discusses German “literary cosmopolitanism.” Its ideal of the generally human intercourse of languages and interdependent national literatures contributed to the de-politicization of the revolutionary impetus endemic to the Enlightenment cosmopolitanism. Compartmentalized into the established disciplines and emptied of the potentially subversive political contents, cosmopolitan ideas were safely limited to the cultural realm and applied to translation, the arts, ethics, law, economy, and, not least, literary history (Albrecht 2005: 299–302). For instance, in 1794, Friedrich Bouterwek pleads for a “universal society” (Universalgesellschaft) of the humankind that was hoped to result from the interaction and “common action” (Gemeinwirkung) of “particular societies” (Albrecht 2005: 302–303). In his 1805 article entitled “Die vier grossen Nationen des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts” (The Four Great Nations of the Nineteenth Century), Bouterwek believes that “Europeanization” will become the driving force of the worldwide fraternization of nations, whereas the making of the “spirit of general Europeanism” is the exclusive  More on this below.

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task of the “the four great nations” (i.e., France, England, Russia, and Germany) that thus “lead the world culture” (Welt-cultur; ibid.: 303–304). He argues that Germans—as a great nation, albeit deprived of political influence comparable to the French—are progressing “on the road of spiritual culture” (auf dem Wege der Geistes-Cultur) to become the “teacher of the world” (die Lehrerin der Welt) (Albrecht 2005: 304). What qualifies German literature for its leading role in “new Europeanism” and “world Culture”— both concepts relied on Herderian individuality of nations18—is, in Bouterwek’s opinion, its “universal perfection” (Universal-Perfectibilität), its learning: “German learning is now the gist of the learning of the entire world.” (Die deutsche Gelehrsamkeit ist jetzt der Inbegriff der Gelehrsamkeit der ganzen Welt.—Albrecht 2005: 304–305). Bouterwek considered his Geschichte der Poesie und Beredsamkeit seit dem Ende des 13. Jahrhunderts (History of Poetry and Rhetorics Since the End of the 13th Century, 1801–1820) a learned contribution of Germans to the “world culture” and intellectual product mediating between the European nations; as such, its historical synthesis evoked a cosmopolitan kind of “general Europeanism” (Albrecht 2005: 306). Likewise, August Wilhelm Schlegel treated cosmopolitanism as an exceptional German quality (Albrecht 2005: 306–311). He devoted his career to aesthetic-literary cosmopolitanism through extensive historical research, comparative approach, lectures, and numerous translations and editions of European and Oriental literatures (ibid.: 307).19 In his 18  In opposition to the French Enlightenment and revolutionary universalism, the German post-revolutionary variety of cosmopolitanism implied an ethnonationalist perspective rendered in cultural terms. Similar to Bouterwek’s culturalist musing about the Europe of nations, Friedrich Schlegel’s more politically pronounced essay on republicanism of 1796 treats nations as the fundamental agencies entitled to build the envisioned cosmopolitan community; the author opts for a democratic world republic composed of numerous selfaware national republics (Albrecht 2005: 311). 19  For the European and cosmopolitan dimensions of A. W. Schlegel’s polymath life and work in the context of the Romantic cultural transfer see Mix and Strobel 2010. In the introduction to the volume, the editors declare him the most important and self-reflected translator among the German Romantics (see his Shakespeare- and Cervantes translations), an internationally influential historian of European and world literature (Vorlesungen über schöne Literatur und Kunst of 1801–1804 and Über dramatische Kunst und Literatur of 1808), and forerunner of comparative literature. During his “transculturally productive years in the circle of Germaine de Staël,” August Wilhelm opened up the German literary space, he persistently mediated between poetry, aesthetics, and historical knowledge, founded the studies of Indian literature and translated from it, put the Romantic movement in a historical and theoretical perspective, improved philological techniques of critical editions, compiled an

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1803–1804 lectures on the history of Romantic literature, for instance, August Wilhelm Schlegel characterizes Europe as a community grounded in shared history, cultural traditions, linguistic kinship, shared interests, and even “European patriotism” (Albrecht 2005: 308). He maintains that the danger of a nationalist-driven disintegration of Europe could be avoided through “scholarly culture,” translation, and mediation of literatures. To Schlegel, Germans are entitled to carry out this cosmopolitan mission: “Universality, cosmopolitanism is the true German quality …. It is thus not too sanguine to hope that the moment is not so far away in which German will become the general organ of communication between the cultured nations” (quoted in Albrecht 2005: 308–309).20 Moreover, in his post-Herderian nationalist cosmopolitanism, August Wilhelm goes so far as to declare that the “German national feeling” comprises the awareness of Germany as the “motherland of Europe” (das Mutterland Europas; ibid.: 309). In 1803, his younger brother Friedrich launched in Frankfurt the journal Europa, a successor of the proto-avant-garde Athenäum, a provocatively unconventional organ of the Jena Romantic aesthetic program. In Europa’s first issue, Schlegel published his literary travelogue “Reise nach Frankreich” (The Travel to France) in which he pondered the essence of Europe by contrasting the role of the German and French nations (see Schlegel 1966: 56–79). He compares the sublime, picturesque, historical, and idyllic landscapes of his motherland to more quotidian French spaces21 and confronts stereotypes of the German and French national character (i.e., poetically introverted Germans vs. happy and artificial Frenchmen). In doing this, Friedrich Schlegel can hide neither his frustration with the unjust marginality of Germans in the modern history of Europe nor his influential anthology of the classics of Romance lyrical poetry (Blumensträusse italienischer, spanischer und portugiesischer Poesie of 1804), and devised literary theory and literary aesthetics. During his long career, August Wilhelm changed from an early Romantic hybridizer of theory and literature into a late Romantic adherent of academic disciplinary knowledge (Mix and Strobel 2010: 1–6). The editors highlight his paramount role of intercultural mediator and protagonist of cultural transfer in the period of Romanticism. 20  “Universalität, Kosmopolitismus ist die wahre deutsche Eigentümlichkeit … Es ist daher wohl keine zu sanguinische Hoffnung, anzunehmen, daß der Zeitpunkt nicht so gar entfernt ist, wo das Deutsche allgemeines Organ der Mitteilung für die gebildeten Nationen sein wird.” 21  Through the difference between the French territory and German landscapes impregnated by historical mnemotopes, Friedrich Schlegel evokes the Rhine river as a symbolic center of the world (Endres et al. 2017: 247)—lacking a metropole comparable to Paris, the banks of Rhine are presented as an ideal meeting point of a restored premodern community of nations.

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concern with the apparent decadence, individualism, superficiality, and fatal division of Europe that stroke him in France. Prefiguring his conversion to Catholicism, Schlegel hereby symptomatically converts the political notion of revolution, whose secular republicanism was exported across Europe by Napoleon’s imperialist campaign. He alters its meaning into a cultural and virtually religious direction—to him it is Asia, with its primordial spiritual unity, that presents the model of the “true revolution” that is hoped to restore the intellectual concord of medieval Europe (see Peter 1978: 53–54; Albrecht 2005: 313; Endres et al. 2017: 14, 246–251). In his many subsequent writings, in particular, Geschichte der alten und neuen Literatur (The History of Old and New Literature),22 whose 1815 print publication he dedicated to the Austrian foreign minister Prince Klemens von Metternich, Schlegel treated European history as a totality of interanimated spiritual achievements of national literatures.23 Schlegel— an intellectual from a bourgeois family and struggling with financial problems his entire life—delivered his lectures on old and modern world literatures from February to April 1812 in a prestigious Viennese inn for around 200 auditors (many of them high nobles). He based his argument on the premise that literature, encompassing verbal art and learned discourses of high culture, significantly affected individual nations in the world history: The true excellence and importance of those arts and sciences which exert and display themselves in speech and writing may best be seen in the great influence which they have exerted on the value and fate of nations, throughout the history of the world. Here it is that literature appears in all its scope, as the epitome of all the intellectual capabilities and productivity of a nation. (Schlegel 1818, vol. 1: 14; translation adapted)24  On Schlegel’s approach to world literary history see Pizer 2006: 12–13, 41–43.  In his article “Über das Studium der Griechischen Poesie” (On the Study of Greek Poetry, 1795–1797), in which he began to distance from the revolutionary understanding of cosmopolitanism, he interprets Europe as a “whole” (ein Ganzes) that emerges from the “mutual imitation” (Wechselnachahmnug) of “national poetries of the greatest and most cultivated European peoples” (Albrecht 2005: 314). The premise of Friedrich Schlegel’s 1803–1804 private lectures Geschichte der Europäischen Literatur (The History of European Literature)—the basis of his 1812 Vienna public course on old and new literatures—is that “European literature forms a coherent whole, where all branches are intimately interwoven, one based on the other, explained and supplemented by them” (quoted in Endres et  al. 2017: 233). On his Geschichte der alten und neuen Literatur see Endres et al. 2017: 225–232. 24  “Am besten zeigt sich die Würde und die Wichtigkeit aller jener in der Rede und der Schrift wirkenden und darstellenden Wissenschaften und Künste, wenn wir ihren großen 22 23

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Paying attention to the impact so-called Oriental literatures exerted on the West, his history—the first of the kind—narrates about the epochs of European literature from the Greeks and the Bible to his contemporaneity. His large-scale synthesis intends to “give a systematic overview of the whole” and depict “the spirit of literature in each epoch, the whole of it, and the succession of its development in the most important nations” (Schlegel 1961: 6, 19). Or, as he puts in the incipit to the first lecture: “In the following discourses, it is my design to present a comprehensive picture of the development and of the spirit of literature among the most illustrious nations of ancient as well as of modern times; but my principal object is to represent literature as it has exerted its influence on the affairs of active life and on the fate of nations in the course of time” (Schlegel 1818, vol. 1: 1; translation adapted).25 Again, Schlegel’s cosmopolitan narration cannot hide his nationalist agenda. First, Schlegel treats individual nations—defined by their specific language, memories (National-­ Erinnerungen), literary traditions, and history writing—as collective agencies of the world-historical process and classificatory units of his literary history (see Endres et al. 2017: 226). Second, following Herder, he affirms the individuality and variety of nations forming the universal community, praising their national self-awareness. Schlegel welcomes the trend of the “return to the national spirit” (eine Rückkehr … zum Nationalgeist) not only in Germany but also in other European literatures from the eighteenth century onward (Schlegel 1961: 10, 12). Third, he is aware that his history of literature—a creation of a German intellectual written in German—masters the multilingual, spatiotemporally extensive material of world literatures through a unifying narrative interpretation. In other words, the very concept of European literary history is a product of German intellect and its synthesizing capacity.26 Similar to Goethe’s idea Einfluß auf den Wert und das Schicksal der Nationen in der Weltgeschichte betrachten. Hier zeigt sich die Literatur, als der Inbegriff aller intellektuellen Fähigkeiten und Hervorbringungen einer Nation, erst in ihrem wahren Umfange” (Schlegel 1961: 15). 25  “In den nachfolgen Vorträgen ist es meine Absicht, ein Bild im ganzen von der Entwicklung und dem Geiste der Literatur bei den vornehmsten Nationen des Altertums und der neueren Zeit zu entwerfen; vor allem aber die Literatur in ihrem Einflüsse auf das wirkliche Leben, auf das Schicksal der Nationen und den Gang der Zeiten darzustellen” (Schlegel 1961: 9). 26  Schlegel’s history is, according to Endres et  al. (2017: 226–227), a “contribution to performative nation-building in the medium of literary history in German,” whereas its “object of representation is decidedly European and adjusted to the horizon of world history.”

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of world literature, Schlegel’s universal literary history written in German and from German perspective compensates for the sense of belonging to a frustrated, non-dominant “great nation.” Finally, Schlegel’s narrative features Germany as the leading historical agency of Europeanness. The author ascribes this role to German culture both through his retrospective interpretation of the Middle Ages and his teleological vision of the present. In Schlegel’s interpretation, the Holy Roman Empire, which under the Germanic rule impregnated the Greco-Latin and Catholic traditions with Nordic spirit and the chivalric ethos, was the cultural seat of Europe in the Middle Ages. Moreover, converted to Catholicism since 1808 and in the service of the Viennese regime, Schlegel explicitly devoted his synthetic world-historical narrative to a pro-Habsburg propagandist idea, believing that his History was beneficial to politics and diplomacy. His historical interpretation opposed French republicanism and its imperialist propagation of secularization. To Schlegel, the Austrian Empire, with its German culture and firm Catholicism, was entitled to become a new center of European integration and restore the harmonious coexistence of free nations which had existed under the Carolingian crown (see Endres et al. 2017: 20–23, 224).27 Hence, cosmopolitan notions of world history—understood as an evolving organism in which individual nations and their particular cultures fertilize each other in the historical progression of the “generally human”— were instrumental to the cultural individualization of national communities of Europe.28 Matija Č op was familiar with several universal literary histories that, at the turn of the nineteenth century, narrated the development of the “world civilization,” “European literature,” or “world history” from the Antiquity to the present (Kidrič 1978: 156–157; Kos 1979: 35–36, 94, 97; Č op 1986: 127, 130). He thoroughly studied and made excerpts from Madame de Staël’s De la littérature, considérée dans ses rapports avec les institutions sociales (On Literature Considered in its Relationship to Social Institutions, 1799–1800), Friedrich Bouterwek’s History of Poetry and Rhetorics Since the End of the 13th Century, and Friedrich Schlegel’s History of Old and New Literature. 27  That Friedrich Schlegel’s historical synthesis resulted from his “Catholic-patriotic turn” of 1808 was evident already to Heinrich Heine who made a much quoted point that “the higher standpoint” from which Schlegel overlooked the entire literature was “always a belfry of a Catholic church” (Endres et al. 2017: 225). 28  On the nineteenth-century and later histories of world literature (Hermann, Hettner, Scherr, Stern, etc.) see D’haen 2012: 16–25.

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Even though these lengthy historical accounts do not use the expression “world literature,” they arrange the succession of the leading European and so-called Oriental literatures into a coherent system that testifies to organic socio-spiritual growth of the human civilization. Adopting a new, comparative historical standpoint, they study the typological characteristics of individual nations, their literary cultures, contacts, mutual imitation or cross-fertilization, intellectual exchange, and intertwining.29 With their historicism, these works of the early Romantic period brake with the classicist tradition and the canonical universality of the Greek and Roman Antiquity. Through comparisons between the ancients and the moderns, they demonstrate the uniform progress of the European civilization: cultivating their vernaculars, individual national literatures of Europe (from the Italian to German) are thought to emerge in a historical succession to compete for a more comprehensive, quasi-universal validity. In the place of the Antiquity, the universality is now attributed to the emerging canon of European and world literature, in which medieval and modern vernacular writers are gaining importance. Schlegel’s History of Old and New Literature intended to devise “a world-historical picture of European intellectual formation” (ein welthistorischen Gemälde der europäischen Geistesbildung) (Schlegel 1961: 19). In it, Č op must have come across the author’s self-reflective designation of his method as a “historical viewpoint that compares the nations according to their value” (auf diesem historischen, die Völker nach ihrem Wert vergleichenden Standpunkte; ibid.: 15). “World history” constitutes the horizon of Schlegel’s comparative evaluation of the importance and evolutionary role of individual nations, while literature as “the epitome of all the intellectual capabilities and productivity of a nation” (ibid.: 15) is the main subject of his assessment. A similar nexus of the national and the universal characterizes Goethe’s fragmentary musings on world 29  Schlegel’s section “Epochs of Literature” from his Dialogue on Poetry (F. Schlegel 1968: 60–80) appears as a proleptic summary of the historical narrative of his History of Old and New Literature; it also reminds of the notion of development as proposed by de Staël’s On Literature in the Light of Its Relationships with Social Institutions. De Staël, who prepared her D’Allemagne in Weimar, in the company of Wieland, Schiller, and Goethe, get acquainted with August Wilhelm Schlegel in 1804 on Goethe’s recommendation and invited him to her Swiss residence in Coppet to become her collaborator and educator of her children; Friedrich joined his brother in autumn 1804 and gave to de Staël private lectures on German philosophy. In 1807, Friedrich followed Germaine de Staël to Vienna, where he started to lecture on the dramatic art and literature in 1808 (Peter 1978: 60; Endres et al. 2017: 16).

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literature from 1827 to 1831 scattered in his articles for Kunst und Altertum and Eckermann’s 1836 Conversations of Goethe. Given that nations formed their (literary) identities through mutual comparisons and the hermeneutic reflection of and differentiation from contemporaneous ethnic communities,30 which were becoming conscious of their nationhood in a similar way, world literature in Goethe’s understanding could not merely arise from the pre-existing national literatures at hand. The Schlegel brothers, the historians of European and world literature, and Goethe, the promotor of Weltliteratur, are subjects of Vladimir Biti’s recent critique of the Enlightenment and Post-Enlightenment cosmopolitanism. In his Tracing Global Democracy, Biti exposes the dark side of the purportedly democratic, universally human, and inclusive ­cosmopolitanism of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. On the one hand, cosmopolitanism was the privilege of the enlightened nobility and educated bourgeoisie. Due to their class elitism, the proponents of cosmopolitanism prevented the members of lower, uneducated classes of the same society from becoming legitimate participants of their polite discourse. The sophisticated “men of the world” did not imagine the subalterns moving in the polite transnational society authorized to preach the universal humanist values. On the other hand, cosmopolitanism discloses its exclusivism also if observed from the perspective of relations between individual societies or national communities. In the nineteenth century, the cosmopolitan rising above the petty-nationalist parochialism and egoism figured as a matter of the elitist club of Western nations. Smaller, marginal peoples of Europe, not to speak of non-European others, were not admitted to the worldly dialogue of the great. Moreover, they were not even considered as subjects of international relations to which cosmopolitan principles applied. According to Biti, in both the intra-social and international framework, cosmopolitan discourse relied on the hegemonic opposition between the “agencies” authorized to speak about cosmopolitanism, articulate its meaning, and define its field of reference, and the “enablers,” that is, dominated social classes and dependent countries. The latter only supplied material resources and reproduced socio-economic conditions allowing the hegemonic classes or nations to produce and disseminate the cosmopolitan discourse (see Biti 2016: 1, 17, 21, 139, 149, 161–164). 30  On Goethe’s notion of reflecting national literature in the ethnic and cultural otherness of foreign literatures see Strich 1949: 18–19.

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Interpreting Voltaire, Rousseau, Kant, Herder, Goethe, and the Schlegels, Biti distinguishes two geopolitical types of cosmopolitanism—“republican universalism” and “national universalism” (Biti 2016: 17, 21–22). Patterned on the imperial Roman example, the French Enlightenment type of cosmopolitanism represented by Voltaire and Rousseau made use of the literary medium to promote and disseminate the universality of human rights disregarding ethno-lingual and cultural differences between peoples of the world. Contrariwise, the German Pre-­Romantic and Romantic type of pluralist cosmopolitanism as formulated by Herder gained momentum among what Balibar calls “dominated nationalisms” in reaction to the imperialist and military expansion of the French “dominating nationalism.” Pluralism propagated a plural synthesis of the universally human sensibility and peaceful coexistence that was expected to result from the intercultural dialogue and mutual understanding of autonomous nations (see Biti 2016: 57). Biti, too, recognizes a nationalist hidden agenda of cosmopolitan concepts, including literature as a crucial medium of their transnational circulation.31 Driven by a self-assured nationalism of a dominating state, the French republican universalism did not hesitate to generalize and enforce its revolutionary socio-ideological model abroad. The German pluralist type of national universalism, albeit apparently more sensitive to ethnocultural differences and the idea of national autonomy in the beginning, when German intellectuals “were struggling for their own emancipation,” soon attempted to impose itself as the only valid alternative to imperialist cosmopolitanism. As such, it was supposed to become a model to be imitated by smaller ethnicities of East-­Central Europe during their emancipatory movements; thus “the German ‘bondsman’ adopted the imperial behavior of the French ‘lord’” (Biti 2016: 21, 64–67, 149). Discussing Goethe’s and Schlegel’s efforts to place the hitherto marginalized and belated Germany at the heart of the modern Europe of nations, I have indicated that the ethnonationalist type of cosmopolitanism was instrumental in justifying Germany and Austria as pretenders to a hegemonic 31  To a certain extent, one can agree with Biti’s claim that “the modern idea of literature was actually deeply involved in its [democracy’s, M. J.] shaping, contrary to the entrenched opinions that oppose it to the world of economy and politics by highlighting literature’s autonomy. Its democratic circuit of ideas was inextricably intertwined with the free circulation of money, commodities, and people, i.e. with the processes of unbounded market exchange” (Biti 2016: 21). However, as known, the liberal principle of the free circulation of ideas through literature was seriously impeded not only by censorship but also by inequality of participants in the world literary market.

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position in the post-Napoleonic epoch of Restoration.32 Biti’s analyses follow the same course. He maintains that “both Herder’s and Goethe’s ‘hospitable’ cosmopolitanism were put at the service of the German national self’s consolidation, which at that time was deeply wounded and frustrated” (Biti 2016: 10). According to Biti, “one of the main preoccupations of German intellectuals from Herder to Goethe was to promote the German language as the key mediator of European languages”; for instance, August Wilhelm Schlegel proposed that the task of Germans was “to create a cosmopolitan midpoint for the human spirit” (ibid.: 63). In the end, the Schlegel brother’s historical argument that “Germany’s medieval cosmopolitanism … beats France’s modern one” was meant to ground the early nineteenth-century “imperial ambitions of German cultural mission as envisaged by Romanticists” (ibid.: 66–67). Biti’s critique of Goethe’s concept of world literature follows the same line, demonstrating that the formerly democratic idea soon revealed its hegemonic tendency. Goethe did not take all the producers and products of literature for equal stakeholders of world literature and its cross-national exchange leading to a mutual understanding of humanity. Goethe’s aristocratic notion of the secluded cosmopolitan elite (the “quiet church of the serious-minded”) rejected the trivial, low-brow, marketable and narrow-­ minded literary production for the plebs. He excluded popular literature from what he believed to be ethically and aesthetically worth symbolizing the universally human worldwide. Biti is no less critical of Goethe’s discrimination between the developed and underdeveloped literatures. Goethe authorizes the former to figure as perpetual aesthetic originators, renovators, sources of inspiration or mirrors of self-reflection to each other, and as models to minor, dependent literatures. The underdeveloped, smaller, or “exotic” literatures such as Serbian or Chinese, however, might in Goethe’s view occasionally provide thought-provoking raw material to great literatures but cannot present universally valid models eligible for canonization in the empire of world literature. Accordingly, these literatures have been relegated to their national particularity and destined to remain mere enablers of world literature’s autopoietic system (Biti 2016: 96–97, 138–143, 158–164). 32  The argument that justified this ambition consisted in the presumption of German merits in the cultural realm such as the inborn cosmopolitanism of Germans, their philosophical profundity, philological and historical erudition, translation mastery, and perfection of the German language.

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National Universalism and the Cultivation of Language: From German to Slovenian Literature Proposing novel concepts and practices of worlding their national literature, Friedrich Schlegel and Goethe intended to overcome German semi-­ peripheral position in the emerging world literary system. In Biti’s analysis, Goethe and the Schlegels hoped that in the conditions of modern cultural exchange among the nations, German literature would assume the position equivalent to universality attributed to Greek literature within the classical paradigm. Hence, static exemplarity based on the quasi-eternal canon would be replaced by a dynamic model dependent on variable factors such as the level and prestige of literary languages, supply-anddemand ratio on the global cultural market, as well as incessant competition for the universal acknowledgment of particular national literatures and their products. To Friedrich Schlegel, “the Weltgeist, unlike the Greek fixed canon of artistic rules, affirms itself in the mobile medium of a language” (Biti 2016: 63). The Schlegels replaced “the past all-encompassing but frozen Greek mirror by the present mobile German one on the rise” (ibid.: 64). Goethe, too, proposed his Weltliteratur as a modern substitute to the canonical normativity of the Greek Antiquity: After their [the ancient Greeks’] definite departure, their legacy lost its binding power, henceforth figuring merely as a regulating idea. As the Lord was now irrevocably absent, His throne became empty and up for grabs. In order to expose its improper usurpers after the historical dissolution of the Antique pattern, Goethe invented Weltliteratur as a permanent supervising negotiation between them. Every modern writer must accordingly courageously confront the turbulent worldwide flux, expose his own body to its erasure, and stubbornly drive his spirit through its mess if he wants to gain the real overview and achieve representative status in the ongoing European competition. (Biti 2016: 150)

As it has been shown above, German representatives of the ethnonationalist brand of cosmopolitanism such as Bouterwek, Goethe, and the Schlegel brothers attempted to circumvent the sense of their national inferiority by proposing idealized representations of the past or speculations about the coming epoch with German culture as the leading force of world history. Considering Slovenian cultural transfer of Romantic cosmopolitanism, one may speculate that a particular variation of what Biti treats as German

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“trauma narrative”33 might have inspired Č op and Prešeren, albeit they rendered the idea in much more modest terms. This was the belief that the new German literature should qualify as a world-forming cultural agency by its ability to world internally, that is, to absorb the epochal literary achievements of world-class national literatures from the Antiquity to the present. Biti quotes Herder who as early as 1795 expected Germans to “appropriate the best of all the peoples and in such a way become among them what man became among his fellow creatures … from which he learned his skills. He came at the end, took from every one of them his art and now he surpasses and rules all of them” (quoted in Biti 2016: 152). In a similar vein, Friedrich Schlegel prophesized in his essay published 1803 in the journal Europe: Thus, the high spirit of Germans is revealed now through a noble restlessness and activity which does not get tired either discovering and complementing ever new sources of truth and beauty or reviving and bringing to the homeland fields those which have already been poured out among other nations in ancient times. Judging by its present beginnings, German literature will in a not very long time banish all other old literatures, incorporate and absorb them. (Schlegel 1975: 17; see Enders et al. 2017: 216)34

In his lectures on the History of European Literature of 1803–1804, Schlegel put this idea in a historical perspective: The newer literature begins with the Christian-Latin: thereupon follows the old French, the source of Italian and Spanish-Portuguese, the Nordic as the middle source of all these literatures, the English and finally the German 33  According to Biti, the trauma narrative is a kind of consolatory fiction that attempts imaginatively to heal traumatic experiences (feelings of a lack and inferiority or the exposure to violence, exploitation, and repression): in the nineteenth-century German case, the trauma narratives were also invented to compensate for the sense of being deprived of the position among the powerful great nations: “Turning the long-term inferiority into the present and especially future superiority—no other turn-around can better epitomize the plot of what Jeffrey Alexander has termed ‘trauma narrative’” (Biti 2016: 2–3, 64, 95, 148). 34  “So zeigt sich nun jetzt der hohe Geist der Deutschen in einer edlen Rastlosigkeit und Tätigkeit, die gleich unermüdet ist, neue Quellen der Wahrheit und der Schönheit zu entdecken und zu ergänzen, und auch die, welches schon in alten Zeiten bei andern Nationen sich ergossen haben, von neuen zu beleben und auf die vaterländischen Fluren zu leiten. Die deutsche Literatur wird, nach dem gegenwärtigen Anfange zu urteilen, in nicht gar langer Zeit, alle andren älteren Literaturen verbannt, sich einverleibt und in sich aufgenommen habe.”

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which has comprehended, moreover swallowed up all these literatures; and it is the only one that blossoms with the most free life force, the only one from which an important fertile epoch is to be expected. (Schlegel 1958: 140; quoted in Biti 2016: 62)35

The German strategy of worlding an internationally not-yet-established literary system seemed to be productive to Slovenian Romantic literature, even though its ambitions appeared to be more restrained. Slovenian cosmopolitans of the Romantic period could not even dream about Ljubljana becoming a world-scale intellectual hub comparable to, say, Weimar or Vienna, or the Slovenian as the globally acknowledged language of literary mediation. Their ambition was merely to cultivate the Slovenian vernacular belles-­lettres through “swallowing up” the summits of European literatures of the Antiquity, Middle Ages, and Modernity to prove to others that the nascent national literature met the aesthetic standard deemed universal. In other words, the Slovenian version of internal worlding was conceived as a kind of an accelerated poetic apprenticeship leading Prešeren to master and outdo the poetic repertoires of the world classics. Prešeren scholarship agrees that Č op and Prešeren were familiar with what Biti calls “national universalism” (Biti 2016: 17, 21–22) of German Romanticism, in particular, the ideas of the Schlegel brothers about how to cultivate national literature through worldwide intertextuality. Scholars of Prešeren, however, disagree about the importance of the German model for Prešeren and Slovenian Romanticism: Avgust Žigon (1914: xvi–xvii, xxxvi–xxxviii, clii–clxx), France Kidrič (1978: 154–158, 1938: xlvi, lxxiv– lxxv, cxxi–cxxii), Janko Kos (1970: 104–141, 1979: 34, 94–98), and Boris Paternu (1994: 48–61) consider Schlegelian example to be a fruitful inspiration to Č op and Prešeren whereas Anton Slodnjak (1984: 156–164) underlines the aesthetic and ideological differences between them.36 Even 35  “Die neuere Literatur beginnt, wie gesagt, mit der christlisch-lateinischen; dann folgt die altfranzösiche, die Quelle der italienischen und spanisch-portugiesischen, die nordische als Mittelquelle aller dieser Literaturen, die englische und endlich die deutsche, die alle diese Literaturen umfasst, sie alle verschlungen hat; die einzige die noch in freiester lebendiger Kraft fortblüht und von der allein eine bedeutende fruchtbare Epoche zu erwarten ist.” 36  Originally published in 1956, Slodnjak’s article rejects Avgust Žigon’s 1914 thesis that Schlegel’s Dialogue on Poetry represented “the literary-artistic program of Č op’s academy and thus also of France Prešeren’s poetry” by claiming that Č op, albeit connoisseur of Schlegel’s work, was not only “independent thinker” but differed from Schlegel in his aesthetic views (e.g., higher estimation of Byron) and more progressive ideological orientation, not hostile to the Enlightenment. According to Slodnjak, Č op’s “aesthetic thought rather

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though aware of the contradiction between Prešeren’s free-thinking commitment to the national movement of a small Slavic nation and Friedrich Schlegel’s underestimation of Slavs and his reactionary worldview, Boris Paternu follows Žigon’s thesis about Schlegelianism as the program of “Č op’s academy” and Slovenian Romanticism. Č op’s letters and the catalog of his private library disclose that he studied the work of the Schlegel brothers. Paternu surmises that Prešeren, too, first acquainted with world literature—much less profoundly than Č op, to be sure—by reading Friedrich Schlegel’s History of Old and New Literature (Paternu 1976: 98). According to Paternu, the Schlegel brothers inspired Č op’s and Prešeren’s Romanticism not only with their cosmopolitanism in the guise of national universalism, which has been discussed above but also with their view of language and the concept of formal artistry (Paternu 1976: 98, 100, 102). Many German thinkers from Herder to Humboldt shared Schlegel’s idea that language grounds human thought, enables communication, establishes the social bond, and represents the identity of a national community in the world-historical process. In his introductory lecture to The History of Old and New Literature, Friedrich Schlegel conceives of language as a distinctive feature of humans and key social factor molding individual and collective consciousness; to him, language is, correspondingly, the central attribute of a nation and the prime measure of the nation’s intellectual development and importance (see Paternu 1976: 98). Handling with binary oppositions prefiguring structuralist theories of language (voice vs. writing and thought vs. word), Schlegel admires the “voice” and “writing” (die Stimme, die Schrift) as natural, even divine gifts that form “the artificial structure of language” (das künstliche Gebilde der Sprache), unite and link people to each other (die Menschen eint und verbindet), enable to identify “thought” (das Gedanke) with “word” (das Wort) and thus characterize “the original essence” of a human (das ursprüngliche Wesen des Menschen) (Schlegel 1961: 14).37 Consequently, one is inclined to “infer the mind from language, the thoughts from the expression” (von der Sprache auf den Geist, von dem Ausdruck auf den Gedanken zu schließen), whereas the arts and sciences represented in speech and writing, literature in particular, exert considerable influence on followed the line of literary articles in Goethe’s journal Über Kunst und Altertum and the contemporaneous poetry of Western Europe” (Slodnjak 1984: 156, 161). 37  For a rather free English translation see Schlegel 1818/I: 11–12.

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the world-historical value of nations (Schlegel 1961: 15). Based on these general assumptions and frustrated by the military and political power backing the imperial cultural influence of France, Schlegel finds poets and philosophers such as Homer and Plato more vital to the world history than army leaders or politicians. In his opinion, the “influence of the work and mind” (der Geist) of the former on the posterior “development of the humankind” (die Entwicklung des menschlichen Geschlechts) supersedes the “scope and durability of the impact” of the latter (ibid.: 17). Accordingly, he considers poets and philosophers “the proof and general measure of the intellectual power and literacy of the nations to which they belong” (ein Beweis und allgemeiner Maßstab der geistigen Kraft und Bildung derjenigen Nation betrachtet, welcher sie angehören) (ibid.: 17). Relying on a similar ideological transaction typical of German cultural nationalism, his brother August Wilhelm, too, believed that only the intellectual field was at that time available for unhindered national self-assertion (see Paternu 1976: 99). Assuming its relevance to Č op’s and Prešeren’s implicit language politics, Paternu points to Schlegel’s advocacy of the right of every language, including the dominated ones, to be cultivated as literary languages: Every significant and independent nation has the right, if I may express it, of possessing a literature peculiar to itself; and no barbarism is in my opinion so hurtful as that which would oppress the language of a people and a country, or do anything which tends to exclude them from reaching the higher orders of intellectual cultivation. It is mere prejudice, which leads us to consider languages that have been neglected, or that are unknown to ourselves, as incapable of being brought to perfection. (Schlegel 1818, vol. 2: 41; translation adapted)38

To be sure, the above Schlegel’s citation refers primarily to Nordic and East European nations and continues with a linguistic prejudice that “some languages … are in certain degree unfavorable for poetry”; Schlegel even shows his ignorance and underestimation of Slavic literatures (Schlegel 1818, vol. 2: 41, 1961: 229). However, his general conclusion, 38  “Eine jede bedeutende und selbstständige Nation hat, wenn man so sagen darf, ein Recht darauf, eine eigne und eigentümliche Literatur zu besitzen, und die ärgste Barbarei ist diejenige, welche die Sprache eines Volkes und Landes unterdrücken, oder sie von aller höhern Geistesbildung ausschließen will. Auch ist es nur ein Vorurteil, wenn man vernachlässigte, oder unbekanntere Sprachen sehr häufig einer höhern Vervollkommnung für unfähig hält” (Schlegel 1961: 229).

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which calls for the need to cultivate the mother tongue with regard to other European languages and without succumbing to either parochial purism or barbarian dependence on the ruling language, appears to Paternu an important incentive for Č op and Prešeren in their politics of motivating the educated classes to commit themselves to literarization of Slovenian: Every independent and important nation … has the right to possess peculiar literature; that is, to possess proper cultivation of language, without which the cultivation of their intellect can never be universally effectual and national, but has to learn and practice in a foreign language and always keep something barbaric. It is indeed a very absurd way of showing our partiality for our own language to desist from learning any other, or even to deny the advantages which some foreign languages may possess over our own. Besides the ancient languages, there are several modern languages so useful in regard to general cultivation … The use of a foreign language in legislation and in courts of law is at all the time distressing, and I might even say unjust; the use of a foreign language in diplomacy and in the social intercourse of polished life, can never fail to produce injurious effects upon the vernacular language. … It then becomes the duty of the whole cultivated and higher class of society to come forward together, to point out by their influence the proper route into the universal between two extremes of entirely neglecting and exclusively studying foreign languages; to give to necessity that which she requires, but never to forget what is due to our country. The care of the national language I consider at all the times a sacred trust and a most important privilege of the higher class. Every man of education should make it the object of his unceasing concern, to preserve his language pure and entire, to speak it so far as is in his power, in all its beauty and perfection. He should be acquainted generally, not superficially, not only with the history, but with the language and literature of his country. … A nation whose language becomes rude and barbarous, must be on the brink of barbarisms regarding everything else. A nation which allows her language to go to ruin is parting with the last half of her intellectual independence, and testifies her willingness to cease to exist. (Schlegel 1818, vol. 2: 56–58; translation adapted)39 39  “Eine jede selbstständige und bedeutende Nation, hat … das Recht, eine eigentümliche Literatur, d. h. eine eigne Sprachbildung zu besitzen, ohne welche auch die Geistesbildung nie eine eigne, allgemein wirkende, und nationale sein kann, sondern in einer ausländischen Sprache erlernt und fortgeübt, immer etwas Barbarisches behalten muß. Töricht würde es freilich sein, die Liebe zu der vaterländischen Sprache bloß dadurch zu beweisen, daß man die fremden nicht lernt, oder ihre Vorzüge nicht erkennt. Selbst für allgemeine Geistesbildung sind außer den alten Sprachen, auch mehrere der neuern, nach dem besondern Zweck eines

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In Paternu’s interpretation, Schlegel’s apology of the cultivation of the national language, in particular, a minor or subjugated one, influenced Čop’s program in Carniola together with another Schlegelian idea. If literature were to be the highest expression of a nation, its literary language could achieve perfection and refinement (“the artificial structure of language,” das künstliche Gebilde der Sprache) through the adoption of the demanding foreign artistic forms connoting classical proportion, harmony, and euphony (see Paternu 1976: 100). According to Paternu, in his History of Old and New Literature, Friedrich Schlegel observed the cultivation of literary language as one of the most telling criteria in his evaluation of the world-historical development of nations and epochs. For instance, he characterized the period from the mid-seventeenth to the mid-eighteenth century as an “epoch of barbarism” or a “chaotic middle state in German literature” in which its language wavered between a would-be half-French and a feral German, artificiality and banality (Schlegel 1961: 367).40 Paternu argues that the Schlegel brothers inspired Čop and Prešeren with their high esteem of the Romance poetic forms, in particular, those of the Italian Middle Ages and the Renaissance, as devices cultivating the literary language. They counted these forms jeden die eine oder die andere, mehr oder minder durchaus unentbehrlich …. Der Gebrauch einer ausländischen Sprache für die Gesetzgebung und die bürgerlichen Rechtsgeschäfte ist allemal höchst bedrückend, ja man kann sagen, schlechthin ungerecht; der Gebrauch einer ausländischen Sprache für die Staatsgeschäfte und was damit zusammenhängt, auch für das höhere gesellschaftliche Leben, kann nicht ohne nachteiligen Einfluß bleiben für die einheimische Sprache. … Hier ist es nun die Sache der Gebildeten, und überhaupt der höhern Klasse, ins Mittel zu treten, und den rechten Weg zwischen beiden Extremen, durch ihren Einfluß, allmählig zu dem allgemeinen zu machen; der Notwendigkeit zu geben, was sie fordert, ohne doch die Pflicht gegen das Vaterland zu vergessen. Denn, als eine recht eigentliche und unerläßliche Pflicht, betrachte ich allerdings die Sorge für die eigne Sprache, besonders von Seiten der höhern Klasse. Jeder Gebildete sollte dahin streben, seine Sprache rein und richtig, ja so viel als möglich vollkommen und vortrefflich zu reden; er sollte sich, wie von der Geschichte seines Volkes, so auch von ihrer Sprache und Literatur, eine allgemeine, aber doch nicht gar zu oberflächliche Kenntnis verschaffen. … Eine Nation, deren Sprache verwildert oder in einem rohen Zustande erhalten wird, muß selbst barbarisch und roh werden. Eine Nation, die sich ihre Sprache rauben läßt, verliert den letzten Halt ihrer geistigen, innern Selbstständigkeit, und hört eigentlich auf zu existieren” (Schlegel 1961: 237–238). 40  In his manuscript literary history of Slovenian literature (Literatur der Winden) written in 1831 as a contribution to Šafárik’s Geschichte der südslawischen Literatur, Č op applied the same measure to the developments of Slovenian language and letters (see Juvan 1987: 280, 282–285).

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among the greatest achievements of what they called “modern” or “Romantic” epoch of poetry, the successor of the classical canon of the Antiquity. In his 1800 “Gespräch über die Poesie” (Dialogue on Poetry), the young Friedrich praised Dante as the founder of modern poetry (der heilige Stifter und Vater der modernen Poesie). According to Schlegel, Dante knew how to elevate what was most precious and singular in his vernacular tradition to the level of the classical (von den Altvordern der Nation lernte er das Eigenste und Sonderbarste, das Heiligste und das Süßeste der neuen gemeinen Mundart zu klassischer Würde und Kraft zusammenzudrängen), including the art of rhymes and a large-scale orderly structure. To Schlegel, Petrarch’s sonnets and canzonas exemplified a genuine and permanent source of formal artistry, sensibility, and erotic discourse in poetry (Sein Gefühl hat die Sprache der Liebe gleichsam erfunden) (Schlegel 1972: 290–291). Focusing his aesthetic and literary-historical reflection of verse, the ­structure of poems, and the forms of poetry, with special emphasis on the sonnet, August Wilhelm published his anthology of translations entitled Blumensträusse italienischer, spanischer und portugiesischer Poesie (Bouquets of Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese Poetry) in 1804. With this publication, he wanted to demonstrate the aesthetic capacity of the Romance metric forms such as ballata, canzona, sonnet, madrigal, sestina, terza rima, or ottava rima (see Strosetzki 2010; Strobel 2010). According to Paternu, the Schlegel brothers maintained that the artful poetical forms represented modern equivalents to canonic proportionality of the Classical Antiquity. As such, they were supposed to have instigated the cultivation of national languages and literatures, beginning with the rise of the sixteenth-century Spanish literature. Given that, the Romance metric patterns seemed appropriate to Č op as an instrument enabling the cultivation of the Slovenian literary language (see Paternu 1976: 100–101). To sum up, in the first quarter of the nineteenth century, August Wilhelm and Friedrich Schlegel advocated a kind of literary cosmopolitanism similar to Goethe’s path to the concept of world literature. Even though marked by Winckelmann’s and Goethe’s classicist graecomania, their universalism was Romantic and nationalist, in that it affirmed the European post-classical tradition from the Middle Ages to the present as “Romantic” and interpreted it from a Germanocentric perspective. Their national universalism materialized in their manifold aesthetic-­ philosophical, philological, literary-historical, translation, and poetic practices through which they strove to contribute to the universal Bildung of

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Germans as Kulturnation.41 Similarly to the Weimar classic Goethe, their correspondent and patronizing source of inspiration, they thought that German literature would gain the international prestige by taking up the role of a mediator or translator of multilingual world traditions, seeking creative inspiration from global imaginaries, and cultivating the German language with foreign forms that connote classical proportion and harmony.

Slovenian Transfer of Schlegelianism: World Literature as a Peripheral Practice Many documents testify that Č op and Prešeren attempted to follow the idea of the Schlegels to literary-aesthetically refine the insufficiently cultivated mother tongue by the Medieval and Renaissance Romance poetic forms adopted with respect to their original linguistic expression and semantics (see Kos 1970: 38–54, 106–107, 126–132, 1979: 94–95; Paternu 1994: 51–53). Even though there is no agreement in Prešeren scholarship as to whether they also accepted the Schlegelian idea of Romanticism as a synthesis of the Antiquity and Modernity (Kos 1970: 117–120; Paternu 1994: 54–57), it has been proven beyond any doubt that Prešeren obeys the principles of classical proportion in the composition of his poems, while intertextually drawing on the style, forms, and imagery of the Classical Antiquity, Medieval Christianity, Early Modern vernacular traditions of the Renaissance and Baroque, and even on the Arabo-Persian form of ghazel. 41  See their critical essays, philosophical fragments, and lectures with aesthetic and literaryhistorical content (Friedrich’s Gespräch über die Poesie and Geschichte der alten und neuen Literatur, August Wilhelm’s Vorlesungen über schöne Literatur und Kunst and Vorlesungen über dramatische Kunst und Literatur); translations and publication of foreign literatures from Dante, Petrarch, Cervantes, Camões, and Shakespeare to the classics of Indian literature (August Wilhelm’s collection Blumensträuße italienischer, spanischer und portugiesischer Poesie, the journal Indische Bibliothek) and August Wilhelm’s original poems written in Romance forms—similar to Friedrich’s early writings, August Wilhelm understood his multiple roles (poet, literary historian, critic, aesthetician, editor, and translator) as partaking in intertwining discourses that follow the same principle of poiesis; through them and his cosmopolitan network, he attempted to mediate between Germany and other national literatures in order to build Europe as a cultural whole with Germany at its center (see Strobel 2010: 160–161). As aesthetically ingenious, philologically accurate, and hermeneutically self-reflected translator, the most influential among the German Romantics, he significantly broadened and opened up the national literary field, providing an example of cultural transfer aimed also at establishing a kind of world society (Mix and Strobel 2010: 1, 5).

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The composition of Prešeren’s volume Poezije (Poesies) of 1847 appears to be a kind of a Romantic national digest of world literature, including modern currents of pre-Romanticism, Romantic Byronism and Orientalism, Slavic national Romanticisms, and Biedermeier. In this way and similar to Goethe’s cosmopolitan poetics, Prešeren articulates his singular sense of modern individuality, which suffers from the social and world-systemic marginality, by hybridizing Romantic subjectivism characterizing modern national literatures with purportedly objective forms of representation sanctioned by the canon of world literature. What could have started as a spontaneous, confessional subjectivism of a Romantic poet from the periphery or as a straightforward literary patriotism of a pioneer of national awakening, is thereby elevated to the sublime level of universality, while the Slovenian vernacular, in its aesthetic quality of the language of high literature, enters the textual space of world literature. With their fictional, interior worlding, Prešeren’s poems exemplify Julia Kristeva’s concept of intertextuality as “textual interaction produced within the text itself” and “an indicator of how the text reads history and locates itself in it” (Kristeva 1969: 443, quoted in Juvan 2008: 12). Prešeren’s 1847 volume of poetry thus interiorizes the classical and modern aesthetic codes of world literature to mark its inscription in the textual space of world literature, in which the actual socio-linguistic inferiority of Slovenian and its world-system marginality are sublated by the symbolic act of writing and only in the realm of writing. That the models of literary cosmopolitanism were originally elaborated by Goethe and the Schlegel brothers to supply the needs specific to German national literary ecology did not prevent Č op and Prešeren from transferring them into Carniola where the Slovenian national movement attempted to emancipate just from the German-dominated Austrian public sphere. As protagonists of the early phase of European national awakenings, they still did not show any chauvinist hostility toward the dominant language and the ethnic group it represented. They instead made use of the German language and culture as a given repository of knowledge and a medium of cultured communication. Similar to other national movements of Europe, the decision to take part in the national awakening did not imply othering, that is, excluding those who spoke in the imperial language or declared their belonging to the imperial nation. Until the outburst of inter-ethnic tensions in the late 1860s, it was normal even for Slovenian nationalists to use German or to opt for the Slovenian national movement regardless of one’s non-Slovenian ethnicity and language.

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The process of Č op’s and Prešeren’s cultural transfer of German national universalism took place mainly between the years 1828 and 1835 when the two friends were regularly meeting in Ljubljana, the land capital of Carniola, which at the time bore a noticeably German appearance. Through the transfer of the Goethean and Schlegelian model, the protagonists of Slovenian Romanticism intended to cultivate their literary language and world the nascent literature of a dominated national movement. The objectives, strategies, and implementation of the transfer of the Schlegelian model of nationalizing literature through aesthetic cosmopolitanism originated from Č op’s and Prešeren’s assessment of the history and current social position of the Slovenian literary culture. Having returned from the Galician capital L’viv where he worked as a high school teacher and university assistant, Matija Č op changed his literary interests. From a secluded philologist and passive aesthetic c­ onnoisseur of European literatures who was compelled to earn a living from the dull profession of teaching, he turned into a mastermind of the Romantic program for the cultivation of the Slovenian literary field (see Kidrič 1978: 157–161; Kos 1970: 38–40, 1979: 32, 36–37, 124–131, 137). After his return to Ljubljana, he applied the comparative perspective, from which he had earlier merely studied the achievements of the European literary past and present, to his program of worlding the Slovenian Romantic literature and his increased interest in other Slavic literatures. In the light of their interliterary comparisons, he and Prešeren found the cultural condition of Carniola to be lagging behind the major European literatures, including the German or Czech. Moreover, the current state and prospects of the Slovenian verbal art proved to be contained by the public predominance of German in the Austrian Empire and the religious-­ utilitarian needs of the mostly illiterate population. The educated class had for centuries been made up almost exclusively by the clergy, while the rare consumers of the Slovenian print consisted mainly of literate peasants.42 The existing concepts of national awakening in Carniola, which arose under the influence of the conservative Enlightenment of the renowned Viennese Slavic scholar Jernej Kopitar and the local rigorist clergy, 42  See Č op’s letters to Pavel Josef Šafárik (24 June 1831, 27 June 1831), Jernej Kopitar (January 1828, 16 May 1830, 28 April 1833, 2 May 1833, 12 May 1833, 17 June 1833), František L. Č elakovsky (14 March 1833), and in particular his polemical-programmatic essay Nuovo discacciamento di lettere inutile from 1833 (Č op 1983: 47–85); Prešeren, on the other hand, evoked similar diagnosis in his poetic language, for example, in the poems Nova pisarija and Glosa (see my discussion above).

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presupposed that Slovenians were mainly peasant population who needed only gradual practical instruction, literacy, and the education in the Catholic morals. From this aspect, it was considered adequate for the needs of Carniolan literature to standardize and purify the peasant vernacular through grammar, dictionary, and orthography, collect morally decent folklore songs and stories, and print literary genres whose aesthetic pleasure was only an instrument of utility and religion (see Kos 1979: 120–170; Paternu 1994: 107–126). Because of their perception of the lack of the aesthetic autonomy and high literature in the available writing in Slovenian, Č op and Prešeren felt the need for the importation and adaptation of literary strategies that had proved to be fruitful in cultural nationalism of Germans, Poles, and Czechs. Č op and Prešeren, who had the experience of living in foreign, multinational cities with a lively cultural atmosphere, found the autarky of the prevailing cultural policy in Carniola difficult to bear. This is why they appreciated Goethe’s “European orientation” (Kos 1979: 79), which opposed the purism and self-sufficiency of German Romantic nationalists. For this reason, they sought inspiration in the cosmopolitan variety of national Romanticism advocated by the Schlegel brothers, whose nationalism was more pronounced than Goethe’s (see Pizer 2006: 41–44). Following the example of Friedrich Schlegel, Č op and Prešeren wanted to convince the Carniolan educated class, which had been integrated into the more prestigious German-language literature, to participate in the newly established national literary ecology and contribute to the cultivation of the Slovenian vernacular through polite conversation, scholarship, and high culture. In the local literary supplement Illyrisches Blatt of February 1833, Č op presented this program publicly and comprehensibly in his introduction and appendix to the German translation of Č elakovský’s Czech review of the almanac Krajnska čbelica published in the Prague journal Č asopis českého Museum in 1832.43 Č op summarized this article and the ensuing polemic about the Slovenian ABC reform in a 1833 pamphlet entitled Nuovo discacciamento di lettere inutili, Das ist: Slowenischer ABC-­ Krieg (A New Chasing Away of Useless Letters, or: Slovenian ABC-War). 43 ̌  Cop was arguably the first in Carniola to use the argument “from outside” for “internal” needs (similar to what Goethe was doing in Germany; see Strich 1949: 21). The favorable review of Prešeren and the Carniolan poetic almanac in a larger and more developed literature such as the Czech figured as a crucial evidence of their universal aesthetic value which the home environment was still not able to perceive. For more on this, see Chap. 7.

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Here, he argued for the cultivation of Slovenian vernacular through poetry such as that published in the almanac Krajnska čbelica (Carniolan Bee) with the intention to entice Carniolan educated class to the project of national awakening. In line with Schlegelian views on the role of the debarbarization of vernaculars exposed to a dominant cultural language, Č op refutes the conviction that the linguistic purity and grammatical correctness themselves make for “the entire formation of a language” (die ganze Bildung einer Sprache). He called instead for complementing the stylistic and semantic structure of Slovenian through the introduction of socially higher and conceptually more sophisticated linguistic layers: As long as a language remains confined to expressing the notions of a simple countryman (die Begriffe des einfaches Landmannes auszudrücken) and is not suitable to be used in higher circles of life and in the sciences as a communication tool (in den höheren Kreisen des Lebens und der Wissenschaft zum Mitteilungswerkzeuge zu dienen), it cannot demand to be named a cultured (gebildete) language … Language can acquire the true formation (eigentliche Bildung) only through being gradually introduced into these circles. (Č op 1833: 25, 1983: 115)

Č op also adopted Schlegel’s conviction that a literary language progresses toward the cultured ideal by being open but not subjugated to other cultured languages of Europe: Our writers can best learn what the Slavic literary style (slawischer Bücherstyl) is from the writings of those Slavs who already have a rich literature; only we must not immediately proclaim everything in it as unacceptable Germanisms, Gallicisms and so on when these are artistic expressions common to all European literatures or a general European phrase dictated by common usage and culture (was entweder ein allen Literaturen Europa’s gemeinsamer Kunstausdruck oder eine durch gegenwärtige Sitte und Cultur bedingte allgemein-­europäische Redeweise ist). (Č op 1833: 26; 1983: 116)

In his philological, aesthetic, and literary-historical reflection of the current literary initiative of his Romantic circle, Čop recognizes the true merit of Carniolan Bee in that it offers contents which may foster the participation of the educated (die Theilnahme der Gebildeten … zu erregen), on which “a higher formation of language (die höhere Bildung der Sprache) primarily depends” (Čop 1833: 26, 1983: 116). Čop concludes his most striking appearance in the Carniolan public with the

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conviction—based on his belief in Prešeren’s artistic capacity—that it is poetry that is most suitable to contribute to further formation of Slovenian language. To him, poetry is namely “least dependent on outer circumstances,” in which it is otherwise “scarcely possible to imagine the cultivation of true sciences in our country language” (die Pflege der eigentlichen Wissenschaften in unsrer Landessprache; Čop 1833: 31, 1983: 122). The idea of cultivating the mother tongue through the cosmopolitan language of poetry informed not only Č op’s metaliterary reflection written and published in German, but also Prešeren’s self-understanding. Among other things, the idea triggered his polemics with the Slovenian poet Stanko Vraz (1810–1851), the Lower-Styrian adherent of the Illyrian variety of Pan-Slavism. Advocating linguo-cultural and literary autonomy of Slovenians, Prešeren, in his letter to his friend Vraz of 5 July 1832, writes down a symptomatic formulation: “The tendency of our carmina and similar literary activities [i.e., Prešeren’s poetry and contributions of the Carniolan Bee circle] is no other than to cultivate our mother tongue” (Die Tendenz unserer Carmina und sonstigen literärishen Tätigkeit ist keine andere als unsere Muttersprache zu kultivieren; Prešeren 1966: 197). In other words, Č op regarded poetry such as Prešeren’s as discourse whose perfection was dependent primarily on the individual talent of its creators and presupposed neither a completely developed set of national cultural institutions and media nor a functionally fully differentiated standard language. Carniolan Slovenians were short of media and institutions necessary for grounding their autonomous national culture, while their vernacular had not yet been introduced into the spheres of modern scholarship, politics, and high culture. Taking such circumstances into account, Č op considered the aesthetically and intellectually demanding poetry Prešeren was producing as the most convenient shortcut by which it would be possible to catch up developed Europe and establish Slovenians as a modern cultural nation (see Kos 1979: 155–170). In this sense, Č op expected the art of poetry in Slovenian to achieve the aesthetic excellence by following the Schlegelian model of universalism, that is, through highly individualized and self-reflective intertextual emulation of the European traditions generally recognized as the highest artistic achievements of humankind. The deficiency of actual social heteroglossia in Slovenian would thus be compensated for by the internal aesthetic-stylistic saturation of the poetic language absorbing the multilingual literary polyphony of the world. ̌ and Prešeren’s transfer of Schlegelian national universalism and the Cop ensuing local inscription of world literature repertoires into Slovenian

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poetry encompassed ramified practices and texts. As mentioned in Chap. 4, ̌ and Prešeren collaborated with Miha Kastelic in issuing the first three Cop volumes of Carniolan Bee (1830–1834), the second almanac of Carniolan poetry in Slovenian. With this sample edition, they attempted to found a Slovenian annual through which they hoped to recruit a stable circle of literary producers, and entice the educated readers whose mother tongue was Slovenian to identify with the national awakening. Employed as the ̌ took care to regularly complement librarian of the Ljubljana lyceum, Cop the school’s cosmopolitan book collection, while enriching his private ̌ participated in the library with great care and knowledge. Moreover, Cop cosmopolitan respublica litteraria. Even though he never approached the influential core of the leading European intellectuals nor did he scored them among his correspondents (except for Jernej Kopitar), he joined a network of lesser-known Slovenian and ­international supporters of the modern aesthetic tastes through his interaction and extensive correspoň ̌ dence. Some of Cop’s international correspondents, František L. Celakovský (1799–1852) and Pavel Jozef Šafárik (1795–1861) in particular, became mediators of Slovenian literature and helped it to make the first steps into other peripheral regions of the world literary system.44 As early as at the ̌ beginning of Prešeren’s career, a thin selection of his work in Celakovský’s Czech translation thus started to be actively present outside the native literary system, albeit in that of another Slavic nation subjected to the same Habsburg state. This development comes close to the first necessary condition David Damrosch lists for a work to become world literature (see Damrosch 2003: 4, 15–17). Texts planning, carrying out, and publicly defending the adaptation of the imported cosmopolitan model for the cultivation of a dependent literary language were crucial in the transfer process. The genres of these texts, which were involved in polemics with Carniolan adversaries from Kopitar’s circle, ranged from literary-historical, aesthetic-critical, comparative or philological reflections and polemics (Č op’s private letters to Kopitar and his public comments to the translation of the Czech review of Carniolan 44  See Chap. 7 on Č elakovský’s review of Krajnska čbelica and his sample translations of Prešeren; his presentation of Carniolan literature was published in the journal Č asopis Č eského museum, one of the typical media which fostered the international circulation of literatures through translations, news, reviews, and essays. On Kopitar’s initiative, Šafárik invited Č op to contribute in 1831 his extensive information about the history of Slovenian literature for Šafárik’s history of South Slavic literature (Geschichte der südslawischen Literatur I), which was published posthumously only in 1864.

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Bee, included in Nuovo Discacciamento di lettere inutili, das ist: Slowenischer ABC-Krieg) to literary citationality, self-referentiality, and satire in Prešeren’s poetry, as well as his translations of modern European poets (Bürger, Byron, and Mickiewicz). Prešeren carried out the program of Romantic cosmopolitanism and adapted it to the local needs while laying the groundwork for its favorable reception in public by his poetic comments. On the one hand, he performed Schlegelian cosmopolitan principles of the intertextual synthesis of the world traditions and the cultivation of national literature through harmonious Romance poetic forms. His metaphors and exempla allude to a worldwide repertoire of the Classical Antiquity, medieval Christianity, Dante and Petrarch, Iberian sonnetists, Baroque masters, and more contemporaneous Pre-Romantic and Romantic imagery, the Byronian in particular. He wrote his poems in the internationally respected forms such as the Italian sonnet, terza rima, and stanza, Spanish glosa and romance, French triolet, as well as an elegiac couplet, ballad, or ghazel. At the same time, however, Prešeren legitimized the ongoing transfer process through his self-reflection embedded in the tropes of his verses (see Juvan 2017: 48–106). In his poetry, he thus called for a socio-ideological context that would enable the existence and reproduction of such poetry. For instance, as a response to a scandal caused by the newspaper publication of his 1834 “Wreath of Sonnets,” whose acrostic “Primicovi Julji” (“To Julia Primic”) was considered an act of presumptuous public courtship of a young girl from a respected bourgeois family, Prešeren wrote several sonnets in his defense. In them, he comments on the difference between the factual and poetic eroticism. In the sonnet beginning with the verse “Na jasnem nebi mila luna sveti” (The gentle moon shining on the serene sky), he contrasts two kinds of light, the intensive energy of sunlight and gentleness of moonshine. The metaphorical antithesis between the two lights points to the opposition that the speech-act theory would later describe in terms of the difference between the illocutionary force of the factual courting and the etiolated speech act of fictional amorous worship within the aesthetic discourse. With such a self-referentiality of meta-poems, Prešeren, so to speak, attempted to educate his Carniolan readership by making them aware of the aesthetic-literary convention, crucial for the very existence of the literary system (see Schmidt 1980: 92–95, 104–107, 140–141). Elegiac, sentimental, or jovially satirical, his meta-poetry and epigrams defend in the Carniolan public his adoption of the concept of a serious intellectual and deeply individual confessional poetry, while rejecting all

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kind of utilitarian, educative, or moralist compromise. These works also comment on his experience of the poetic calling hampered by the local socio-historical conditions, addresses his Carniolan and international predecessors, attack influential adversaries, and indulgently tease minor fellow-­poets of the Krajnska čbelica circle.45 In short, in the late1820s and 1830s, that is, in his period of creativity dubbed the Romantic classical, Prešeren attempted to perform and justify the German pattern of grounding modern national literature on literary cosmopolitanism, which extends beyond Eurocentrism. During the process of cultural transfer, Matija Č op helped his friend Prešeren with the philosophical, historical, and comparative aesthetic expertise as well as the holdings of his private library and that of the Lyceum. Based on his intensive study of foreign languages and literatures and nurtured by the exchange of books or letters about recent developments in European literatures and scholarship, Č op became a productive mediator between European and Slovenian literature, the Romantic universalism and Slovenian national revival (see Kos 1970: 38–54). A series of Č op’s practices and views corresponded to the meaning of Goethe’s notion of world literature and Schlegel’s ideas about how to constitute a (semi-)peripheral national literature within the cosmopolitan horizon as a synthesis or mediator of world traditions. One aspect of the literary cosmopolitanism as personified by Goethe and the Schlegels is Č op’s systematic and enduring philosophical, philological, and literary research; moreover, the knowledge of about twenty languages allowed him to comprehend literary texts in their authentic linguistic or historical expression. Č op’s cross-­national correspondence, which arose from the traditions of the European republic of letters (see Buescu 2012), was his primary medium for the exchange of facts and news about literature and dissemination of his metaliterary comments and aesthetic ideas. Finally, Č op realized Goethe’s metaphors of world literature as an international book market through his exchange and purchases of books, with which he systematically built up his private library and complemented the holdings of the Ljubljana lyceum library. Č op conscientiously collected books in many languages, in particular, those that fit the aesthetic understanding of literature typical of Romanticism. He thus acquired literary works of the Greek and Roman classics, the vernacular masters of the European Middle Ages, 45  See the discussions of “Glosa,” “Nova pisarija” (New Writing), and “Sonetni venec” (Wreath of Sonnets) in Chap. 4.

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the Renaissance, Mannerism and the Baroque, as well of contemporary protagonists of European Romanticism; to deepen his understanding of these sources, Č op systematically collected literary histories, essays in poetics or aesthetics, dictionaries and grammars (Kidrič 1978: 148, 156–158; Žigon 1917). It thus appears that Č op designed his private library—albeit containing 1.993 volumes—in the spirit of world literature, just like Goethe.46 In his case, too, Reingard Nethersole’s general view on libraries as tools of world literature is pertinent: As sites encapsulating and recording specific flows of symbolic and cultural capital as well as offering tools with which to access it, libraries great and small, famous and almost forgotten, real, imagined, and virtual, are the receptacle of the world’s scriptural memory. They are the place best suited to learning how to read the process of recording and recounting individual and collective encounters with the world, derived from and shaped by the commerce of books in different parts of the globe that together produce an increasingly connected cosmopolitan universe. (Nethersole 2012: 314)

Its cosmopolitan character notwithstanding, Č op’s library also included works related to the idea of national awakening, particularly among the Slavs. With both orientations, Č op’s library, as well as the lyceum library, provided sources for Prešeren’s literary production. What remained of his private library after his death was far more modest in extent than Č op’s collection; it consisted of but a hundred and some books.47 Č op further concretized Goethe’s idea of world literature by following European cultural journals. Goethe’s Kunst und Altertum, a journal on the literary arts of Germany, Europe, and the world published from 1816 to 1832 was among Č op’s favorite readings. In the case of journals as well, Č op was not merely a passive recipient consumer of European literatures, but started to participate in the exchange among them in 1827 and 1828. He was sending news about the Vienna book market to the L’viv journal Rozmaitości (Variety); his letter about Bowring’s English anthology of 46  Considering his reputation and wealth, Goethe’s personal library was not that much bigger than Č op’s: it consisted of about 5000 volumes of German, Greek, Latin, French, Italian, English, Oriental, Eastern European, Spanish, and Portuguese, and Nordic literary traditions (Mani 2017: 53–54). 47  Interestingly, only the works of Byron and Thomas Moore represented Romanticism in Prešeren’s personal library; the classics of the Antiquity, Middle Ages, and Modernity were less few in number (see Kos 1970: 33–35). This might also be the reason why the Romanticism of Prešeren appears to be so “classical.”

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Polish poetry provided the building material for Wacław Zaleski’s article on the topic (Štefan 1985). When the Vienna court librarian Jernej Kopitar took over the editorship of (Wiener) Jahrbücher der Literatur in 1828,48 he invited Č op to collaborate but because of their quarrel in the 1833 Alphabet War nothing came of it, despite Č op’s having prepared considerable material for literary reviews (see Kidrič 1978: 160–161). Not least of all, Č op’s intensive comparative historical study of the development of European and non-European literatures in mutual connection, primarily through translations, belonged to the Goethean notion of world literature and paralleled otherwise much more effective and ramified literary cosmopolitanism of the Schlegels. Similar to them and Goethe, Č op also took into consideration old and modern world literature when reflecting on his national literature. To conclude, through his activities described above, Prešeren and Č op belonged to hundreds of nameless individuals from European peripheries that, with their practices, works, and concepts, constituted the reference of Goethe’s term Weltliteratur. Through their cultural transfer of the German national universalism between the years 1828 and 1835, Matija Č op and France Prešeren also adopted the essentials of Goethe’s notion of Weltliteratur, which only began to enter the European public space in that same period. For that reason, it is not so important that no mention of this expression has yet been found in Č op’s textual legacy. However, Č op might have been even familiar with Goethe’s explicit notes on world literature. Goethe’s fragmentary and ambivalent characterizations of the term “world literature” from the years 1827–1831, of which the most prominent are recorded posthumously in Eckermann’s 1836 Conversations of Goethe, are for the most part “scattered in one ‘work’,” that is, in his published or unpublished articles for Kunst und Altertum, a publication with which the “citizen of the world from Weimar” implemented the program of literary cosmopolitanism in cooperation with other European journals such as L’Eco or Le Globe (Koch 2002: 19, 231–233). In his correspondence, Č op referred to specific issues of Goethe’s journal from the period 1817–1827 (Kos 1986). It is thus probable that he also came across Goethe’s first mentions of Weltliteratur in Kunst und Altertum of 1827–1828. This word appears on page 131 of 48  In terms of its content (among others, it published the works of Goethe and August Wilhelm Schlegel), this quarterly was arguably Austria’s most cosmopolitan journal, despite Metternich’s patronage and its conservative orientation.

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the first part of the sixth volume, in which Goethe, among other things, publishes an article about Vincenzo Monti and Carlo Tedaldi-Fores, to which Č op makes reference in his letter of 31 January 1828 to Savio. Goethe introduces the expression “world literature” in a generalizing segment of a note in which he somewhat narcissistically responds to the “historical drama” of Alexandre Duval Le Tasse which he evidently influenced with his Torquato Tasso: The extracts from French periodicals that I give are not merely intended to remind readers of myself and my writings: I have a higher aim of which I shall give a preliminary outline. We hear and read everywhere of the progress of the human race, of the wider prospects in world relationships between men. … For my part I seek only to point out to my friends my conviction that a universal world literature [eine allgemeine Weltliteratur] is in process of formation in which we Germans are called to play an honourable part. The nations all look to us, they praise, blame, adopt and reject, imitate and distort, understand or misunderstand us, open or close their hearts towards us. (Goethe, quoted in Strich 1949: 349)

Goethe mentions his cosmopolitan notion of the universal nature of the emerging world literature only in passing and—as explained above—linked it to his nationalist belief in a prominent role Germans would play in the formation of this new epoch of literary interaction. In the same volume, part two (1828) of the journal, Goethe refers to “world literature” again, on p. 396. Here, he praises the Edinburgh Review as an example of cosmopolitan literary journals which “gradually reach a wider public” and promise to “contribute most effectively to the universal world literature we hope for” (Goethe, quoted in Strich 1949: 350). Goethe published more substantial formulations of the idea in Kunst und Altertum of 1828, whereas his most influential argument on the topic of world literature, printed in Eckermann’s Conversations of Goethe, only came out after Č op’s death. It is thus questionable whether the remarks from 1827 to 1828 attracted Č op’s attention to the same degree as Goethe’s article about Monti and Tedaldi-Fores (“Moderne Guelfen und Ghibellinen”), which appeared in 1827 on pages 164–166 of the first part of volume six. In his letters, Č op referred on many occasions to Goethe’s commentaries on European literature printed in Kunst und Altertum. Discussing recent Italian literature in the letter to Savio mentioned above, Č op asks his correspondent: “Do you know Meditazioni Poetiche by Carlo Tebaldi [sic!] Fores, which Goethe mentions favorably in the newspaper ‘Kunst und

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Alterthum’?” (Č op 1986: 102, 105). According to Janko Kos, Goethe reported briefly on Tedaldi-Fores’s poetological poem (it includes a polemic response to Monti’s essay on mythology) in his Kunst und Altertum only a year after its publication, in 1826; in 1827, he wrote more extensively about it when discussing the difference between the classicist and the Romantic attitude to mythology (see Kos 1986: 314). These discussions are very close to the time of his first mention of Weltliteratur. It is not possible to confirm that Č op was familiar with the expression Weltliteratur by 1828 when his and Prešeren’s transfer of Romantic cosmopolitanism began, and Goethe’s term has not yet been discovered in Č op’s vocabulary. Nevertheless, there can be no doubt that he and Prešeren were part of the European developments which Goethe at the same time surmised, recognized, and labeled with the term “world literature”—however, the Slovenian literary cosmopolitans remained invisible to him because they were determined by their peripheral position in the nascent literary world-system. As early as in a note to a German elegy written on the occasion of Č op’s death by the Austrian poet Franz Hermann von Hermannsthal, which appeared in Illyrisches Blatt on 18 June 1835, the word Weltliteratur was indirectly, through a particular figure of speech (hypallage), introduced to Carniolan readers with the expression “literary world.” This phrase indicates the conviction that Č op’s active role in world literature has been unjustly overlooked: That he is known only in Carniola, his homeland, and not the entire literary world [die gesammte literarische Welt; emphasis added], has come about only because the constant demands of his studies and teaching, and his early death, left no time for the latter [the literary world] to come to know him, even as he was supporting its cause. (Hermannsthal 1835; emphasis added)

Works Cited Albrecht, Andrea. 2005. Kosmopolitismus: Weltbürgerdiskurse in Literatur, Philosophie und Publizistik um 1800. Berlin and New York: de Gruyter. Beck, Ulrich. 1997. Was ist Globalisierung? Irrtümer des Globalismus – Antworten auf Globalisierung. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. ———. 2006. The Cosmopolitan Vision. Trans. Ciaran Cronin. Cambridge: Polity. Birus, Hendrik. 2003. The Goethean Concept of World Literature and Comparative Literature. In Comparative Literature and Comparative Cultural Studies, ed. Steven Tötösy de Zepetnek, 11–22. West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press.

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Biti, Vladimir. 2016. Tracing Global Democracy: Literature, Theory, and the Politics of Trauma. Berlin and Boston: de Gruyter. Bloom, Harold. 1997. The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry. 2nd ed. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Buescu, Helena. 2012. The Republic of Letters and the World Republic of Letters. In The Routledge Companion to World Literature, ed. Theo D’haen, David Damrosch, and Djelal Kadir, 126–135. London: Routledge. Casanova, Pascale. 1999. La République mondiale des Lettres. Paris: Ed. du Seuil. Cohen, Deborah, and Maura O’Connor, eds. 2004a. Comparison and History: Europe in Cross-National Perspective. New York and London: Routledge. ———. 2004b. Introduction: Comparative History, Cross-National History, Transnational History  – Definitions. In Comparison and History: Europe in Cross-National Perspective, ed. Deborah Cohen and Maura O’Connor, ix–xxiv. New York in London: Routledge. Conrad, Sebastian. 2004. La constitution de l’histoire japonaise: Histoire comparée, transferts, interaction transnationales. In De la comparaison à l’histoire croisée, ed. Michael Werner and Bénédicte Zimmermann, 53–72. Paris: Seuil. Č op, Matija. 1833. Nuovo discacciamento di lettere inutili, Das ist: Slowenischer ABC-Krieg. Eine Beilage zum Illyr. Blatt. Laibach: Kleinmayr. ———. 1983. Pisma in spisi. Ed. Janko Kos and Trans. Janko Moder. Ljubljana: Mladinska knjiga. ———. 1986. Pisma Matija Č opa. Vol. 2, Eds. Anton Slodnjak and Janko Kos. Ljubljana: SAZU. D’haen, Theo. 2012. The Routledge Concise History of World Literature. London and New York: Routledge. Damrosch, David. 2003. What Is World Literature? Princeton: Princeton University Press. Ď urišin, Dionýz. 1984. Theory of Literary Comparatistics. Bratislava: Veda. Eckermann, Johann Peter. 1998. Conversations of Goethe with Johann Peter Eckermann. Trans. John Oxenford. Cambridge: Da Capo Press. Endres, Johannes, et  al. 2017. Friedrich Schlegel-Handbuch: Leben  – Werk  – Wirkung. Ed. Johanness Endres. Stuttgart: J. B. Metzler. Espagne, Michel. 2003. Transferanalyse statt Vergleich. Interkulturalität in der sächsischen Regionalgeschichte. In Vergleich und Transfer: Komparatistik in den Sozial-, Geschichts- und Kulturwissenschaften, ed. Hartmut Kaelble and Jürgen Schriewer, 419–438. Frankfurt and New York: Campus Verlag. Even-Zohar, Itamar. 1990. Polysystem Studies = Poetics Today 11 (1). Frassinelli, Pier Paolo, and David Watson. 2011. World Literature: A Receding Horizon. In Traversing Transnationalism: The Horizons of Literary and Cultural Studies, ed. Pier Paolo Frassinelli, Ronit Frenkel, and David Watson, 191–207. Amsterdam: Rodopi.

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Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. 1914. West-Eastern Divan in Twelve Books. Trans. Edward Dowden. London and Toronto: J.M. Dent. ———. 1917. Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship. Trans. Thomas Carlyle and Ed. William Allan Neilson. New York: P.F. Collier. ———. 1963. Schriften zur Kunst. Schriften zur Literatur. Maximen und Reflexionen. 5th ed. Eds. Herbert von Einem, Hans Joachim Schrimpf, and Werner Weber. Hamburg: Ch. Wegner (Goethes Werke: Hamburger Ausgabe; Bd. 12). ———. 1974. Goethes Werke in Zwölf Bänden. Vol. 11: Schriften zu Kunst und Literatur. Berlin in Weimar: Aufbau-Verlag. ———. 1999. Sämtliche Werke. Briefe, Tagebücher und Gespräche. Band 22: Ästhetische Schriften 1824–1832; Über Kunst und Altertum V–VI, ed. Anne Bohnenkamp. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Goßens, Peter. 2011. Weltliteratur: Modelle transnationaler Literaturwahrnehmung im 19. Jahrhundert. Stuttgart and Weimar: J. B. Metzler. Haupt, Heinz-Gerhard, and Jürgen Kocka. 2004. Comparative History: Methods, Aims, Problems. In Comparison and History: Europe in Cross-National Perspective, ed. Deborah Cohen and Maura O’Connor, 23–39. New York and London: Routledge. Hermannsthal, Franz Hermann von. 1835. Dem Andenken des […] Mathias Zhóp. Illyrisches Blatt 18 (June): 113. Hroch, Miroslav. 1993. From National Movement to the Fully-formed Nation. New Left Review 198: 3–20. Juvan, Marko. 1987. Poganjki literarnozgodovinske metode v Č opovi Literaturi Slovencev. Slavistična revija 35 (3): 277–290. ———. 2008. History and Poetics of Intertextuality. Trans. Timothy Pogačar. West Lafayette: Purdue University Press. ———. 2011. Literary Studies in Reconstruction: An Introduction to Literature. Frankfurt: Peter Lang. ———. 2017. Hibridni žanri: študije o križancih izkustva, mišljenja in literature. Ljubljana: Literarno-umetniško društvo Literatura. Kaelble, Hartmut, and Jürgen Schriewer, eds. 2003. Vergleich und Transfer: Komparatistik in den Sozial-, Geschicts- und Kulturwissenschaften. Frankfurt and New York: Campus Verlag. Kidrič, France. 1938. Prešéren: 1800–1838: življenje pesnika in pesmi. Ljubljana: Tiskovna zadruga. ———. 1978. Matija Č op [1925]. In Izbrani spisi, ed. France Kidrič, vol. 2, 147–164. Ljubljana: Slovenska akademija znanosti in umetnosti. Koch, Manfred. 2002. Weimaraner Weltbewohner: Zur Genese von Goethes Begriff ‘Weltliteratur’. Tübingen: Niemeyer. Kos, Janko. 1970. Prešeren in evropska romantika. Ljubljana: Državna založba Slovenije. ———. 1979. Matija Č op. Ljubljana: Partizanska knjiga.

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CHAPTER 6

A Compromise “World Text”

The point of departure of the present chapter is a nexus of two concepts of Franco Moretti’s theory: the notion of the modern epic as a “sacred/ world text” belonging to cultural tradition (Moretti 1996), and the notion of “compromise” as the form and content of interliterary contact between the center and the periphery (Moretti 2013: 50–61, 116–117). As understood by Moretti, the modern epic is an essential agent of the fracture between unified, class homogeneous “classical writing” and pluralist “modern writing” marked by class conflict, as identified by Barthes in French literature as early as in the bourgeois nineteenth century in the light of the development of the institution of Literature (Barthes 2009: 17, 58–60). Just when Literature had firmly established itself within the framework of classical writing, it immediately began to fall apart, as authors turned to modern writing under the influence of the bourgeois ideologeme of pluralism and free choice. In the absence of a common socio-­ cultural framework, the styles of the mid-nineteenth century became equal, comparable and interchangeable, which led authors to a frustrating engagement with the problematic nature of language as a literary medium (Barthes 2009: 60–61). In contrast to the natural individuality of personal style and the spontaneous reality of the language system, Barthes conceives of writing as a social framework for the discourse consciously or unconsciously chosen by the writer. Writing is, therefore, a mode of “the relationship between creation and society,” “the morality of form, the choice of that social area © The Author(s) 2019 M. Juvan, Worlding a Peripheral Literature, Canon and World Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-32-9405-9_6

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within which the writer elects to situate the Nature of his language” (Barthes 2009: 14–15). The transition from classical to modern writing is also manifest in the correlation between the genre system and the political processes participating in the construction of a nation in pre-bourgeois and bourgeois societies. While (semi-)peripheral European literatures, including that of Germany, seek to form the sense of national belonging with the aid of the epic as a privileged form of classical writing, the central and well-established national literary ecologies, such as English literature, demonstrate their identity with the novel as a popular form of modern writing distributed via the print media of bourgeois society (Moretti 1996: 50; Anderson 1991: 24–25). The novel, which according to Anderson and Moretti is a decisive ideological factor in the nation-building process, played its part more tacitly and in the background compared to the epic, which was declared a nation-­ founding genre and supposed to have a lasting effect on readership. The novel influenced the imaginary social ties between individuals immersed in their privacy with spheres of action that marked the living space of a nation (see Moretti 1999). The nation-building impact of the novel resulted from a language that sought to mimetically internalize the reality of contemporary heteroglossia and from the verisimilitude of narratives about heroes with whom readers could identify, seeing themselves as the heroes’ compatriots. As Moretti explains, the prosaic regularity of everyday life of the “serious century” was presented by the novel to its bourgeois readership through subdued rhetoric of the effects of the real (Moretti 2006). The subterranean ideological agency of the novel, which, with its very “prosaics” (Morson and Emerson 1990), turned the idea of society—based on a common language, traditions, habits, and space—into something natural, quotidian, and real, represents a modern alternative to the traditionally aristocratic and poetic monumentality of the epic. Thus, when treating the arts that symbolically unite and represent national communities (e.g., monumental architecture, sculpture, patriotic music, or historical painting), Hegel, who may be considered the metaphysicist of the German cultural nationalism, provides a particularly extensive treatment of epic poetry in his 1835–1838 Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik (Lectures on Aesthetics; Hegel 1975: 1044–1063, passim), specifically mentioning “the national epic” (ein nationales Epos) (1057). In “epic proper,” Hegel sees the sacred book of a nation, its foundation and the expression of its history, spirit, and culture: “… the content and form of epic proper is the entire world-outlook and objective manifestation of a national spirit presented in

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its self-objectifying shape as an actual event” (1044). The monumental, heroic, and poetic form of the epic encompasses the totality of an individual nation (its beliefs, character, habits, or space) in an encyclopedic fashion. At the same time, through the narrative on war and paradigmatic heroes, the epic particularizes both the suprahistorical generality and each specific historical case of national essence. Contrariwise, the novel is, to Hegel, merely a modern, degraded form of representing such a totality. As a philosopher of the rising literary semi-­periphery, Hegel declares the novel to be “the modern bourgeois epic” (moderne bürgerliche Epopöe). It still possesses “the wide background of a whole world” (der breite Hintergrund einer totalen Welt) while lacking “the original poetic situation of the world” (der ursprünglich poetische Weltzustand), because it presupposes “a world already prosaically ordered” (setzt eine bereits zur Prosa geordnete Wirklichkeit voraus) (Hegel 1975: 1092; the translation adapted according to Hegel 2015). If Hegel’s formulation of the novel as a “bourgeois epic” is viewed from the perspective of Barthes’s conception of writing, the change of the mode of positioning literary form along the relation between its production and consumption becomes evident: by submitting to modern writing, the novelist places his or her language in the heteroglossia of post-feudal bourgeois society, its demystified rationality, seriousness, and private routines. If the epic so enchanted Hegel, the enthusiasm for the epic in many other (semi-)peripheral national ecologies, especially Central and SouthEastern Europe, should not come as a surprise. The national movements of the region strove for greater cultural and political autonomy within imperial monarchies, which is why, in accordance with Hegel’s lordship and bondage dialectic (Hegel 1977: 111–119), they showed the need for a national awareness formed—in conditions of dependence on the ruling Other—through the monumental narrative of the nation. This kind of heroic historical narrative was conceived of by national movements as an imagined counterweight to the actual political power of the Master. Epic mania erupted in the late eighteenth century, in the atmosphere of European cultural nationalism, and did not subside in the following century. As I have explained in detail elsewhere, the epic of Antiquity and the Middle Ages—both the artistic and the folklore epic—became the object of devout historical-philological studies and a model for a series of imitations and mystifications, while critics and aestheticians saw in the epic an authentic expression of the “national spirit,” its confirmation and original foundation (Juvan 2002a). The extensive historical retrospectives in

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Hegel’s aesthetics symptomatically show that the modern nationalist conception of the epic looked to the distant past for models, to a time when different ideological forms of collective allegiances, such as kinship-tribal, state, dynastic, and regional allegiance were in place. In Antiquity, the epic evolved from the need for a canonical consolidation of collective ties via mythological-historical narrative. Although the nineteenth-century “national epic” modeled itself on its precursors from Antiquity and the Early Modern Age (Homer’s Iliad, Virgil’s Aeneid, Camões’s Lusitanians, Ronsard’s Franciade), its ideological and poetological structure was determined by contemporary historicism, nationalism, and fractures between classical and modern writing. The national epic, the heir to aristocratic culture, indirectly interpreted the contemporary state of the imagined community it was addressing and legitimized the aspirations of the nationalist bourgeoisie and intellectuals. Thus, in addition to textual editions and rewriting of Medieval narrative cycles and heroic epics, many original historical epics, dramatic poems, and narrative poems were written that thematized major battles and religious, racial, or ethnic conflicts, such as Ernst Schulze’s Caecilie, which deals with the topic of the Christian victory over the pagan Danes, Jan Holly’s epic Svatopluk, Milošijada by Jovan Popović, Konrad Wallenrod and Dziady (Forefathers’ Eve) by Adam Mickiewicz, Petar P. Njegoš’s The Mountain Wreath, Alexander Pushkin’s Poltava, Mikhail Lermontov’s The Last Son of Freedom, and France Prešeren’s The Baptism on the Savica (Juvan 2002a: xxix–xxx). In his Theory of the Novel, Lukács (1971) established a series of dichotomies between the epic and the novel (totality vs. fragment, transcendence vs. immanence, closed vs. process form, homogeneity vs. heterogeneity). Similarly, the novel was defined as the antithesis of the epic by Bakhtin through the oppositions such as completed vs. developing genre, high and canonized literature vs. low and non-canonized literature, monologism vs. dialogism, absolute past vs. open-ended present, poetic language vs. heteroglossia (see Bakhtin 1981). Lukács’s and Bakhtin’s binary oppositions, along with the other distinctions between the genres (verse vs. prose, collective vs. individual, oral vs. written, public vs. private), owe a great deal to Hegel. Massimo Fusillo concludes that, based on such differences, the epic can be understood as “a spontaneous and auroral genre” and the novel as “the preeminent secondary genre” (Fusillo 2006: 34). Regardless of this antithesis, Moretti argues that both genres played an equivalent

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discursive role in the ideology of nation-building: they organized the national space centripetally (Moretti 1996: 56). Moretti treats Goethe’s Faust as the first genuinely modern example of the epic. This dramatic poem resembles the classical epic in its very scope as well as in its poetic tendency to substantiate in verse the existence and significance of the community in which it came into being. Much like the classical epic, it seeks to allegorically grasp the totality of the existence of the world, while occupying a position no less central than that of the classical epic in the canon. The modern epic has the status of a sacred text of a given culture, which is why—with the assistance of the school apparatus—it has been continually republished, interpreted, adapted, and referred to (Moretti 1996: 1–88). According to Moretti, the modern epic is an attempt of the bourgeois epoch to demonstrate that it is on a par with the foundations of Western civilization (classical Antiquity and feudal Christianity) by means of an original and prestigious adaptation of the binding legacy of the magnificent epic form (Moretti 1996: 36). Compared to a multitude of novels, modern epics are exceptional, even indigestible for the average reader, yet they function as masterpieces (ibid.: 6, 38–39). Faust by the cosmopolite Goethe, a known adversary of Romantic nationalists, is interpreted by Moretti as a “world text”: rather than subordinating itself to the construction of national identity, it allegorizes the dominant position of the West in the world-system. In opposition to the novel, which represents the heterogeneity of contemporary society by internalizing its heteroglossia, Goethe’s modern epic depicts the heterogeneity of the global space as synchrony of historical periods (ibid.: 41–59). In the following paragraphs, I will seek to demonstrate that, in addition to the monumental form of the cosmopolitan and allegorical encyclopedic material transpiring in Faust, the modern epic—at the turning point between classical and modern writing—developed many other varieties, including some that were much shorter and more emphatically integrated into nation-building processes. Just as Moretti permitted himself to generalize the supposed essence of the modern epic from a handful of canonized Western texts, I shall venture to point out the vast field of variants of the modern epic, this hybrid between the classical epic and the modern novel, by analyzing one of the key texts from among dependent national ecologies of literature. Krst pri Savici (The Baptism on the Savica, 1836), a verse tale by France Prešeren, was printed thirty years before the first Slovenian novel, Deseti brat (The Tenth Brother) by Josip Jurčič (1844–1881). In the historical

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genre adopting terza rima and stanzas, Prešeren, the poet, outlines the downfall of an epic hero who has to exchange the destroyed proto-national community of the Slavonic people of Carinthia and Carniola for the supranational community of victorious Christianity. On the other hand, in a prose representation of his time, Jurčič, the writer and journalist, depicts the rise of an unexceptional individual who manages to integrate himself into the ruling class of the proto-bourgeois society in the Slovenian territories. Set in the Slovenian-populated global periphery, both the poetic descent of an epic hero into universal Christianity and the prosaic ascent of a modern individual into universal capitalism unfold along the trajectory of a love story that ends, in the first case, with renouncement and separation, and, in the second, with the institution of marriage. The Baptism on the Savica, the first printed longer epic versification in Slovenian, establishes a relationship with the national epic genre conditioned by the cleft between classical and modern writing. Prešeren anchors his poetic fiction referentially in the sources of Carniolan historiography of the Baroque and Enlightenment—Janez V. Valvasor’s Die Ehre des Hertzogthums Crain (The Glory of the Duchy of Carniola) of 1689 and Anton T. Linhart’s Versuch einer Geschichte von Krain und den übrigen Ländern der südlichen Slaven Oesterreiches (An Essay on the History of Carniola and Other Austrian South Slavs) of 1789–1791. Prešeren’s poetic narrative interprets the epochal events in world history that are worthy of a national epic, namely the universal process of the Christianization of the European pagan peoples, which, according to the Salzburg Conversio Bagoariorum et Carantanorum, included the Alpine Slavonic population of the principality of Carantania and Carniola. The epic theme of Prešeren’s poem is the eighth-century rebellion of the pagan Carantanians and Carniolans against the bearers of the new Christian civilization—missionaries of the Salzburg and Aquilean Dioceses, as well as the military forces of the Bavarian nobility and the converted Slavonic peoples—and their final defeat in which the Alpine Slavs lost their cultural, religious, and state autonomy. Hence, The Baptism on the Savica, paradoxically, figures as a narrative of the origin of the catastrophic hiatus in which Slovenians as a collective subject vanished from the historical scene. However, it is precisely this invention of the continuity of the Slovenian ethnic group, its language, culture, and space as bases for a national history that was to the taste of the nineteenth century. This function is consistent with that of the national epic since Virgil’s Aeneid via Camões’s Lusitanians to the Romantic

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poems of Adam Mickiewicz, Alexander S. Pushkin, and Petar P. Njegoš. It appears that the role of the national epic is fulfilled by at least some features of The Baptism on the Savica, such as its formal-stylistic classicalness, the aetiological character of the historical narrative, and the representation of personal fate on the backdrop of world history, such as the Schlegel brothers expected from Nationalgedicht or Heldengedicht (Paternu 1977: 95–101). As explained in Chap. 5, Matija Č op and Prešeren were aware of the dawning of the world literary ecology in which the (semi-)peripheral newcomers joined the core of the most cherished European traditions. In this context, The Baptism on the Savica, dedicated to the deceased Č op, entered the European genre system that found itself in the transition from classical to modern writing, abandoning hierarchies inherited from the Antiquity and giving writers the possibility to freely choose the form and the topic from a range of places and historical periods. Prešeren, too, followed the Schlegels, Schiller, Germaine de Staël, and other protagonists of the Romantic aesthetic, who historically typologically counterposed their modernity to the classics (see Furst 1976: 7–10; Rajan 1980: 260). Prešeren chose forms and topics originating in the epic tradition from Antiquity to the Renaissance. He adapted them freely to his Romantic message, which associates an elegiac personal confession with the narrative of a defeated but historically resilient Slavonic nation, and which is written in a minor literary language of a province that sought to establish its cultural autonomy within the predominantly German Habsburg Empire. Intertextually, The Baptism on the Savica evokes classical epics and their topoi. It refers to Homer, Virgil, Dante, and Tasso with meaningfully selected strophic forms (terza rima and stanzas), Homeric comparisons, borrowed epic motives (laying siege, the rousing address before a hopeless battle with a stronger enemy, fratricidal massacre, the figure of a religiously haloed virgin), and, most importantly, with the theme of the historical demise of a civilization and the birth of another (Kos 1970: 39–52, 112–118, 139–140, 167, 183–209, 1991: 143–160). Drawing on earlier Prešeren studies, classical philologist Marko Marinčič lucidly interprets The Baptism on the Savica in terms of a palimpsest of Latin classics. Through an allegiance with the classical symbolic power of the Latin world, the poet attempted to rid himself of the contemporary imperial power of German culture and establish himself as a Slovenian and Slavonic canonical author (Marinčič 2011: 17–37). According to Marinčič, with The Baptism on the Savica Prešeren programmatically created the Slovenian Aeneid, that is, an

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epic that narrates the founding, aetiological myth of a nation-state. However, through the figure of the defeated Č rtomir—the Slavonic double of the “pious” Aeneas and his spiritual self-portrait—Prešeren steered Virgil’s patriotic model in the direction of the “antiphrastic epic” (Marinčič 2011: 47) and the Roman (Ovid’s) elegy, that is, the genre of the “conceptual periphery of Augustan classics” (36), which, rather than a patriotic position, expresses the poet’s lamentations on loss, exile, and renunciation (ibid.: 45–88). On the one hand, then, it is a classical work, but as a Romantic deconstruction of monumentality, as a hybrid between the epic and the lyrical. On the other hand, with the work’s subtitle “povest v verzih” (verse tale) and text structure, Prešeren clearly belongs to the modern current of versified epic originating in Byron’s “metrical tales,” creating, at the point of the transition from the epic period to the novel era, a syncretic blend of genres (see Kos 1970: 190–209; Paternu 1977: 95–99, 145–152). Prešeren hybridizes a condensed epic story with elegiac lyricization. The introductory sonnet dedicated to Č op indicates this crossbreeding through the identification of the poet (the speaking persona) with protagonists of the epic narrative in the following: Vam izročim, prijatlja dragi mani! ki spi v prezgodnjem gróbi, pesem milo; ločitvi od njegà mi je hladílo, bila je lek ljubezni stari rani.

I give to you, blest spirit of a friend Who sleeps too soon interred, this poem dear; When I was chilled by separation drear, My ancient wounded love it served to mend.

Minljivost sladkih zvez na svet’ oznani, kak kratko je veselih dni število, de srečen je le tá, kdor z Bogomilo up sreče únstran groba v prsih hrani.

Tell all the world sweet ties soon meet their end, How few our days of happiness appear, That he, like Bogomila, may find cheer But only if his hopes the grave transcend.

Pokopal misli visokoletéče, željá nespolnjenih sem bolečine, ko Č rtomír ves up na zemlji sreče;

My highest-flying thoughts have I inhumed, With all the pain of wishes unfulfilled, Like Č rtomir’s, all hopes in earth entombed;

dan jasni, dan oblačni v noči mine, srcé veselo, in bolnó, trpeče vpokój’le bodo groba globočine. (Prešeren 1965: 172)

Days bright and dull are both to night distilled, And hearts to suffer joy and sadness doomed Will all in deepest grave at last be stilled. (Prešeren 1999: 111; translated by Henry Cooper and Tom Priestly)

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The sonnet characterizes the entire verse tale as an elegy. “Pesem mila” (“poem dear” or mila pesem) was at that period the Slovenian expression for elegy. Moreover, the introductory lyrical poem interprets the epic story of Č rtomir and Bogomila who renounce their love self-reflectively as an autobiographical allegory of the resignation of the poet himself (Juvan 1990: 103–110). In Prešeren’s verse tale, the epic fragment narrated concisely in just twenty-six Dantesque terza rimas of the Introduction1 approaches the genre of drama in the central part of the text entitled the Baptism after the metrical switch to Tasso’s or Byron’s strophic form; in line with Prešeren’s architectonics, there are fifty-three stanzas. Ottava rima of the second, longer part of the poem mixes telling and showing narration and dialogues. Moreover, the main part of the poem resembles the prose structure of the novel, since the hero withdraws from the sphere of the public into his private intimacy, while the narrative of love, the baptism, and separation of Č rtomir and Bogomila proves to be non-linear, progressing via ambivalent focalizations, digressions, inserted stories, and metafiction.2 More restrainedly than in Byronic poems (Žirmunski 1978: 43–47, passim), the poet’s first-person voice of Prešeren’s verse tale nevertheless keeps interfering into the narrative about the Middle Ages. Narration thus 1  Starting with the panoramic historical outline of the eighth-century religious combats among the Alpine Slavs in Carinthia and Carniola, the narrative zooms on the besieged Carniolan fortress Ajdovski gradec in the vicinity of the Lake Bohinj where the leader Č rtomir, the protagonist, resists to the superior Christian army with a small troop of those faithful to the original Slavic religion. In a series of metafictional turns, the narrator reminds his nineteenth-century addressee about the present-day relics of Č rtomir’s fortress and alludes to contemporary tensions within the Slovenian nation as well as the Slovenian relation to the German-speaking rulers and the Slavic world. Historically ornate by epic topoi (Homeric simile, the motives of siege and fratricidal battle in a storm, the patriotic address of the commander to his soldiers), the Introduction concludes with the total defeat of the pagan army, with Č rtomir as the only survivor. 2  Defeated and alone, his country having been destroyed and subjugated, Č rtomir loses the sense of being and finds himself on the verge of suicide at the bank of the Lake Bohinj. A spontaneous memory of his beloved Bogomila, the former pagan priestess on the Isle of Bled, and images of their pre-war romance, however, avert Č rtomir from the act of selfdestruction and give him some hope of restoring his private happiness. When he finally meets Bogomila again, it turns out that in the meantime she, too, has converted to Christianity and taken vows out of her care for Č rtomir. In resignation, Č rtomir who has to renounce his erotic love to Bogomila and sublimate his desire tacitly accepts to be baptized at the Savica waterfall. He forever separates from Bogomila and becomes a Christian missionary stationed in Aquilea.

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occasionally morphs into subjective confession, comparing the poet’s autobiography with Č rtomir’s story. The first-person narrator also addresses his readership and incorporates his historical narrative into his contemporaneous nationscape (the Slovenian “Lake District” in the vicinity of Prešeren’s birthplace) along with topical allusions to the political reality of the pre-March period. The following stanzas from the beginning of Baptism exemplify the devices of the kind: Mož in oblakov vojsko je obojno končala temna noč, kar svètla zarja zlatí z rumen’mi žarki glavo trojno snežnikov kranjskih siv’ga poglavarja, Bohinjsko jezero stoji pokojno, sledu ni več vunanjega viharja; al somov vojska pod vodó ne mine, in drugih roparjov v dnu globočine.

The matching violence of man and cloud By darkling night are ended now, and bright Sunrise now gilds the threefold peaks unbowed Of Carniola’s grey and snowbound height. All tranquil lie Lake Bohinj’s waters proud, Of battle now no trace remains in sight. But armies of fierce pike beneath the waves Fight other denizens of th’ watery caves.

Al jezero, ki na njegà pokrajni stojiš, ni, Č rtomír! podoba tvoja? – To noč je jenjal vojske šum vunajni, potihnil ti vihar ni v prsih boja; le hujši se je zbudil čr v nekdajni, ak prav uči me v revah skušnja moja, bolj grize, bolj po novi krvi vpije, požrešniši obupa so harpíje.

Does not, O Č rtomir, this selfsame lake Resemble you, as on its shore you stand? War’s outward noise was calmed before daybreak, But by the storm within you are unmanned. That ancient worm, much worse now, is awake – As I the trials of life well understand – It cries for still more blood from out its lair, Yet hungrier are the harpies of despair.

Na tleh ležé slovenstva stèbri stari, v domačih šegah vtrjene postave; v deželi parski Têsel gospodari, ječé pod težkim jarmam sini Slave, le tujcam sreče svit se v Kranji žari, ošabno nós’jo tí pokonci gláve. Al, de te jenja ta skeleti rana, ne boš posnel Katóna Utikána!

Old pillars of Sloveniandom are cast down, And all our laws on ancient habit based; All bow before Bavarian Tesel’s crown, The sons of Slavdom ‘neath his yoke are placed, And haughtily the aliens strut and frown Within our homeland, by bright fortune graced. But yet, to stop the pain of this downfall, You shall not—as did Cato—end it all!

Prenesla pričujoče ure teže bi ne bila let poznih glava siva; v mladosti vènder trdniši so mreže, ki v njih drži nas upa moč goljfiva; kar, Č rtomír! te na življenje veže, se mi iz tvojih prejšnjih dni odkriva, ko te vodila ni le stara vera tje na osredek Bléškega jezéra.

A greying head, one of advancing years, Could not endure the present hours of pain; For youth the net much firmer yet adheres Wherein false pow’r of hope can us enchain. What binds you to this life, O Č rtomir, From your past years I clearly ascertain: Not that old faith alone did bring you straight Here to the very middle of Lake Bled!

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Tje na otòk z valovami obdani, v današnjih dnevih božjo pot Marije; v dnu zad stojé snežnikov velikani, poljá, ki spred se sprósti, lepotije ti kaže Bléški grad na levi strani, na desni griček se za gričam skrije. Dežela kranjska nima lepš’ga kraja, ko je z okolšno ta, podoba raja. (Prešeren 1965: 179–180; emphases added)

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Here to this isle with lake encircling round Which nowadays is Mary’s holy shrine: Against the sky stand tow’ring peaks snowbound, Before them spread the fields; the fair outline Of Castle Bled perfects the left foreground, While rolling hills the right hand side define. No, Carniola has no prettier scene Than this, resembling paradise serene. (Prešeren 1999: 199, 121; translated by Henry Cooper and Tom Priestly; emphases added)

The straightforward epic structure is additionally jeopardized by narrative evaluation of the central character and action, which is ambivalent, intentionally inconsistent, and packed with contradictions, ambiguities, the unspoken, and the indefinite.3 This uncertainty undermines every possibility of a homogenous collective identification with the hero, who, problematic as it seems, is far from the exemplary character of the national epic. Furthermore, the potentially grand epic story about national and European history is narrated litotically in a mere 509 verses. It is interrupted at the point of defeat, which, unlike in the Aeneid, is not followed by a promise of the transference (translatio) of failed statehood to another location or a later time. Following the Introduction to the poem, the epic discourse of the Baptism proper alters into a novelistic love narrative that, in terms of genre, resembles Goethe’s idyllic pastoral in verse Hermann and Dorothea, which, together with Mickiewicz’s Pan Tadeusz, Č op considered as “the true epic of our time” (eine wahre Epopöe unserer Zeit; Č op 1986: 284). Unlike some would-be national epics (Č op 1986: 145), Č op appreciated both works for their representation of everyday life against “a world-­ historical background that elevates the action” (einen welthistorischen die Handlung hebenden Hintergrund; ibid.: 284). 3  For instance, the narrator uses oscillating designations of Č rtomir (he is the youngest among the heroes that defend their country and yet “bears the guilt for all this slaying”) whereas motives with a key causal function in the narrative remain untold or ambiguous. The following stanza featuring Bogomila’s radiant appearance below the waterfall and its impact on Č rtomir may be interpreted according to Christian symbolism of rainbow or as a phenomenon of natural beauty: “Now out between the clouds appears sunlight, / Whose rays the pureness of their beauty shed; / On Bogomila pale a rainbow bright, / A heav’nly glow o’er her dear face is spread. / He cannot hide his tears which dim his sight; / He thinks the heav’ns have opened overhead, / And that he stands no more in this world’s realm, / So does this vision him quite overwhelm” (Prešeren 1999: 143).

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Č rtomir, a variant of the torn Romantic characters from Byronic poems, loses the attributes of the classical epic subject in a series of consecutive defeats. Following the defeat of his rebel army in the beleaguered Ajdovski Gradec, he fails as a protagonist of the action and a sovereign of his people; when, due to his wish for establishing a peaceful private life with the beloved Bogomila, once the priestess of Slavonic goddess of love, he abandons thoughts of suicide, he also loses the features of a hero of stoicism. While yielding definitively to the baptism in accordance with the values of the Christianized Bogomila, and by bidding farewell to her, Č rtomir is extinguished as the subject of desire, only to disappear entirely from the text, in the end, as the subject of speech. In the closing stanzas of the poem, Č rtomir is merely silent, with the psycho-narration ceasing to disclose his desires, emotions, and thoughts. Č rtomir lives to see the end of The Baptism on the Savica as a hollow subject (Juvan 2002b: 356–358) and resigns hypnotically to the overwhelming power of the Other—the symbolic order of Christianity emanating from the irradiated figure of the virgin Bogomila. Č rtomir thus sublimates the erotic form of love (éros) into Christian agápe. In his 1987 book on the language, ideology, and Slovenians, Slavoj Žižek devotes a chapter to the two key texts that epitomize what is usually termed “the national identity of Slovenians”—Ivan Cankar’s 1910 drama Hlapci (Serfs) and Prešeren’s Baptism on the Savica. According to Žižek’s analysis, at the heart of the symbolic economy defining “the national identity” of Slovenians is an unresolved relation to the universality of the Law (in the images of Christianity, statehood, modern science or technology, etc.), that is, characteristic of “the national identity” of Slovenians is that it avoids “being truly seized” by the universality of the Law, keeping instead the attitude of an “external mimicking” in relation to the Law, which “does not really take” the subject, does not “performatively catch” the subject. Or, to use Lacan’s terms, in the relation of the “Slovenian” to the ideological discourse, the symbolic network constitutive of his “national identity,” there lacks a “quilting point.” (Žižek 1987: 34)

In Žižek’s view, The Baptism is “focused on the problem of renunciation forced by facing a Christian-state ‘culture’” (ibid.: 36). Even though Č rtomir “loses everything ‘in this world’” (that is, “the freedom of his tribe and the possibility of personal happiness”) and becomes “a harbinger

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of Christianity, herby identifying precisely with the origin of his total defeat,” he does not succumb to any “‘internal conversion’, any change of perspective, change of the subject position” (Žižek 1987: 36–37). Žižek concludes that Prešeren makes visible in a pure, existentially radically critical form … a fundamental feature of the symbolic economy of the Slovenian “national identity,” that is a non-interiorization of the universal Law, the wavering of the subject between the universal Law and the particular “native country”; in other words, the external subjugation to the Law notwithstanding, the subject’s locus of enunciation remains liable to the particularity of the “native country” … In Prešeren, the conflict between the pagan native country with the universal, “foreign” Christianity leads to the defeat of the native country, whereby Christianity is accepted only externally, through a total resignation that does not amount to redemption … (Žižek 1987: 38)

Žižek’s analysis of Prešeren’s narrative relies on the psychoanalytic understanding that “the Name of God functions as instance of the universal Law that disengages us from being closed within the incestuous relation to the Mather-Native Country” (ibid.: 38), what has a bearing on the problem of peripheral worlding that is at the heart of this book. In the world-­ system terms, Žižek’s analysis needs to be turned upside down. Prešeren, as the enunciating subject of the narrative about Č rtomir, the prototype of the Slovenian “national identity,” did interiorize the universal Law—that is, the universality of world literature—through the act of the (intertextual and self-reflective) narration of his modern epic, the world text. However, he did this by way of Moretti’s compromise, which, in turn, only empowered Prešeren’s author function within the national literary ecology and its canon, without being recognized by the Third, that is, the very socio-­ economic and symbolic structure of the literary world-system. The Baptism on the Savica is, after all, a national epic, but construed with an intentional flaw. This is why it had strengthened its position in the literary canon by the end of the nineteenth century—together with its author, the “national poet” Prešeren—not as a quilting point (point de capiton), but as a point of ideological-aesthetic dissensus. The dissensus produced by critical and ambivalent voices is no less a factor of conflictual social cohesion than the consensus imposed by the ideological state apparatus; Prešeren always used to act through both consensual and the dissensual channels. Thus, as early as in the second half of the nineteenth

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century, the heroic Introduction to the poem became part of the set curriculum of Slovenian schools, the leading ideological apparatus of the emerging bourgeois society. On the other hand, this “antiphrastic epic” dealing with problematic subject matter and clad in the aesthetic-­formal perfection by the standards of world literature has throughout produced opposing interpretations, intertextual references, and derivations, as well as selectively reduced uses in public discourse filtered by individual interests. Since the 1860s, Slovenian newspapers, divided into Catholic-­ conservative and liberal-progressive camps, have appropriated proper names (the title, heroes’ names, settings) from Prešeren’s text, through which they arrogated sentences, motives, persons, and topics as well. Critical, journalistic, and literary metatexts have, according to the logic of antonomasia, turned these names into appellatives for general or recurring characteristics of the community—for understanding Slovenian history in the Biblical key of “a thousand years of servitude,” for the world views of political parties and the constants of the “Slovenian national character.” Through this recurrent use of antonomasia, politicians, essay writers, journalists, and literary writers have transformed The Baptism on the Savica into a repository of interpretants, which have served to articulate modern problems and reflect on the nation in a historical perspective (Juvan 1990). Č rtomir’s transformation from a youthful heroic fighter for his pagan fathers’ faith and the freedom of his people into a calm Christian missionary reconciled with his fate, who sets out to spread the new religion amongst his fellow countrymen and beyond their borders, gave rise to controversial responses on the part of interpreters of the text, as well as literary and theater writers. Some saw this as an artistic deficiency of the poem, while others identified a praiseworthy conversion of Prešeren, the freigest, to a devout Catholic, along with an apologue of Christianity. Some saw it as a depraved betrayal of the freedom-loving struggle for the national cause and a manifestation of the servile nature of the Slovenian people, while others perceived it as a modern and inevitable compromise with an overpowering force, enabling the poet and the nation to survive, albeit beyond Romantic heroism. To sum up: in Slovenian culture, Prešeren’s narrative, which thematizes the involuntary compromise of an epic hero and his renouncement of the fight for the national cause, was paradoxically canonized as a sacred text that defines “Slovenianness” and as such gives rise to ever new critical, literary, and artistic reinterpretations. The status of Baptism is in contrast to Jurčič’s

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The Tenth Brother (1866), the first Slovenian novel, which, through the school curriculum, numerous printed editions, and dramatizations, achieved much more widespread popularity among readers, thus becoming standard reading for young readers. However, in Slovenian comparative studies— outwardly more cosmopolitan than their counterpart, national literary history—this work was marked as a failed, belated, and aesthetically inferior adoption of a genre whose prototype originated in the major, more developed English literature (see Habjan 2018). According to Moretti’s formula (Moretti 2013: 50–61, 116–117), Jurčič’s novel comes across as an (unhappy) compromise between a foreign genre form imported from the center and the local Slovenian subject matter and perspective. Some years ago, while analyzing Jurčič’s relation to Walter Scott, I myself succumbed to a typical peripheral (and postcolonial) defensive reaction to the imperial harshness of Moretti’s systemic formula. I pointed out that, in the first paragraph of the first Slovenian novel, Jurčič himself revealed to his Slovenian readers, by way of metafictional self-­commentary, his inferior, belated, and socially weaker implementation of Scott’s genre model. The narrator seeks to level out, with a tinge of irony, the inequities between the originality of the writer of European stature (representing the leading, developed culture) and his unknown Slovenian imitator representative of a peripheral culture. This is Jurčič’s incipit: As the renowned novelist Walter Scott already notes, narrators have an old right to begin their stories at an inn—that is, at the meeting place of all traveling people, where various characters are directly and openly disclosed to one another and the proverb In vino veritas is confirmed. We too have exerted this right because we believe that our Slovenian inns and innkeepers are no less original than the old English ones described by Scott, although they are much simpler in the countryside. (Jurčič 1965: 141; emphases added)

Jurčič’s sophisticated exordial rhetoric led me to believe that Moretti’s formula does in fact adequately describe the actual production-­reception relations in the world literary system, which reproduce the dependence of the periphery on the shifting centers of economic, political, and cultural domination. It is, nevertheless, too unrefined at the level of intertextual analysis, considering that talented authors from the periphery know that they are in no way poorer in terms of artistic power compared to the privileged leading figures and that they know how to convey this to their readers (Juvan 2011: 82–84). The recent intervention by Jernej

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Habjan (2018) frames Jurčič’s metafictional irony and my thesis about it in a Mannoni formula of negation (I know well that I’m no Walter Scott, but all the same I believe I am). He reminds us, however, that a fetishist negation of one’s peripheral position—such as that at the level of the intertextually imaginary—cannot replace the sociological and class analysis of this position at the level of the world-system. Only acceptance of the non-exceptional nature of the fact of one’s dependence and belatedness enables a criticism of global asymmetries that is unlikely to end in the discourse of guilt and inferiority, or the discourse of deprivation and imaginary equality. In our case, it becomes evident from this perspective that drawing exclusive parallels between The Tenth Brother and Walter Scott and other contemporary novels consecrated internationally by European metropolises (top-quality French, English, and Russian works) leads to erroneous theses of literary history. Slovenian comparative literature has predominantly focused on the relations of the first Slovenian novel with the novels of European centers while neglecting parallels with the works of the same genre from other (semi-)peripheries and with the popular production of the German-speaking world that also reached the Slovenian regions. It thus postulated the impossibility of the Slovenian novel: as an optimistically ideological text of the Slovenian national movement, The Tenth Brother by Jurčič supposedly concealed the ontological difference that is revealed upon the downfall of the main hero in great realistic novels, and therefore does not yet represent “the essence” of the novel. When, at the turn of the century, this essence is finally achieved in the Slovenian novel with Ivan Cankar (1876–1918), the traditional European novel is already in the process of self-abolition, making way for the modern novel (Pirjevec 1972, 1997). In other words, the embeddedness of the genre of the novel in the political agenda of the Slovenian national movement, which had not yet fully developed an autonomous, accomplished, and class-differentiated society, presumably prevented the fully fledged aesthetic articulation of Lukács’s “transcendental homelessness” (Lukács 1971: 41) or Bakhtin’s “dialogism” (Bakhtin 1981: 279 ff), both of which were crucial for the canonical European novels of the nineteenth century. Here lies the answer to the question as to why, in the nineteenth century, the Slovenian nation was partly constituting itself on the “sacred text” of a compromise but singular epic, rather than merely on the mass printing of compromise novels (as would follow from Anderson’s thesis). The peripheral situation of a society acting as the emerging community of

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a nation, which, due to its weak bourgeoisie, had not yet developed a sociolectal differentiation sufficient for the establishment of the novel as a protagonist of modern writing, offered as a better option the revision of classical writing and the epic. Classical writing privileged poetic (verse-­ regulated) genres, while in the modern revision of the watershed Romantic period poeticalness was defined by the subjectivist conceptions of the aesthetic and the individual rather than by traditional classicist formal and stylistic attributes. Prešeren’s The Baptism on the Savica is a distinguished literary work that, in a peripheral, nascent literary space, through the treatment of a “local” historical theme, internalized and established the universalism of European Romanticism, including its historicism and global horizon, in the domestic scene. Prešeren developed his poetic language in Slovenian, a language saturated with the voices, stories, images, and forms of world literature. He gathered these from the European literary canon from Antiquity to modernity, allowing a single unique voice articulate through a language that internalizes the polyphony of historical periods, languages, and cultural spaces. This is the voice of an individual’s modern experience, which, paradoxically, presents itself as both the singular and the generic at the same time. It was Prešeren’s unique poetic individuality itself, which was repeatedly perceived as the general model, that became established as a voice that—to paraphrase Althusser (1971: 170–186)— interpellates other individuals, its addressees, to become the subjects of Slovenianness as a collective individual in the world arena. The lyrical variety of the Slovenian language that was to gain permanent access to the world canon was conceived by Č op and Prešeren as a strategy to compensate for the objective deficiencies of the community, addressed and ideologically co-created by Slovenian literature with the symbolic capital of its aesthetic universality and expressive individuality. The Slovenian national movement, located at the periphery of the emerging world capitalist system, was economically and politically dependent, lagging behind culturally, and socially incomplete due to its weak bourgeoisie. In the spirit of European cultural nationalism, Prešeren and Č op programmed the transfer of the repertoires and norms of the universal aesthetic literature to Slovenian as a catalyst that, in the province of the Habsburg Empire lacking a Slovenian-speaking bourgeoisie, was to encourage the development of public discourse in the Slovenian language amongst intellectuals. Only then can a nation, in the post-Enlightenment sense of the word, be formed.

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By way of conclusion: The Baptism on the Savica is a “world text” of the kind that Moretti describes based on Faust, in view of the fact that it stages local history and the hagiography of a converted national hero on the backdrop of world history and in the medium of the aesthetic discourse of world literature. It is a story about the inevitable compromise between the universalism of European Christian civilization, on the one hand, and the ethnicity of Slovenians, on the other. As opposed to the cacophonic polyphony and the act of ascribing actual spaces to historical periods in the modern epic represented by Goethe’s Faust, the world’s sacred text and the generator of a multiplicity of incommensurable interpretations (Moretti 1996: 45–50), Prešeren’s poem, including its form and genre, is a compromise between epic and novelistic discourse. Prešeren’s Byronic verse tale is a hybrid of the epic and the novel, of drama and elegy. However, this genre compromise is so exceptional that it aesthetically empowers the depicted Slovenian-world story and, through a history of effects, transforms itself into a Slovenian sacred text. Metatextual and intertextual series referring to Prešeren’s Baptism have helped canonize Prešeren in the registers of literary and scholarly discourse as the indisputable national poet, the author of the (hybrid) modern epic about the constitutive past of the Slovenian nation. At the same time, the fictitious Č rtomir from The Baptism has, with the aid of controversial political interpretive appropriations, been made into a controversial symbol of the unprincipled national hero who repeatedly evokes the conception of Slovenian national identity as constitutively split in two. The nation between the epic and the novel: almost exactly halfway between the year of the publication of Prešeren’s modern epic about the Christianization of the people whom the poet considered to be the predecessors of the Carniolan Slovenians and the year of the publication of Jurčič’s novel about a young intellectual’s ascent in the emerging Slovenian bourgeois society is the Spring of Nations of 1848, which brought the first demand for a “united Slovenia” signed by a great many Slovenian intellectuals. Taking into account Hroch’s historical typology of Centraland Eastern European national movements (Hroch 1993),4 I can conclude that, in the Slovenian territories, the aesthetically universal and poetic form of the national epic, albeit ambivalent and modernized in a hybrid fashion, is the prominent genre of the first, predominantly philological-­cultural phase of the national awakening. In it, the thin layers 4

 See Chap. 5.

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of the clerical or lay nationalist intellectuals addressed a limited number of Slovenian-speaking readers through almanacs, books of lyrical poetry, Slovenian texts printed in German periodicals, and the first attempts at Slovenian newspapers. The second, mass phase of the national movement, which, ever more explicitly political, also attracted broader circles, including farmers, officials, craftsmen, and the lower bourgeoisie, relied on the mass production of the novel, a genre that circulated in the form of feuilletons in daily newspapers, literary journals, and regularly published book series.

Works Cited Althusser, Louis. 1971. Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses: Notes towards an Investigation. In Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster, 127–186. London and New York: Monthly Review Press. Anderson, Benedict. 1991. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. Rev. and Extended ed. London: Verso. Bakhtin, Mikhail M. 1981. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Ed. Michael Holquist and Trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin and London: University of Texas Press. Barthes, Roland. 2009. Writing Degree Zero. Trans. Annette Lavers and Colin Smith. New York: Hill and Wang. Č op, Matija. 1986. Pisma Matija Č opa. Vol. 2, Eds. Anton Slodnjak and Janko Kos. Ljubljana: SAZU. Furst, Lilian R. 1976. Romanticism. London: Methuen. Fusillo, Massimo. 2006. Epic, Novel. In The Novel, ed. Franco Moretti, vol. 1, 32–63. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press. Habjan, Jernej. 2018. The First Slovenian Novel and the Literary World-System. Journal of World Literature 3: 512–523. Hegel, G.W.F. 1975. Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art. Vol. 2. Trans. T.M. Knox. Oxford: Clarendon Press. ———. 1977. The Phenomenology of Spirit. Trans. A.V.  Miller. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hroch, Miroslav. 1993. From National Movement to the Fully-formed Nation. New Left Review 198: 3–20. Jurčič, Josip. 1965. Zbrano delo. Vol. 3. 2nd ed. Ed. Janez Logar. Ljubljana: Državna založba Slovenije. Juvan, Marko. 1990. Imaginarij Krsta v slovenski literaturi: medbesedilnost recepcije. Ljubljana: LUD Literatura. ———. 2002a. Uvod: panorama romantične pesnitve. In Romantična pesnitev, ed. Marko Juvan, xv–xxxvii. Ljubljana: Filozofska fakulteta.

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———. 2002b. Modernost Krsta pri Savici? In Romantična pesnitev, ed. Marko Juvan, 347–360. Ljubljana: Filozofska fakulteta. ———. 2011. Literary Studies in Reconstruction: An Introduction to Literature. Frankfurt: Peter Lang. Kos, Janko. 1970. Prešeren in evropska romantika. Ljubljana: Državna založba Slovenije. ———. 1991. Motivi Prešernovega Krsta pri Savici in evropska literatura. In Prešeren in njegova doba, 143–160. Koper: Lipa. Lukács, Georg. 1971. The Theory of the Novel: A Historico-Philosophical Essay on the Forms of Great Epic Literature. Trans. Anna Bostock. London: The Merlin Press. Marinčič, Marko. 2011. Križ nad slovansko Trojo: Latinski palimpsesti v Prešernovem Krstu pri Savici. Ljubljana: Slovenska matica. Moretti, Franco. 1996. Modern Epic: The World-System from Goethe to García Márquez. Trans. Quintin Hoare. London and New York: Verso. ———. 1999. Atlas of the European Novel: 1800–1900. London and New York: Verso. ———. 2006. Serious Century. In The Novel, ed. Franco Moretti, vol. 1, 364–400. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press. ———. 2013. Distant Reading. London and New York: Verso. Morson, Gary Saul, and Caryl Emerson. 1990. Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a Prosaics. Stanford University Press. Paternu, Boris. 1977. France Prešeren in njegovo pesniško delo. Vol. 2. Ljubljana: Mladinska knjiga. Pirjevec, Dušan. 1972. Pri izvirih slovenskega romana. Problemi 10 (109): 31–36. ———. 1997. Problem slovenskega romana. Trans. Tomo Virk. Literatura 9 (67–68): 63–75. Prešeren, France. 1965. Zbrano delo. 1. Ed. Janko Kos. Ljubljana: Državna založba Slovenije. ———. 1999. Poems. Trans. Tom M.S. Priestly and Henry R. Cooper. Klagenfurt: Hermagoras-Verlag. Rajan, Tilottama. 1980. Dark Interpreter: The Discourse of Romanticism. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. Žirmunski, Viktor. 1978. Bajron i Puškin. Leningrad: Nauka. Žižek, Slavoj. 1987. Jezik, ideologija, Slovenci. Ljubljana: Delavska enotnost.

CHAPTER 7

Worlding the National Poet in the World-­System of Translation

Eric Hayot rightly reproaches theorists of world literature for not having theorized the concept of the world (Hayot 2012a: 40). In his opinion, they are satisfied either with the notion of the world-system that regulates cross-national circulation of literature through relations between dominant cores and dependent peripheries (Moretti’s conception) or with the idea of the world literary space in which unequal literatures develop according to laws that differ from economic-political dependencies (in Casanova’s approach) (Hayot 2012a: 31, 34). Hayot argues that Moretti’s world literary system and Casanova’s world literary space are less than the world. Armed with modern theories of fiction and possible worlds, Hayot does not look for the concept of the world either in Wallerstein’s world-­ system theory (like Moretti) or in Bourdieu’s notion of the literary field (as Casanova), but in literature itself. Conjecturing that literature may well be the origin of the idea of the world (ibid.: 85), Hayot draws on Bakhtin’s concept of chronotope—that is, an artistic model of experiencing the space as marked by traces of history and human action—and Heidegger’s notion of the world as the unfolding of Being and grounding existential relations of humans through a permanent process of becoming. Polemicizing with current conceptions that explain globalism and transnationality of literature by the idea of circulation, Pheng Cheah’s What Is a World? continues Hayot’s quest for the theory of the world. The current approaches to world literature are said to content themselves with the explanation of how the international book market along with the © The Author(s) 2019 M. Juvan, Worlding a Peripheral Literature, Canon and World Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-32-9405-9_7

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practices of translation, reception, influencing, and intertextuality make for the circulation of texts beyond their mother tongue and enable their functioning outside their original literary ecology. Instead, Cheah draws on Heidegger, Hannah Arendt, Derrida, and postcolonial theorists to provide the grounding to his idea that world literature transcends a repertoire of works on the global translation market. In his view, the notion of world literature as circulation merely passively mirrors the existing world controlled by the economy. Like Hayot, Cheah argues that literary discourse has a more significant potential since it is in essence world-making: literature makes the world in the ontological meaning by opening up space to otherness. To Cheah, the world is therefore not merely a measurable geographical space containing societies, civilizations, and cultures, which the instrumental mind of humans seizes and controls. The world is instead the temporalized space of being, which continually creates relations between living beings, peoples, languages, and cultures. Relying on Heidegger’s insight that art discloses the truth of Being, Cheah is convinced that literature can conceive the world, which, differing from the existing global reality, allows for coexistence, liberated from any subordination and ­ exploitation. Granted, Cheah is aware that today’s globalization, regulated by the instrumentality of imperialism and capitalism, is far from the said ideal. But for some reason, he believes that normative ethical power dwells precisely in the bosom of world literature, which—due to its singular openness to alterity—might transform the existing constellation of the global power into a more humane world. In this way, Cheah also understands Heidegger’s verb welten (“to world”) and its English derivative of “worlding”: In the current conjuncture, where capitalist globalization has cast doubt on the feasibility of grand teleologies of universal human progress toward freedom, the phenomenological idea of worlding is a more powerful way of understanding world literature’s normative force than the idea of teleological time underwriting spiritualist and materialist accounts of the world. It suggests that temporalization is a power of worlding that cannot be destroyed by attempts of calculative reason to reduce the world to quantifiable space that can be regulated for oppressive economic and political ends. […] ‘Literature’ discloses and enacts this unerasable promise of the opening of other worlds. (Cheah 2016: 97)

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Recently, Birgit Neumann further elaborated Cheah’s critique of the concept of world literature as circulation driven by market forces. She, too, rejects the principle “the faster a text travels, the greater its world literary value” (Neumann 2018: 241) and shares usual objections to the understanding of world literature as cross-national circulation such as its reduction of literary (use) value to market value or the aesthetic power to cultural influence. Besides, Neumann underlines that “the global circulation paradigm rests on a fairly strict demarcation between seemingly separate cultures and distinct literary traditions” instead of observing their entangled history and that this approach only “reproduces geopolitical hierarchies” along with “the old center-periphery model” (ibid.). As an alternative, Neumann, too, resorts to the mythical power of literary works to make the world. Her specific interpretation of literary worlding is in the emphasis on relationality, that is, on the linguistic, structural, and thematic negotiation between the local and the global or the vernacular and the cosmopolitan that marks literary texts she considers genuine works of world literature. In Neumann’s words, through such worlding, “worlds of world literature … translate between transcultural connectivity and topographical singularity, between the particular and the cosmopolitan” (ibid.: 241–242). However, her list of contemporary Anglophone literary texts exemplifying the clash of transcultural relationality with local situatedness fails to replace a theory that would explain where this world-making force originates from and whether this kind of worlding is a necessary condition of world literature or rather just an accidental feature of what would be more adequately termed contemporary “global literature.” In my view, the materialistic understanding of world literature as circulation (criticized by Cheah and Neumann) answers the question of how and to what extent literary texts can altogether become agencies of world-­ making. How can a literary fiction, with its textual worlds, produce in the audience a viable idea of the world of coexistence radically different and better from the existing one? How can literature instigate its readers to pursue such ideas, make them interiorized objects of their desire or even durable goals of their actions? To achieve this, world-conceiving textual worlds empowered by their utopian-normative discourse should be not only produced and printed but also widely read and enthusiastically accepted. They should find their place in most of the geo-cultural areas and influence the thoughts and deeds of people divided by class, race, ethnicity, gender, and other factors of inequality. The question why it is so hard to transpose possible worlds—in particular, those that imagine or

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evoke socio-cultural alternatives—into the actual world can be answered only by a theory that explains how the global reality is structured that it over and over again prevents any local utopia from being fully realized. As demonstrated by the recent failure of the Greek leftist party Syriza, which won the national elections with an out-of-the-way yet feasible program of how to overcome the devastating neoliberal rule of the debt economy in Greece and European Union at large, even the political alternatives that are gaining ground locally soon become subject to the pressure of the world-system. The system keeps reproducing relations of dependency, demonstratively demolishing any offshoot of dissenting options through its ideological apparatuses and apparatchiks. Things get even more complicated when it comes to literary worldmaking initiatives. If an artistic vision of the world-to-be appears in a particular language and literature whose position in the cross-national circulation is marginal, it has virtually no chance of gaining universal validity and influencing the change of the world globally. Even if the local literary idea of a different world once succeeded in persuading the multilingual multitudes of global readership divided by class, gender, ethnicity, and other factors, this would probably happen in a historically changed constellation in which the idea might have already lost its universal appeal because of a long-lasting and impeded penetration among the variegated audiences. Prešeren’s 1844 poem “Zdravljica” (Toast), for instance, expresses the vision of the world and society which arguably exemplifies the principles of Cheah’s ethical and political concept of worlding. Calling for a world order of liberty and equality of individuals and nations, the poem, with its world, offers a utopian-revolutionary replacement for the actuality of the absolutist regime of the Vormärz Restoration. Embedded in the seemingly innocent Anacreontic genre frame—drinking to someone’s health in the jovial privacy of the company at the table—and patterned on Gleim’s “Tafellied” (Kos 1987: 57–58), “Toast” poeticizes the revolting politics of the radical Enlightenment, democratic nationalism, and cosmopolitan internationalism, starting with the second strophe: Komú narpred veselo zdravljico, bratje! čmò zapét’! Bog našo nam deželo, Bog živi ves slovenski svet, brate vse, kar nas je sinóv sloveče matere!

Now whom for our first triple Shall we, glad brothers, toast in song? Our land, us Slovenian people May God endow with lifetime long, Where’er found Brothers, bound As sons to mother much renowned.

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V sovražnike ʼz oblakov rodú naj naš’ga treši gróm; prost, ko je bil očakov, naprej naj bo Slovencov dom; naj zdrobé njih roké si spone, ki jih še težé!

May our home skies wage warfare, With thunder strike the enemy! Henceforth, as were our forebears’, May Slovenians’ homes be truly free; Let their hands Iron bands Constrict, who still oppress our lands!

Edinost, sreča, sprava k nam naj nazaj se vrnejo; otrók, kar ima Slava, vsi naj si v róke sežejo, de oblast in z njo čast, ko préd, spet naša boste last! […]

May unity, joy, blessing Return, may we be reconciled! And, brotherhood professing, Close linked be Slava’s every child, That again We may reign And honour, riches now regain! […]

Živé naj vsi naródi, ki hrepené dočakat’ dan, ko, koder sonce hodi, prepir iz svéta bo pregnan, ko rojak prost bo vsak, ne vrag, le sosed bo mejak! […] (Prešeren, Zbrano delo 1 28–30)

Let’s drink that every nation Will live to see that bright day’s birth When ’neath the sun’s rotation Dissent is banished from the earth, All will be Kinfolk free With neighbors none in enmity. […] (Prešeren, Poems 159–161)

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Prešeren found inspiration in Thomas Paine’s 1791 Rights of Man, the ideology of Slavic reciprocity, and Giuseppe Mazzini’s Young Italy, a movement for the unification of Italy and the creation of a Young Europe, which would be founded on the ruins of absolutism by democratic republics of equal nations, including the Slavs (see Paternu 1994: 213–215). In his political poem, Prešeren expresses the ideas of the French Revolution and peaceful coexistence of nations from the perspective of the national emancipation of Slovenians and other Slavic peoples living in the Austrian Empire. “Toast” would probably have woken a democratic revolutionary spirit among the supporters of the Slovenian national movement years before the March Revolution, but only in March 1848, in the heyday of the Spring of the Nations that shook the Habsburg Empire, it appeared on the covers of the newspaper Novice (The News) and succeeded to address the Slovenian public. Its earlier print was forbidden by Metternich’s preventive censorship, which, in addition to the radical Enlightenment, suppressed the spread of ideas of bourgeois liberalism, the July Revolution, Young Germany, and other national movements (Bachleitner 2017: 124–130).

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In addition to censorship, the possibility that Prešeren’s “Toast,” with its democratic and cosmopolitan message, would have changed the world at least in the territory of Austria was thwarted by the inferiority of language, in which the song was conveyed, and the dependence and underdevelopment of the Slovenian literary system. The hypothetical worldwide expansion of the poetic worlding produced by an author virtually unknown to Europe would have required translations into regionally influential or world languages, circulation in several editions, and continuous support of consecrators. Only cross-national translation, wide-ranging diffusion, and a series of consecrating acts would have put the potential of worlding, inscribed in “Toast” from Slovenian perspective, into a social context in which the poem would have exceeded its linguistic boundaries and influenced universal alternatives to the existing world. But that did not happen. The path of Prešeren’s works into the world was in general difficult and time-consuming, which is also true of “Toast,” even though the poem’s seventh strophe was institutionalized as the Slovenian national anthem in 1991 and can be occasionally heard today in the frame of ritualized practices all over the Earth. Regrettably, its liberating ideology has almost vanished from our mental landscapes along with the wane of political utopias after 1968. Based on considerations presented above, I have decided to use the word worlding rather in a sense indicated by Djelal Kadir’s seminal paper “To World, to Globalize—Comparative Literature’s Crossroads,” which explores the symptom of “the re-emergent conjunction between the globalization of the world … and the upsurge of a discourse of/on world literature” (Kadir 2004: 2). In contradistinction to Hayot or Cheah, Kadir draws on Heidegger’s ontological notion of worlding. However, he gives it a different turn based on the critique of imperialist and totalitarian political implications Heidegger’s term acquired in interwar Germany. Kadir points out that “Heidegger explored the notion of worlding at the threshold of a would-­be ‘one world’ and ‘a new world order’ with the messianic ideology of what would apocalyptically and post-historically call itself The Third Reich” (Kadir 2004: 6). Kadir’s denunciation of Heideggerian idea of worlding is a corollary to the line of argument that unearths the condition, responsibility, and interest of the subjects of worlding along with the appropriative move that inheres in the acts of worlding. Bearing in mind that the literary is a product of practices—including disciplinary discourses such as comparative literature—through which the agencies of knowledge constitute the objects of knowledge, Kadir approaches

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world literature and globalization as concepts produced, circumscribed, and circulated by accountable agencies who, responding to the challenges of recurrent historical conjunctures of nationalism and imperialism, invest these categories with their interests. He thus invites us to take the word “world” as verb, and to read globalization not as boundless sweep but as bounding circumscription. To world and to globalize, then, would have to be parsed in light of their subject agencies and their object predicates. World and globalization, thus, would be imputable actions, rather than anonymous phenomena. To world and to globalize, then, would have to be parsed in light of their subject agencies and their object predicates. (Kadir 2004: 2)

According to Kadir, Goethe launched the term Weltliteratur “in direct response to his own ‘globalization’ of sorts, when he was responding to a review of one of his works in the Paris Globe.” (ibid.: 4) Hereby Kadir, too, emphasizes the interplay of nationalist ideologemes, cosmopolitan concerns, and imperialist tendencies through which writers, literary historians, and comparatists conceived the notions of world literature and globalization from the nineteenth century to the present. In his view, the invocation of world literature in Goethe’s post-Napoleonic period attempts to establish a kind of “cosmopolitan agora whose promising ecumenism” was hoped to prevent the literary from the rise of ethnonationalist narrow-­mindedness and chauvinism (Kadir 2004: 5). Nations installed themselves as concepts grounding the objects of literary studies, including comparative literature, what enticed recurring counter-efforts to conceive of world literature as a cosmopolitan ecumene, which, in turn, respond to “imperial moves that circumscribe the world into manageable global boundedness” (ibid.: 7). To Kadir, “world literature may be nothing more than a product of our engagement in notional or narrative acts of worlding” (ibid.: 6). The acts of worlding originate from the concerns and interests of their agencies, what results in the cognitive appropriation of the realities delineated as world literature: If world in world literature, then, is a verb, we, who do the worlding arrogate to ourselves not only the verb’s subject agency but the world itself. And our actions’ object predicate consists not only of the world but also of its literatures and cultures. There is, unmistakably, something inevitably proprietary in the transitive impulse of such productive action, whose reach, whether metaphorical or pragmatic, constructs, defines, and inexorably appropriates its objects. World literature, in this sense, is invariably a product of our optic and grasp. (Kadir 2004: 7)

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The universality of world literature is therefore not residing within the world or literature but originates from “the universalizing impulse” of practices carried out by the agencies of worlding such as cosmopolitan authors (like Goethe) and comparative literature scholars (see Kadir 2004: 7). In the final analysis, the intensity of the discourse on world literature corresponds to traumatic historical constellations in which the rise of ethnonationalism clashes with imperialism (ibid.: 8). In his paper “World Literature and Globalization,” Hayot expands Kadir’s concept: If worlding named a process, however, it would be a process of orientation or calibration; to world (a person, or a place) would be to locate it “as is” in relation to the whole, to think the whole as that which includes “on loan.” Worlding is gestural; it is an attitude, by which one adjusts oneself, symmetrically, to one’s inclusion in a whole that does not belong to one. Worlding creates worlds because it bespeaks the part’s relation to the whole, but also because in that speaking it imagines (or recreates) the whole that opens to the part. The whole neither precedes the part, nor succeeds it. (Hayot 2012b: 228)

Whereas Kadir explicitly mentions Goethe and comparatists as the subjects who world, Hayot’s formulation allows for a broader concept of agencies involved in worlding literature. In my understanding, it is through the acts of worlding that actors of a particular literary field perceive cross-national literary traffic, conceive of the universal aesthetic space of literature and envision their position within it. Through the acts of worlding, they also relate their particular literary ecology with the global one, and, finally, attempt to take part in the worldwide textual circulation, for example, by promoting translation of their home literature into major languages. The perspective of worlding that is internal to each literary field is confirmed or negated by an external perspective. Agencies of the cross-national literary circulation often do not at all perceive authors who seem universal from a particular internal perspective, unless the perspective in question inheres in a globally or regionally dominant literary system. The question arises, how much attention if any the international audiences pay to repertoires that have been recognized only locally. How intensively do they read, translate, and cover the products that a periphery considers as deserving to become world-renowned? Do these translations get the chance to map their worlding (in Cheah’s sense of the ethical-normative world-making) into the ideological sphere of target cultures, world metropolises, and regional centers?

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In the following, I will reconsider the outer worlding of the Slovenian national poet. In the previous chapters, I have demonstrated the process of Prešeren’s internal worlding, that is, how Prešeren and Č op perceived and imagined the world literary space, how Prešeren’s poems inscribed themselves in the cross-national textual universe by reading world literature intertextually, and how the Slovenian literary ecology, emerging peripherally within the Austrian Empire, canonized Prešeren as a national icon whose world-class level legitimates the equality of Slovenians to the so-­called historical, major nations of Europe. The inner perspective of worlding Prešeren within the national literary system intersects with the external perspective of his international worlding: is Prešeren, a central poet of peripheral literature, visible in the world at all? In Prešeren’s case, as well, translation occupies the position at the intersection of both perspectives. Mediating literary texts between the originating and receiving systems, translation itself, as a channel and practice of literary worlding, may become an object of evaluation. The presumed universality of world literature is always already inscribed in particular literary systems through different variants and perspectives articulated by translations. Compared to original literary production which is traditionally praised as the locus of inspiration, art, and creativity, translations tend to be discarded as a matter of “petit métier” carried out by the “literary proletariat” (Apter 2006: 10). The paradox is, that even though they are thought to be inferior to original works of individual literatures, translations are, in fact, the fundamental mode of existence of world literature, whose canonic universality, in turn, appears to be superior to national literatures (see Eysteinsson 2006). In the long nineteenth century, cultural nationalism deemed literature in the mother tongue the symbolic pillar of the national community and telling evidence of its original creativity. Translations, on the other hand, were frequently dismissed as derivative, second-hand, and etiolated speech. For instance, reviewing the state of Slovenian letters through the lens of Goethean aesthetic discourse combined with Herderian national universalism, Josip Stritar (1836–1923), the leading Slovenian critic of the Post-­ Romantic period, made judgments about the shares of translation, imitation, and originality in his homeland against the normative ­backgrounds of the classical hyper-canon and what he termed the “world culture.” In the name of the ideologeme of vernacular literature as the natural expression of national spirit, he rejected translations both in principle and practice. In his 1870 essay, he branded translation as “foreign,

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borrowed goods,” which do help to improve the Slovenian language but do not contribute to the national literature proper: “A nation is entitled to call its property only what has grown from its soil” (Stritar 1955: 119). In his role of the editor of the literary journal Zvon (The Bell), “in a provocative an innovative way conceived as exclusively Slovenian by its language and contributions,” Stritar refused to publish translation altogether (Stanovnik 2005: 53). However, the period of nationalism did not only devalue translation. The scope of translation from foreign literatures came to represent in national literary ecologies their internal worlding, that is, their capacity to absorb, process, and appropriate worldwide cultural resources. The quality of translations figured as a touchstone of the mother tongue’s cultivation, its expressive flexibility, and accuracy, while the extent of the translated repertoire became a measure of the national level of cultural literacy compared to international competitors. Thus, Slovenska Matica, the oldest scholarly-cultural institution of the national movement in Carniola, ventured to enrich local literature with a prestigious supply of translations at the turn of the century. From 1904 to 1937, the book series entitled “Prevodi iz svetovne književnosti” (Translations from World Literature; see Prijatelj 1907) presented twenty-one volumes of world classics such as Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Njegoš, Goethe, Pushkin, Dostoevsky, Shaw, Reymont, and Cervantes. Commenting on the collection’s launching in 1905, Josip Tominšek emphasized that the choice of translated masterpieces of world literature did not jeopardize but strengthened national autonomy. Transplanted into Slovenian, the world literary canon gauged the autonomy and linguistic perfection of the receiving literature: “Every nation striving for independence has to make every effort—using domestic resources—to provide compatriots with all most important achievements of other nations that enjoy world recognition. … Therefore, translations stand for the cultural criterion of every nation” (Tominšek 1905: 376). Tominšek’s reasoning ranks among defenses of translation that started with Ivan Prijatelj’s 1901 polemic with Stritar and lead to Anton Ocvirk’s comparative views. The literary historian Ivan Prijatelj (1875–1937) argued that translations, being productive junctions between nations, enhance the aesthetic development of any national literature (Stanovnik 2005: 68–87). Finally, in his pioneering Teorija primerjalne literarne zgodovine (Theory of Comparative Literary History) of 1936, Anton Ocvirk (1907–1980), a student of Paul Hazard and the founder of

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Slovenian comparative literature as a university discipline, discusses translation as the leading mediator in cross-national literary exchange1: The translation is, undoubtedly, the strongest and at the same time, the most successful means of disseminating or mediating literary works of art among nations. Only a narrow circle of the educated masters three, four European languages, and very rare are those who could enjoy in the original not only French, Italian, Spanish, German, and English works but also Norwegian, Russian, Polish, and possibly even Czech and Hungarian. The translation is definitely an indispensable necessity, because only with it can the influx of foreign values into the national organism be enabled; moreover, translation only familiarizes the wider audience with those European literary creations that would otherwise remain unknown. In comparative literary history, therefore, the chapter on translations is extremely important since it does not clarify only international cultural relations, but also provides a solid starting point for a scientific analysis of influences. (Ocvirk 1936: 237)

Having been subordinated to the original literary production or the comparative research of international influences for decades, the concept of translation recently established a paradigm that reconfigures the general approach to literature. Susan Bassnett famously declared translation studies an umbrella discipline ready to bring the supposedly defunct comparative literature back to life (Bassnett 1993: 47, 138–161). At the same time, the theory of translation produced another seminal method of studying interliterariness—Itamar Even-Zohar’s polysystem theory (1990). His concept of interferences between different literary systems (existing or emerging, central or peripheral), in turn, inspired not only Moretti’s notion of the world literary system (Moretti 2000, 2003, 2013) but also the ensuing world-systemic oriented studies of small and peripheral literatures (see, e.g., Domínguez et al. 2018). It may be that translation, along with literary transnationalism and other terms referring to transportation, transaction, crossing the boundaries, or crossbreeding, became so central to the intellectual history of recent decades because it denotes a postmodern epiphenomenon of globalization and its flows of capital, people, goods, or information. Intensive inter-lingual interpreting and comprehension are 1  In addition to translation, Ocvirk lists the following individuals, institutions, media, and localities functioning as literary mediators: cosmopolites, emigrants, students, scholars, writers, literary reviews, scholarly journals, newspapers, theaters, literary circles, scholarly societies, literary and theater criticism, salons, and metropolises (Ocvirk 1936: 231).

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keys to managing the different, contradictory, and mutable interests popping up within the inter-state system and the world economy. Indeed, globalization would not be possible without translating, that is to say, the incessant transaction of meaning among disparate languages and discourses, informational coordination of faraway locations of power, crosslingual circulation of popular or prestigious products of geoculture, and worldwide comprehensibility of hegemonic ideologemes presenting the state of late-capitalist globalization as the only possible reality. Accordingly, the shares of translation rebounded on the global theory market at the turn of the millennium, with writings that began to globalize Goethe’s idea of Weltliteratur (see, e.g., Venuti 2012). World literature was advertised as a paradigm able to subsume national literary history, comparative literature, and postcolonial criticism in a unified, transcending framework (see Thomsen 2008: 5–32; D’Haen 2012: 1). For world literature studies, translation comes as a central concept because it denotes textual practices that foster the active presence of literary works beyond the linguo-cultural and social ecology they have addressed initially. Even though translations, in David Damrosch’s (2003: 15) humanist perspective, prove to be the fundamental mode of cross-national literary circulation that opens up intercultural windows and doors to the world (windows to readers, doors to writers), they are in fact subject to asymmetries of the world-systems of economy, languages, and literatures. As such, they do not merely pave the way for transnational literary traffic and dialogue with otherness, but may also be complicit in the globalization of Western geoculture and aesthetic discourse. As discussed in Chaps. 1 and 2, Pascale Casanova and Franco Moretti recognized constitutive inequality of modern world literature. In Moretti’s catchphrase, the world literary system is—just like global capitalism—“one and unequal,” so that “the study of world literature is—inevitably—a study of the struggle for symbolic hegemony across the world” (Moretti 2013: 46–47, 56, 127–128). As a rule, global centers, where world languages are spoken, possess developed media and abundant cultural resources they have accumulated due to their economic-political supremacy as colonial or imperial powers. Innovations selected and reinforced by the mechanisms of the global literary market with the assistance of the international copyright legislation, usually spread from core systems to peripheral zones, which are equipped with weaker publishing-media infrastructure, use languages of lesser diffusion, and lack the symbolic capital of internationally recognized traditions (see Casanova 1999: 28–40, 63–65;

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Moretti 2013: 112–113). With its incessant concentration resulting in monopolies, the triumphant transnational publishing industry only adds to the systemic imbalance of the literary world. Thus, opening or shutting intercultural windows on the world becomes the privilege of political superpowers, core economies, cultural metropolises, and world languages. The possibility of a literary text in a language of lesser diffusion to make its way to worldwide circulation depends on whether it is available in a language of broader diffusion and “consecrated” by metropolitan publishers, critics, and media (Casanova 1999: 28–40, 63–65). As early as 1899, the Danish literary historian Georg Brandes—who became famous when all of Europe found inspiration in the hitherto overlooked Scandinavian literatures—complained that authors who create in peripheral countries and smaller languages have inadequately smaller opportunities to enter the venue of world literature. The reason for their handicapped worlding lays in the “imperfection” of translation: Those who write in Finnish, Hungarian, Swedish, Danish, Icelandic, Dutch, Greek, and so on are in the universal struggle for world renown clearly positioned most disadvantageously. In the contest for world renown these authors lack their weapon, their language, and for writers that about says it all … The necessary imperfection of the translations has as a consequence the effect that an author of the sixth rank in a widespread language, a world language, can with ease become more known than an author of the second rank in a language spoken by only a few million. Anyone who knows the literature of the small and the large lands will readily grant this, but·the large countries will a rule not believe it. (Brandes 2012: 25)

From Brandes’s critical remarks on the imperfection of translation, it follows that translation necessarily fails to reproduce the singular aesthetic meaning and structure of an artwork, which is inseparable from the author’s mother tongue (spoken by a few million). According to Gisèle Sapiro, the asymmetry of the literary world-system is evident from the share of translation in the overall literary production of a country: in modern core literatures it is relatively small (from 3% in the US to 15% or 20% in France and Germany), whereas it is higher on the margins (around 65% in Sweden). That literary traffic regularly flows from centers to peripheries, is evidenced by the fact that the majority of target languages translate mostly from English; in the 1980s, for instance, more than half of all translated books in the world reproduce English originals (Sapiro 2011: 229, 233).

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Conceived initially as multilingual polyphony of the best, universally appealing achievements of national literatures, world literature has subjected itself to omnipotent languages that absorb and globally distribute artworks produced in all the remaining idioms. Decades ago, Erich Auerbach predicted that we would have to accustom ourselves “to existence in a standardized world, to a single literary culture, only a few literary languages, and perhaps even a single literary language. And herewith the notion of Weltliteratur would be at once realized and destroyed” (Auerbach 2012: 66). In addition to postcolonial advocates of languages of the global South and East such as Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (2003), comparatists from smaller European nations also attempt to do away with the world-system inequalities. While postcolonial and Asian peripheries, which supposedly feature radical otherness, come into focus to neutralize Eurocentrism endemic to world literature studies, small European literatures—according to Theo D’haen (2013)—experience even further marginalization, being perceived as an insignificant variation of Western models. Milan Kundera—a Czech immigrant in French literature and, eo ipso, in the world literary space—similarly recognized an “irreparable inequality” between the great and the small. He criticized the “provincialism of large nations,” which, due to their fixation on their imperial language and celebrated literature, do not feel the need to know world literature and thus cannot assess the global importance of their writers (Kundera 2012: 290–294). Returning to the case of Prešeren’s external worlding, it is necessary to keep in mind the world-systemic intricacies of translation practices discussed above. Let us recall Stritar’s famous formulation that crowned Prešeren’s internal worlding with his canonization as the Slovenian national poet, a cultural saint. In his 1866 essay, Stritar claims that every nation has its saintly figure of the canonic writer that manifests how this nation has “participated in universal, human culture”; having been assigned this role by Slovenians, Prešeren joins the series of great names of the universal canon (see Stritar 1955: 48). The argument of Stritar’s elevation of Prešeren confirms Nemoianu’s observation on national poets as writers that were canonized during the nineteenth century in order to represent their respective national literatures in the world pantheon. Imaginary, introspective, and intra-systemic worlding of Slovenian poetry through aesthetic cosmopolitanism and glorifying comparisons with the literary celebrities of core literatures proved to be ideologically successful ever since Stritar canonized Prešeren as the Slovenian cultural saint who is

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equal to the great masters of world literature. Prešeren still figures as one and only national poet who deserves to be recognized as a true classic by the world. Prešeren himself in part drafted such an image through his intertextual worlding, imagery, and Romantic classicism, but his posthumous canonizers developed it fully, assuming that Prešeren’s opus, albeit small in quantity, masterfully absorbed classical European traditions and thus in one swing compensated for historical shortcomings of Slovenian literature. However, the actual penetration of the Slovenian cultural saint into the world departs from Prešeren’s imagined worlding. His cross-national circulation was slow, bounded mostly to areas of the former Habsburg monarchy and Yugoslavia, and dependent even on non-literary factors of ideological solidarity such as Slavophilism, international socialism, or the Non-Aligned Movement. On his way from the national classic to the classic of world literature, Prešeren became virtually lost in translation. Nevertheless, the beginning of Prešeren’s external worlding—it was coextensive with the internal perspective—seemed to be quite promising. It took place in the context of the so-called Slovenian ABC-War, a kind of peripheral querelle des anciens et des modernes. The polemic between the Slovenian Romantic circle and their conservative opponents acquired dimensions that transcended the boundaries of national literary ecology. It took part in the formation of the Slavic interliterary community within the Austrian Empire. The Slovenian Alphabet War was a symptom of the fetishization of language typical of the European cultural nationalism. The grammaticality, Bildung, and purity of the mother tongue adapted to the use in high literature were considered the essentials of every cultured nation.2 The literary conflict over the Slovenian literary language was triggered in 1833 by Matija Č op in the supplement to Laibacher Zeitung entitled Illyrisches Blatt (Illyrian Gazette) with a commentary on the publication of a review of the poetry almanac Krajnska čbelica (Carniolan Bee) that had been written in 1832 for Č asopis českého Museum by the Czech poet František Ladislav Č elakovský (1799–1852). In the controversy over the reformed writing system known as the Metelko alphabet (metelčica in Slovenian), which in the view of the Viennese linguist of Carniolan origin Jernej 2  Similar clashes over grammar also occurred among the Czechs, for example between the supporters and opponents of the Old Brethren orthography around 1815 (Vodička 1960: 127–131).

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Kopitar contributed toward bridging the differences among Slavs that used the Latin alphabet, a clash broke out between two differing strategies for Slovenian national revival; this clash also became international in scope.3 As explained in Chap. 4, the Enlightenment and Pre-Romantic ideas of Kopitar’s Carniolan circle relied on the gradual progress of grammatical, folkloristic, utilitarian, religious, or educational activities among the domestic rural population (Kopitar, following Herder, saw the socialcultural foundation of the nation in the peasantry), while Č op along with Prešeren argued for a bolder and quicker, albeit unrealistic program that they conceived in the spirit of Romantic aesthetics and cosmopolitanism and intended for Slovenian-speaking Bildungsbürgertum. In the course of the Alphabet War, the emerging Slovenian literary field started to integrate into the nascent world literary system and meddled in the formation of the Slavic interliterary community. Criticism and translation as the nodes of cross-national cultural traffic were instrumental to this process as well. Časopis českého Museum (The Journal of the Bohemian Museum), under the editorship of František Palacký (1798–1876) the central medium of Czech national revival, attempted to demonstrate by its contributions that Czech language and culture were developed enough to keep pace with the great nations of Europe (see Vodička 1960: 125–129, 149–150, 161; Vinkler 2006: 245–248). As was the case with the national movements of dependent peoples, justifying their cultural value and autonomy through literature was important also for Czechs in the Austrian Empire, since literature compensated for the missing attributes of national sovereignty (Vodička 1960: 13). Intending to gain the recognition of Czech culture as a noteworthy newcomer on the international scene, the editorial politics of the Journal of the Bohemian Museum carefully cultivated the field of Slavic languages and regularly monitored literatures of the Slavic area. The journal advocated the Slavic idea, which started from the presumption that Slavic peoples of Austria were politically inferior and surrounded by a threatening sea of Germans. The utopian solution to the predicament of these peoples appeared to be their solidarity, grouping together, and fashioning the sense of their common origin and national character. The idea of the community of millions of Slavs found different expressions: from metaphysical notions of the Slavic soul and Russophilism through 3  For more see Prijatelj 1935: 142–149; Legiša 1959: 83–89; Paternu 1976: 232–242; Kos 1979: 144–177; Pogačnik 2002.

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c­ onceptions of a unified Slavic nation to the so-­called Slavic reciprocity, that is, cooperation through translations, book reviews, exchanges of books, social networks, or joint political initiatives (see Vodička 1960: 137–139; Pospíšil 2005). Carniolan Slavs, that is, Slovenians were among the communities of interest to Journal of the Bohemian Museum from the standpoint of Slavic reciprocity.4 In this context, Č elakovský printed in this journal his review of the first three volumes of the Slovenian poetry almanac Carniolan Bee entitled Krajinská literatura (Carniolan Literature; see Č elakovský 1832). In light of the upcoming outburst of the Alphabet War it appears paradoxical that the person responsible for Č elakovský’s review of Carniolan Bee happened to be Jernej Kopitar. He was the first to present the Slovenian poetry almanac to Č elakovský and Palacký; the latter then encouraged the former to write a text on contemporary Carniolan literature for his journal (Kvapil 1984: 280; Vinkler 2006: 216–218). Č elakovský seemed to be well suited to this task since he had been dealing with Slovenian language and folk poetry since about 1820; three Slovenian folk songs in modern translation had been included in his Slovanské národní písně (Slavic Folk Songs, 1822, 1825), the first international anthology of this kind (see Závodský 1982: 160; Kvapil 1984: 278–279). Although Č elakovský’s 1832 assessment of Carniolan literature is sympathetic and he sees in literary enthusiasts the promise of a national revival, he is harsh and patronizing in his aesthetic judgment of the almanac. From the perspective of an observer from the artistically more developed capital that aspires to become the center of Slavism, Č elakovský considers Carniolan literature a backward periphery. While he does attribute a groundbreaking significance to Carniolan Bee in the Slovenian context, he concurrently characterizes it as artistically weak and belated replication of Antonín Jaroslav Puchmajer’s Czech poetry school and its 1795 almanac (Č elakovský 1832: 444). Drawing on Šafárik’s 1826 Geschichte der slawischen Sprache und Literatur nach allen Mundarten, he ironically suggests that Slovenian literature before Carniolan Bee virtually did not exist, except for overabundant grammars: “So, even if one can count the whole 4  Among translations from other Slavic literatures and critical and historical essays on them regularly printed in the Journal of the Bohemian Museum, Pavel Josef Šafařik published in 1833 a detailed chapter on Slovenian literature after 1820 (“literatura vindických Slovenův”) in his Survey of recent literature by Illyrian Slavs, shedding light on its historical development (Č asopis českého Museum 7.2 [1833]: 164–181).

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of their literature on the fingers of one hand—who cares!—Slovenians have a fat dozen grammars, and thus a glut of reading that enriches the heart and spirit!” (ibid.: 451).5 The pitiless irony continues in his frank aesthetic condemnation of the dactylic and amphibrach meters so popular in the Carniolan almanac: “Crowing … poetry meters borrowed from Austrian and German Styrian poems … make one sick” (ibid.: 445).6 However, these critical remarks are but a background against which Č elakovský elevates the writings of France Prešeren, whose “excellent works impart a special value and beauty to Carniolan Bee” (Č elakovský 1832: 445).7 Here, sincere admiration replaces the sardonic, patronizing tone. Figuring as an authority on Slavic languages and literatures, Č elakovský argues that Prešeren’s significance transcends provincial borders: “This young, naturally gifted poet … truly deserves an honorable reception in the ranks of Slavic poets” (ibid.: 445).8 Adopting the perspective of European aesthetic discourse, he recognizes Prešeren’s universality. Hence, he characterizes Prešeren in terms compatible with the idea of the classical that Jungmann at that time expected to be realized by modern Czech literature (see Jungmann 1827): accordingly, Č elakovský finds Prešeren’s “literary treasures” to be of different genres, his expression and confession proficient, his ideas harmonious, his verses flowing, his diction concise and “authentically Slovenian” (Č elakovský 1832: 445–446). To demonstrate Prešeren universal qualities to Czech readers, Č elakovský published his metrical Czech translations of four poems printed by Prešeren in Carniolan Bee, what was the first visible appearance of the Slovenian poet outside its original literary system. In addition to the translations of the elegy “Slovo od mladosti” (A Farewell to My Youth), a love sonnet, a humorous ballad, and a soldier’s song, Č elakovský presented Prešeren’s satirical sonnet about the ABC-War in the Slovenian original and applied it to the current Czech situation (Č elakovský 1832: 446–450). The satire on the alphabet controversy is the starting point of 5 ̌ y ostatně celá literatura jejich na prstech u jedné ruky vypočísti se dala—nic  “Bytb neškodí—Slovenci mají auplný ducet grammatik, a pročež dostatek utěšeného, ducha i srdce vzdělávajícího čtení!” 6  “ … po tomto kdákavém a s nechutnými rakouskými a německo-štyrskými písničkami sbratřeném rozměru až ke zhnusení se přemílají.” 7  “… výtečné práce zvláštní cenu a okrasu krajinské Včelce dávají …” 8  “Hodentě opravdu čestného uvítání v pořadí zpěvců slovanských tento hojnými dary od přírody nadaný mladý básník …”

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Č elakovský’s critique of the newly introduced Slovenian-writing system called metelčica.9 In place of Metelko’s invented letters for affricates and fricatives that remind of Cyrillic signs, Č elakovský proposes the CzechPolish method of diacritics as a pertinent solution, arguing—just like Kopitar, albeit contrary to his intentions—that a shared alphabet would facilitate mutual intelligibility among the Slavic languages. The idea of Slavic reciprocity underlying his critique of the reformed alphabet inspires his recommendation for the proper politics of translation; to strengthen the Slavic alliance, he advises “that Slovenians engage more in translation from other Slavic languages than from elsewhere so that their language would not be so easily led astray” (Č elakovský 1832: 453).10 These suggestions are indicative of Č elakovský’s attempts to remove Slovenians from the German sphere of influence and bring them closer to Czech examples and their calls for Slavic interliterary community. The Slavic idea infuses the rhetoric of Č elakovský’s final encouragement of the small literary circle of Carniolan national revivalists: “Do not complain about the small number of your readers; your grateful compatriots are your nearest public …. Your next public is—mind this happy thought!— more than sixty million Slavs who look favorably on your zeal” (Č elakovský 1832: 454).11 Č elakovský sent his review of Carniolan Bee to Prešeren in a letter dated 24 December 1832; in his letter to Palacký on 14 January 1833, Č op characterized Č elakovský’s review as “water for our mill” that should be “brought to the attention of our public” (Č op 1986: 239–240). Č op, therefore, gave the text to a Czech living in Ljubljana to translate it into German, corrected the translation, and sent it back to the author for review. Č op then added his introduction, printed the review under the title of “Krainische Literatur” in Illyrisches Blatt on 9 February 1833, and attached his comments to Č elakovský and follow-up notes on 23 February 9 ̌  Cop later elaborated Č elakovský’s arguments in his polemics with Kopitar and his Carniolan supporters. 10  “… aby hustěji překládáním z jinoslovanských nářečí, nežli odjinud, Slovenci se zanášeli, čímž by ne tak snadno octli se na bezcestí se svým jazykem.” Finally, he proposes that Slovenians adhere to Czech quantitative metrics instead of “being guided by the German usage” (Č elakovský 1832: 453–454). 11  “Netužte pro maločetnost čtenárstva a publikum svého; vaše publikum neybližší buďte vděcn ̌ á srdce krajanů vašich, jichž přibývati bude den ke dni s přibýváním zdařilých plodů rozumu a obraznosti vaší; vaše pak druhé publikum—pomněte na to s radostnou myslí!—jest šedesáte a více milionův Slovanů, kteří s líbostí na vaši horlivost patří.”

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(Berkopec 1961: 231–232). These remarks sparked the notorious philosophical, aesthetic, and cultural-political controversy with the camp of Metelko supporters (including Kopitar), which Č op reprinted in 1833 along with Č elakovský’s review under the title Nuovo discacciamento di lettere inutili, Das ist: Slowenischer ABC-Krieg (Berkopec 1961: 236). Č op’s metatext in Illyrisches Blatt frames Č elakovský’s text with the introduction, comments, and remarks, adapting it to Č op’s intentions and cultural strategy of national awakening. Č op thus expresses his views on Slovenian literature also indirectly, through the words borrowed from the Czech critic, even though he does not refrain from polemicizing with him. The inserted translation of the Czech review is itself a metatext reporting on and evaluating the almanac Carniolan Bee and framing the four Czech translations of Prešeren. The review in the Journal of the Bohemian Museum transfers its selection of Prešeren from the original literary system to the Czech, while the German translation of the Czech review in Ljubljana informs readers in Carniola who are interested in Slovenian literature of how a high profile foreign author regards their literary life. The interliterary mirroring and framings outlined above are symptomatic of the processes of worlding. Modern national literatures, engaged in national movements, established mutual contacts through translation and criticism. Hereby they started to imagine and form their interliterary communities and attempted to find their place in the nascent world literature. As is known, the age of world literature Goethe was announcing since 1827 encompassed cross-national intellectual exchange, intensive translation and reviews in literary journals, and the activity of cosmopolitan networks. Regularly perusing British, French, and Italian cultural journals, Goethe reflected on foreign literatures in his periodical Kunst und Altertum. Through readings that lead him across the boundaries of his national literary ecology, Goethe worlded his literary creativity, calibrating its transnational value and impregnating it with selected repertoires from abroad. In a similar vein, the connections among the texts printed in Carniolan Bee, Journal of the Bohemian Museum, and Illyrian Gazette testify to the efforts of a cross-national literary collaboration, albeit limited to the Slavic area. The node of reviews and translations is an example of the inter-illumination of literatures and the active presence of texts outside their original literary ecology, which are—according to Damrosch (2003: 4, 15)—two key features of world literature. Č elakovský recognized Prešeren as an artist who transcended his native space even before Slovenians did (Závodský 1982: 594). His review and translation are argu-

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ably the initial acts of consecration, since his praise of Prešeren as a topmost poet of the Slavic world opened up a path for the young Carniolan writer to address other Slavic literatures of the Austrian Empire and, eventually, enter worldwide literary circulation. With this early translation and review, Prešeren’s lengthy path into world literature actually started; however, up until the present day, he has remained more at the margins, even in the Czech Republic.12 In the beginning, the world literary system was primarily a creation of the cosmopolitan republic of letters. The correspondence between the influential Carniolan patron of arts and literature Žiga Zois, the linguist Jernej Kopitar, and the so-called patriarch of Slavistics Josef Dobrovský (1753–1829) bears witness to the fact that Slovenian and Czech intellectuals were networking as early as at the turn of the eighteenth to the nineteenth century. While each of them pursued his own aims, they shared the aspiration of cultural nationalism to establish their respective nations as autonomous cultural-political entities within the Habsburg Empire. To this end, they strove to include their national languages and literatures in the European space by forming a Slavic interliterary community (see Vidmar 2016). They made continuous efforts to inform prominent European cosmopolites of the history, characteristics, and main achievements of Slavic languages and cultures. For instance, the Viennese philologist and imperial censor Kopitar played the role of translator, reviewer, mediator, and advocate of Serbian folk poetry collected by his protégé Vuk Karadžić (1787–1864). He translated it extensively into the imperial German, glorified its exceptionality and Homeric power, presented it in the influential journal Wiener Jahrbücher der Literatur, and attempted to intrigue prominent scholars and writers from Jacob Grimm to Goethe for the Serbian folk epic. As it has been explained in previous chapters, Goethe saw in the age of world literature an opportunity for the actual worlding of nations that had not yet achieved the prestige of English or French literature. The works of smaller and non-European cultures, among them Slavic, were, in fact, attracting interest; Goethe, for instance, was enraptured by the South Slavic ballad “Hasanaginica” and translated it around 1775. Moreover, Goethe introduced his idea of world literature in the 12  Although Jonatan Vinkler enthusiastically claims that Č elakovský “permanently engraved [Prešeren] into Czech cultural consciousness” (2006: 214–215, 244), Prešeren’s work did not penetrate the broader public despite numerous translations in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries because it was not included in the Czech school canon.

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famous conversation with Eckermann on 31 January 1827 in a close connection to one of his numerous references to Serbian folk poetry. Next to his declaration that the “epoch of World literature is at hand,” Goethe ­mentions the Serbs, albeit in a context revealing his elitist and semi-­ classicist stance: But, while we thus value what is foreign, we must not bind ourselves to anything in particular and regard it as a model. We must not give this value to the Chinese, or the Servian [Serbian], or Calderon, or the Nibelungen; but if we really want a pattern, we must always return to the ancient Greeks, in whose works the beauty of mankind is constantly represented. All the rest we must look at only historically, appropriating to ourselves what is good, so far as it goes. (Eckermann 1998: 165)

In Goethe’s classicist view, only the Greek canon of the Antiquity is entitled to figure as the universal model to the humanity, whereas all the other works of world literature may only attract historical interest and are worth to be appropriated by German writers selectively if suiting their needs and tastes. Not knowing about Goethe’s discriminatory cosmopolitanism expressed in his conversation with Eckermann, Č elakovský, too, sent to Goethe a translation of a selection from his collection Ohlas písní ruských (Echoes of Russian Songs, 1829). His intention appears to be “entirely in line with the tendencies of European literary development that Goethe at the same time theoretically formulated and proved with his conception of ‘world literature’” (Dvořák 1960: 292–297). For their part, Czech and Slovenian writers strove to improve their literary and linguistic quality according to the imagined standards of the aesthetically developed literature of the West (see Vodička 1960: 8, 128–129; Vinkler 2006: 244–248). To them, these standards were embodied not only in the masters of the Western canon but also in the work of major modern Slavic writers such as Mickiewicz and Pushkin. The emerging transnational literary space made it possible for any national literature to be observed from an outside perspective and judged according to supposedly universal aesthetic standards, which contributed to the process of worlding. Foreign critics became the arbiters of national literary disputes. Goethe, for example, followed the fierce polemic among the Italian neoclassicists (Strich 1949: 23–24). Accordingly, Č op regarded the translation of Č elakovský in Illyrian Gazette as an external reflection of

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Carniolan literary situation and argument by a foreign celebrity, since Č elakovský figured as a prominent author recognized throughout the Slavic world, Goethe’s correspondent, and an authority to whom John Bowring dedicated his Cheskian Anthology (see Bowring 1832: vii–viii). Appealing to the international environment, Č op made use of Č elakovský to play the role of arbiter of Slovenian domestic policy: “An outside opinion, neither elicited nor agreed on” (to use Goethe’s expression) already, in general, has an advantage since it is free of tension; this is all the more important since its author, František Ladislav Č elakovský, is not only one of the most outstanding of currently living Czech writers, but he has also, based on his collection and translations of folk poetry from all Slavic nations …, shown himself to be an authoritative connoisseur of all Slavic languages. (Č op 1983: 110; emphases added)

The mirror that the foreign reviewer placed in front of Slovenians with his translations and critical metatext was an additional incentive for Č op to instruct his Carniolan readers how to locate domestic literary production in universal aesthetic coordinates. As elaborated in Chap. 5, during the years when Goethe was introducing the concept of world literature into European intellectual discourse, Č op and Prešeren started with their cultural transfer of Schlegelian Romantic cosmopolitanism with the intention to world Slovenian literature. In their opinion, literature, which served the needs of the national awakening, needed to be grounded in the universality of aesthetic humanism and the repertoires of European literary traditions from the Antiquity to Romanticism. Goethe’s belief that Weltliteratur, with its reflection of the self in cultural otherness, renews every national literature, as well as his ideal of a “classical national author,” who objectifies his subjectivity through the intertextual appropriation of universal literary repertoires, came close to the Romantic literary cosmopolitanism of the Schlegels. For their part, they attempted to cultivate the apparently belated German literature by drawing on worldwide literary resources. National universalism that Č op and Prešeren adopted from the Schlegel brothers to cultivate Slovenian language and poetry required justification. The outside support from Č elakovský came in handy, even though the Czech poet had a different taste and orientation since he favored folklore-style writing. What is more, Jungmann’s p ­ rogram of Czech national classics was not compatible with Č op’s aesthetic concepts

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which counted on the educated class.13 Regardless of such differences, Č op framed and interpreted Č elakovský in such a way that his voice came across as full support for the cosmopolitan and erudite aesthetic principles of Prešeren’s poetry intended for intellectuals. Drawing on Č elakovský, Č op compares the domestic scene with other literatures of Europe (in particular with Slavic ones), focusing on the question of literary language. As it has been presented in Chap. 5, Č op argues for the need to cultivate the vernacular by including socially and conceptually more demanding, cosmopolitan linguistic domains (Č op 1833: 25–26). In his comments to Č elakovský, Č op goes on to present Prešeren’s poetics—which departed from the established second-rate Carniolan classicism or the emulation of folklore—in the comparative context of world literature, that is, through the perspective of worlding. He highlights Prešeren’s cosmopolitan citationality and the semantization of the imported poetic forms. By explaining universal repertoires to Carniolan readership and employing cross-national comparisons, Č op advocates Prešeren’s aesthetic universalism. He defends Italian and Spanish forms that [Prešeren] uses and that must not be any less familiar to educated readers because they are also frequently used by German poets, especially more recent ones. … The Carniolan poet can thus more freely choose metric forms since in fact, we do not have any national ones [keine eigentlich nationalen] (such as those that the Serbs have, for example). So why should he not select those which are generally recognized as the most beautiful among recent ones (here we are leaving aside ancient ones), namely, Southern European, and especially neighboring Italian, which are painstakingly copied even by those peoples, for example the Germans, English, and others, whose languages have more difficulty adapting to these forms than Carniolan does? Moreover, these forms are already in wide use by other Slavs. (Č op 1833: 27; emphases added)

Č op concludes his comments on Č elakovský’s review with a concise literary revival program that proclaims poetry as the most apposite genre by means of which Slovenians can join the civilized nations without having to 13  Jungmann recommended a somewhat different strategy to Czechs: following the examples of the Ancient Classics and the most accomplished works of early modern European literatures, national classics must mature on the bases of their folk tradition. A single genius does not yet constitute a national classic. Several excellent authors need to contribute many different genres and achieve stylistic perfection and harmony. National classic has to be accepted by all social strata, not only the educated—only in this way a “comprehensive national literature” can arise (Jungmann 1841: 176–185; see Vinkler 2006: 247–248).

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first fully develop their media and differentiated public discourse: “There is nothing to prevent our poets from competing gloriously with those of other Slavs” (Č op 1833: 31).14 The international literary competition for the aesthetic values that Čop hints at in the above quotation is, according to Casanova, essential to the modern world literary space where nations struggle for their visibility; the redistribution of the symbolic capital is a permanent object of international rivalry (Casanova 1999: 55–67). Literatures did indeed build their identity through mutual comparisons, but not merely in a competitive way and respecting the Western models, as Casanova never gets tired of emphasizing (see, e.g., Casanova 2011). As the PrešerenČelakovský case demonstrates, worlding takes place also in relation with nearby or similar literary systems, semi-peripheries, regional hubs, or what Thomsen calls temporary subcenters of world literature (Thomsen 2008: 35–39). With Čop and Prešeren, Slovenian poetry was worlded against the imagined background of European classics, while through Čelakovský it entered into a temporary interliterary alliance with a stronger literary system of the Czechs. However, in connection to the Western core and the German semi-­periphery, Czech literature was in an equivalent position to that of Slovenian and likewise functioned as a pillar of a “non-state” nation (see Vodička 1960: 125–137). As demonstrated in previous chapters, Goethe saw a fragmented Germany as the periphery of the West. Nevertheless, the German semi-periphery, including Austria and Vienna was stronger than the Czech capital Prague. Czech literature and Prague attempted to strengthen their role of a regional subcenter during the nineteenth century; Slovenians increasingly followed Czech models of national revival such as reading societies, national theater, or gymnastic organizations. From the perspective of the national ideology of Slovenians and Czechs, German culture appeared as a dominating opponent mingled among the indigenous community, one that could only be parried by an alliance among weaker nations. However, differences also emerged among the weaker. They are obvious in the condescending attitude of Čelakovský toward the younger and aesthetically less advanced Slovenian literature. While Čop relied on the international stature of Čelakovský as a representative of a potent subcenter, he also countered him in order to assert the particularity of Slovenian culture.

14  “So bleibt es doch unsern Dichtern unbenommen, mit denen anderer Slawen rühmlich zu wetteifern.”

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After all, the Alphabet War revealed that Slovenian literary culture found itself at the intersection of the areas of influence of Vienna and Prague, two regional hubs that competed in the Habsburg Empire for the position of the seat of Slavic studies and Slavic reciprocity. Kopitar, who strove to take on the role of the “patriarch of Slavic studies” from Dobrovský and preserve Vienna as the center of Slavism, had difficulty tolerating the growing strength of Slavistics in Prague and the meddling of Czechs in internal Carniolan-Slovenian affairs, since this was supposed to be his domain (see ̌ Vinkler 2006: 232–234). In his intervention in the disputes between Cop and the Carniolan proponents of Metelko, he, therefore, aimed barbs at ̌ Celakovský as an overpraised “Bohemian patron” and at Palacký, who also ridiculed the plethora of grammars in Carniola (Kopitar 1833: 1–6). In the case of Čelakovský and Čop, the Slovenian-Czech interliterariness is imbued with the Slavism of “Slavic reciprocity,” which in Central and South-Eastern Europe—primarily in the Austrian Empire— legitimized the efforts at the formation of transnational literary ecologies connected by ethno-lingual affinity, shared history, religion, or belonging to a common polity such as empire. Dionýz Ď urišin termed such units of the world literary process interliterary communities (Ď urišin 1984: 273–299; see Gálik 2000; Zelenka 2002: 59–97). With their ideologically based solidarity and the ensuing mechanisms of exchange, translating, and collaboration, interliterary communities such as that of the Austrian Slavs, figure as an interface between national literatures and the literary world-system. That through Slavic reciprocity a regional subsystem was envisioned in which peripheral nations of Central and SouthEastern Europe could play a more visible role can also be felt in the words of Čelakovský, who promises Slovenian revivalists a public of “more than sixty million Slavs.” However, in the central current of Slovenian literature, it was Čop and Prešeren who instilled a nationalautonomist tendency and resistance to closer ties with Slavs. In so doing, Slovenian literature did protect its autonomy, but it also probably hindered its entry into world literature. To sum up, as early as 1832, the Czech poet František Č elakovský recognized Prešeren’s transnational significance. With his four translations, he was the first to open to the Slovenian poet the way to a broader regional circulation, probably aiming to attract Carniolan literary periphery to the Austro-Slavic interliterary community with Prague as its emerging capital. It was through Č elakovský’s publication in a more advanced, semi-­ peripheral literary culture, that Prešeren’s long-lasting path toward the core of the world literary system started.

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Vinzenz Rizzi (1816–1856), a Carinthian-German advocate of Slovenian national movement, poet, and publicist, continued to spread Prešeren’s reputation beyond the provincial boundaries of Carniola in the year of Prešeren’s death. In the local German periodical Deutsche Monatschrift aus Kärnten (German Monthly for Carinthia) printed in Carinthian town Villach, Rizzi published an article in 1849, which, according to Boris Paternu, deviates from the national or Catholic moralism prevailing in Prešeren’s critical reception in Carniola. Rizzi instead relies on the Romantic idea of “poetry as a free personal confession based on the nature of the subject itself ” (Paternu 1989: 9). Even though Rizzi wrote for a marginal Austrian-German periodical, he evaluated Prešeren—who, like him, was the subject of the Habsburg crown—predominantly according to cosmopolitan aesthetic criteria. Just like Stritar did almost two decades later, Rizzi located Prešeren in the imaginary European literary space. His act of worlding, though, could not hide the ideologeme typical of cultural nationalism, Slovenian in particular—that literature of the national poet, saturated by the world, represents the nation to the world: “He gathered the education of the whole of Europe, with which he decorated his poetic works, the young blossoms of his motherland for which his heart was burning” (Rizzi 1849). Rizzi considered Prešeren’s poems as highly original and equivalent to the well-established examples of German literature such as Goethe, Uhland, Grün, and Bürger. In general, drawing parallels between local writers and universally recognized authorities of world literature became a habit of the nineteenth-century imaginary worlding. With their localizing attributes added to universal names, phrases of the type “the Slovenian Goethe” prove to be symptoms of self-­aggrandizing mythology arising from the sense of being marginalized. Believing as Stritar did that the Slovenian cultural saint deserves the prestige of a world-class poet, Slovenian intellectuals attempted to endorse his poetry abroad with the help of eminent foreign intermediaries and translations into German, one of the major languages of Europe and the official language of the Austrian Empire. Such an export strategy characterizing the external worlding of peripheral classics first materialized in Slovenia with Preširenklänge (Prešeren’s Strains, 1880), the volume by the Austrian poet Edward Samhaber (1846–1927). His is a free German translation of excerpts from Prešeren woven into an emotionally laden, almost hagiographic narrative about the Slovenian national poet. With the help of Samhaber’s translation, Slovenian intellectuals intended to demonstrate cultural equivalence of Slovenian language to that of the monarchy’s hegemonic nation. The editor, essayist, and literary critic Fran

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Levec (1846–1916) remembers the plans of Stritar’s literary circle in Vienna: “We wanted to draw attention of the audience that reads and thinks in German to our Prešeren and thus demonstrate that the despised nation of Slovenia has a poet who deserves the company of the greatest poets of modern nations” (quoted in Glonar 1927: 417–418). The promotional strategy of Prešeren’s worlding with the help of translations by an acknowledged writer able to familiarize the German-speaking region with Slovenian national classic appeared to have brought the firstfruits toward the end of the century. For instance, in his 1881 history of world literature (Allgemeine Geschichte der Literatur), the renowned German writer and cultural historian Johannes Scherr mentioned Prešeren, while the Germanic scholar A. E. Schönbach listed Prešeren among the “must-read” authors for European (Über Lesen und Bildung, 1888, 1913) (Glonar 1927: 419). That Prešeren had the opportunity to cross the threshold of world literature by the end of the nineteenth century through his active presence in a more prominent literature (as Damrosch [2003: 4, 15] qualifies the work of world literature), was the merit of translations of his “Wreath of Sonnets” and other poetry printed in the Russian Empire. Boris A. Novak argued that the Russian translation of Prešeren’s sonnet wreath published in the Moscow monthly magazine Russkaja mysl (The Russian Thought) of 1889 by a renowned Slavic scholar and academician Fyodor E. Korsh exerted influence not only on Valery Bryusov but also on other Russian symbolists and unnamed Slavic poets. The Russian translation of Prešeren’s “Wreath of Sonnets” supposedly instigated renowned Russian poets to adopt this complex form, which had hitherto not been known in their language (Novak 2001: 57). Unfortunately, Novak’s farreaching conclusions appear to be premature. The recent Russian research confirms that the first sonnet wreath in the Russian language was, in fact, Korsh’s translation of Prešeren (Kvyatkovskij 1966), but at the same time it points out that Prešeren undoubtedly influenced only the first original Russian sonnet wreath, which was included in the 1894 poetry collection written by a less known Vsevolod E. Cheshikhin (Shishkin 1995: 194–195; Podkovyrova 1998: 1–3). Both Korsh’s translation of Prešeren and Cheshikhin’s ­ original sonnet wreath (“Venok sonetov na mogilu M.  E. Saltykova”) have lacked proper echoes and followers for nearly twenty years. Bryusov—who used to be Korsh’s student—wrote his first sonnet wreath only in 1916, yet under the influence of Vyacheslav Ivanov and Maximilian A. Voloshin.

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The reasons for the time gap between Prešeren’s translation and the rise of Russian sonnet wreaths were probably the resistance of Russian literature of that period to formalism and larpurlartism (what Prešeren’s mannerist form might have connoted) and Prešeren’s national theme, which might have appeared to be too particularistic or subversive to attract the poets of an imperial nation (see Shishkin 1995: 194; Podkovyrova 1998: 4–5). Thus, the Russian production of sonnet wreaths did not begin until 1909, with Ivanov and Voloshin; from the perspective of Symbolism, they recognized the symbolic value in the rigor of the complex form (see Shishkin 1995: 196–198). However, Ivanov’s 1909 “Sonetnyj venok” did not find inspiration in Prešeren, but in the German poet Johannes von Guenther (1886–1973). At that time Guenther lived in Moscow and St. Petersburg, associating with Russian literary circles; in 1906, Ivanov even reviewed his poetry debut which contains a sonnet wreath (Podkovyrova 1998: 6–8). It seems, then, that Prešeren, as a top author of a minor Slavic nation subjugated to the Habsburg Empire, could not be as influential in the Russian Empire as a minor German poet von Guenther, a representative of a culture whose models traditionally appealed to Russian elites. In this case, the Slavic idea did not help Prešeren’s worlding. To conclude, Prešeren’s alleged influence on a more extensive literature remains uncertain, but even in the opposite case, it would be an isolated phenomenon. Given that translation is a decisive factor of the cross-national circulation of texts, while world literature is translated literature for the majority of international audiences, the reasons why Prešeren has not become a world author have to be discovered in the logic of the world-system of translation and the problem of translatability. Grand literatures having a surplus of exports over imports in translation, as a rule, are not so interested in developments beyond their (linguistic) boundaries. In the case they are, they are mostly attracted by other major players in the world literary scene or works, which are just “exotic” enough to remain intelligible and translatable into domestic literary codes, while they are still different enough to wake up interest. The latter kind of translations is mostly a matter of niche market (see Apter 2006: 97–99). Prešeren’s translations do not belong to any of these options of the world-system of translation; they have also lacked the backup of major international consecrators (see Casanova 2010: 294–302). They could not enter in any other niche category through which the authors of the peripheries may acquire global fame, conquer transnational publishing industry or at least overwhelm the boutique publishing sector.15 15  For instance, the niches of genres (Scandinavian crime fiction), identity politics (postcolonial, migrant, feminist, or LGBTQ literature), or topical issues (the breakthrough of

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Moreover, Prešeren’s poetry belongs to the type of stylistically complex, linguistically localized, and intertextually saturated texts (also found in major languages, e.g., in Arabic; see Apter 2006: 104), whose language is close to the limits of translatability. Consequently, it is highly demanding for a translator to create their equivalent in the target language and even more difficult “to invent for the foreign text new readerships,” to borrow Venuti’s wording (2000: 482). Paradoxically, beginning with Samhaber’s German edition which appeared to have promised Prešeren’s transnational success, it has been primarily inadequate translations and the resulting corrupted images of his poetry that hindered his worldwide reception and prevented the invention of his global audience. Prešeren’s poetic language is very challenging to translate since it blends classical topoi, cosmopolitan intellectual reflection, and architectonic composition with Romantic sentiment, nationalist commitment, jovial puns, and elements of vernacular idiom. Glonar’s harsh criticism of Samhaber’s Preširenklänge reveals how shallow Prešeren may sound in another language: “In Samhaber, Prešeren appears to be but a dwarf counterfeit: initially conceived as a translation, the book gradually turns into a diluted reworking, into a symphony redacted for the accordion” (Glonar 1927: 490). In several subsequent English translations, as well, Prešeren appears as a washed-out classicist and sentimentalist epigone (see Stanovnik 1997). Thus, Prešeren’s singular voice, recognizable in the original, drowns in universality, instead of expressing it in an unrepeatable way—translated, it is lost in the subterranean of world literature, on the bookshelves of what Marta Cohen, in passing, termed “the great unread” (Cohen 1999: 23). As mentioned above, Georg Brandes addressed a similar impasse minor literatures find themselves in their attempts to gain world recognition. In 1899, he complained about the necessity of imperfect translations of Danish, Greek, Hungarian, or other literary works produced in smaller languages. Since hardly anybody outside these countries understands the nuances of their languages, these literatures entirely depend on translations, which are unavoidably mere surrogates of the original textual power. Until today, Prešeren has remained almost unrecognized as a poet of the Romantic hyper-canon outside Slovenia. The question is whether this will ever change. The European Romantic canon has formed on the basis of the social capital the Romantic authors accumulated mostly during their Bartol’s Alamut due to the outbreak of Islamism or the success of Slavenka Drakulić in the light of the wars in the Balkans).

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lifetime. Their international prestige grew from their public images, popularity among readers, translations into major languages, their cosmopolitan or exceptional way of life, and the publicity they gained in European metropolises. Compared to, say, Mickiewicz, Prešeren did not work in any European metropolis, while his contacts with intellectuals and artists outside Carniola were scarce. He did not bother enough for self-promotion and cosmopolitan networking. In comparison with Byron, the superstar dandy and a Pan-European icon, Prešeren lacked the charisma of originality and the English mother tongue, so he was not imitated by anybody outside Slovenia. Prešeren’s chances for European reputation were non-­ existent, not only due to his class deprivation (unlike several prominent European Romantics, he was not a noble or a wealthy bourgeois by birth), but even more so because of his language and involvement in Slovenian literary ecology, whose position in the international competition was that of a marginal newcomer. What can be learned about Prešeren’s wordling, his active presence outside the domestic literary system from the bibliography of his translations, these doors or windows to the world? From 1877 to 1970, translations of Prešeren’s individual poems were listed in 33 transnational anthologies of translation, including Selwer’s 1918 Anthology of Modern Slavonic Literature published in London (Bulovec 1975: 133–136).16 Still, the continuous anthologizing of Prešeren’s individual text has not contributed much to the success of his actual worlding. Nor has helped the fact that Prešeren’s Poesies or selections thereof won critical acclaim in other lands of the Habsburg Empire during Prešeren’s lifetime and were until the end of the century continuously translated into German, once also in Czech and Russian. From 1865 to 1969, thirty-one books of Prešeren’s poetry were printed in ten foreign languages, some of them in several editions. Nevertheless, with the exception of six German, two English, two Russian, and one Chinese and the Bengali translation, the target languages are of lesser diffusion, usually South Slavic. Moreover, the translated books were mostly published in Slovenia or in the polities to which Slovenians once belonged; only seven books were printed abroad

16  As a rule, these editions are anthologies of Slovenian, South Slavic, or Slavic literatures. They were printed in German, Italian, English, Spanish, French, Russian, Hungarian, and Serbian or Croatian.

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outside this framework until 1970.17 Typically, the leading target language until the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire was German, whereas, during the existence of both Yugoslav states (i.e., the interwar Kingdom of Yugoslavia and the post-WWII Socialist Federative Republic of Yugoslavia), it was Croatian or Serbian. The first book of Prešeren to be translated into global English was published only in 1954 in Oxford, but with the help of Slovenian intermediaries. The UNESCO Index translationum for the period 1979–2007, somehow surprisingly, shows that Prešeren belongs to Romantics still alive in translation. Granted, he cannot compete with thousands of Pushkins and Hugos nor with hundreds of Byrons. Still, he has been translated more than many other European Romantics and national poets: he records twenty-eight individual books of translations and three publications in transnational anthologies. There are more and more translations into the languages whose literary traditions are central to the world-system or at least semi-peripheral: the Russian and the German languages have five book translations of Prešeren each, the English and Italian four translations each, whereas Prešeren also appeared in the French translation. However, the geography of publishers shows that Slovenian publishing houses and those from the region of the former Yugoslavia have kept the leading position. Apart from Moscow, Minsk, Prague, and Tirana, only two book translations of Prešeren were printed “in the West,” that is, in nearby Austria and Bavaria, albeit with publishers of Slovenian descent. From the map of publication places of Prešeren’s book translations in a period covered by Bulovec’s and UNESCO’s bibliographies, one can decipher a symptomatic spatial pattern. Forming an arrow directed to the West, translations of Prešeren concentrate in the arms of the Slavic world, while almost disappearing west of Munich (except for Oxford and London). Slovenian publishers printed as many as 40% of them, primarily to celebrate Prešeren’s Jubilee Year of 2000. The title of the recent Slovenian collection of translations “Prešernova pot v svet” (Prešeren’s way into the world) discloses that the old nineteenth-century strategy of worlding is still at work—that is, to seek the recognition of the core 17  The decision to translate Prešeren was, in the case of these seven editions, most likely motivated by non-market, personal engagement of translators or by sympathies and linguistic-ethnic or political alliances between the original literary system (Slovenian or Yugoslav) and target literature, such as the Slavic solidarity, Non-Aligned Movement, or international socialism.

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l­ iterary systems by subsidizing the translations into major world languages and seeking for globally acknowledged consecrators. Prešeren continues to travel the world primarily with the support of his country. Nevertheless, Slovenia worlds its national classic, just like other peripheries and semi-­ peripheries tend to do. In many other smaller countries, too, translations into major languages with a representative function are planned and subsidized through financial mechanisms and institutions of the home literary system with the expectation that they would confirm the intrasystemic assessment of the exported author.18 However, given that the world-­systems of literature and translation intersect in the publishing industry, which is branch of economy, there can be no proper worlding of peripheral literature without translations and consecrations that are motivated by durable or raising demands of the transnational literary market.

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Index1

A ABC-War/Alphabet War, Slovenian, 22, 70, 183, 190, 233–236, 244 Abu Lughod, Janet, 24 Academia Operosorum, 101–102n12, 103, 103n14, 104n15 Accelerated evolution, 101 Aesthetic ideology/discourse, 6–10, 12, 16, 20, 23, 25–29, 29n5, 36, 37, 37n1, 39, 40, 42, 47, 48, 50, 54, 65, 68, 72, 73, 75, 82–86, 94, 97, 98, 112–114, 117, 120, 120n27, 129, 133, 135, 137, 148, 149, 151, 153–155, 161, 162, 165, 166, 169, 179, 180n41, 185, 187, 199, 209, 210, 212, 214–216, 220, 221, 224, 226, 227, 230, 236, 241, 243 Aesthetic sphere, 41 Ahacˇicˇ, Kozma, 102n13 Albrecht, Andrea, 162–165, 163n18, 165n23

Alfieri, Vittorio, 121 Allusion, 41, 56, 82, 84–86, 106n17, 114n22, 117, 125, 129, 208 Almanac, literary, 4, 5, 22, 44, 45n7, 70, 85–87, 101–111, 114, 115, 116n23, 119, 121, 122, 123n30, 127, 135, 146, 183, 183n43, 184, 186, 217, 233, 235, 236, 238 Althusser, Louis, 215 Alyn, Marc, 76 Amin, Samir, 24 Anacreon, 91 Anderson, Benedict, 98, 200, 214 Anthology, 120n26, 164n19, 179, 189, 235, 241, 249 Antiquity, 9, 10, 20, 38, 46, 55, 86, 87, 91, 92, 102, 104n15, 107, 109–111, 114, 114n22, 115, 125, 142n1, 152, 159, 167, 168, 173, 174, 179, 180, 187, 189n47, 201–203, 205, 215, 240, 241

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s) 2019 M. Juvan, Worlding a Peripheral Literature, Canon and World Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-32-9405-9

277

278 

INDEX

Antonomasia, 212 Apollo, 85, 88, 90, 91, 105, 105n17, 106, 121, 125, 136 Appadurai, Arjun, 65 Apter, Emily, 65, 69, 75, 227, 247, 248 Arac, Jonathan, 13, 64 Arendt, Hannah, 220 Aron, Raymond, 40 Assmann, Aleida, 81 Assmann, Jan, 81 Auerbach, Erich, 232 Austro-Slavism, 22 Autonomization of literature, 97–101, 110, 114, 119 Autopoiesis, of literary systems, 6, 84–85, 110 Avant-garde, 18, 72–76, 136 B Bachleitner, Norbert, 223 Bakhtin, Mikhail M., 37, 68, 202, 214, 219 Bal, Mieke, 14, 66 Balibar, Étienne, 170 Balzac, Honoré de, 97 Baroque, 51n12, 86, 91, 99, 100, 102n12, 103–106, 104n15, 114n22, 180, 187, 189, 204 Barthes, Roland, 21, 199–201 Bartol, Vladimir, 1, 2, 30, 248n15 Bassnett, Susan, 229 Beck, Ulrich, 141, 142 Beecroft, Alexander, 15, 92–97, 99, 99n8, 102, 113, 114, 120, 130 Behdad, Ali, 14 Beiser, Frederick, 151 Bellah, Robert N., 40 Berkopec, Oton, 237, 238 Bessière, Jean, 64 Bibliomigrancy, 7, 73

Bildungsbürgertum, 112, 122, 234 Bilingualism, 4, 47, 52, 99, 120, 122 Birus, Hendrik, 161 Biti, Vladimir, 69, 169–174, 170n31, 173n33 Bleiweis, Janez, 105, 126–128, 135 Bloom, Harold, 55, 145 Boccalini, Traiano, 91 Bohoricˇ, Adam, 99 Book/publishing market, 3, 5, 7, 15, 16, 23, 26, 29, 40, 55, 63, 63n2, 66, 67, 71, 75, 76, 81, 94, 99, 101n12, 126, 127, 132, 133, 159n15, 186, 188, 189, 200, 210, 211, 217, 219, 228, 231, 235, 248–250 Bosold-DasGupta, Bettina, 90, 91 Botev, Hristo, 43, 50, 50n11 Bourdieu, Pierre, 97, 97n7, 219 Bourgeoisie, 11, 98, 122, 133n39, 153, 169, 202, 215, 217 Bourgeois society, 148, 151, 154, 200, 201, 212, 216 Bouterwek, Friedrich, 19, 162, 163, 163n18, 167, 172 Bowring, John, 241 Brandes, Georg, 71, 231, 248 Braudel, Fernand, 14 Brooks, David, 74, 76 Brouillette, Sarah, 68, 75 Bryusov, Valery, 246 Buescu, Helena, 8, 188 Bulovec, Štefka, 249, 250 Bürger, Gottfried August, 5, 114, 187, 245 Burlesque, 125, 128, 129 Burns, Robert, 43 Byron, George Gordon Noel, 5, 45, 114, 159, 174n36, 187, 189n47, 206, 207, 249, 250

 INDEX 

C Calderón (Pedro Calderón de la Barca), 54, 158, 158n14, 240 Camões, Luís Vaz de, 114n22, 117, 180n41, 202, 204 Cankar, Ivan, 52, 210, 214 Canon and authority, 81 classical (of the Antiquity), 9, 46, 86, 92, 109, 110, 125, 142n1, 168, 179, 203, 215, 240 Greco-Latin, 19, 41, 86 hegemonic, 82 national, 16, 18, 19, 43, 45, 49, 55, 81–137, 181, 215, 228, 232 of national literature, 9, 20, 54, 62, 81–137, 172, 181, 228, 232 vernacular, 16, 65, 86, 95, 107, 109, 114, 119, 120, 147, 152, 168 of world literature, 12, 16, 41, 48, 54, 55, 75, 111–118, 132, 181 Canonicity, 3, 16, 30, 35–56, 81, 84, 86, 87, 89, 109–111, 129, 145 Canonization, 2, 5, 7, 16, 17, 21, 27, 38–40, 43, 46, 48, 51, 51n13, 54, 82, 83, 87, 89, 100, 120, 121, 126–137, 171, 232 of national poets, 17, 39 Capitalism, 7, 12, 14, 17, 23–25, 27, 36, 40, 65, 71, 73, 75, 115, 116, 204, 220, 230 late, 5, 7, 12, 23–25, 27 Carantania, 47, 97, 130, 204 Carlyle, Thomas, 160 Carniola, 19, 52, 86, 86n2, 94, 99, 102–104, 104n15, 106, 107, 111–113, 113n21, 115, 118n24, 119, 122, 124, 125, 136, 141–192, 204, 207n1, 228, 238, 244, 245, 249

279

Carravetta, Peter, 36, 38, 83 Casanova, Pascale, 7–9, 12–14, 27, 49, 49n10, 61–64, 66, 68, 69, 71, 98, 154, 219, 230, 231, 243, 247 Catholic Church, 16, 43, 100, 167n27 ˇ elakovský, František L., 22, 70, 186, C 186n44, 233, 235–238, 237n9, 237n10, 239n12, 240–244 Censorship, 5, 16, 36, 113n21, 170n31, 223, 224 Center vs. periphery in literary world-system, 17, 18, 65, 71 in translation world-system, 23, 64 Cervantes, Miguel, 39, 50, 117, 163n19, 180n41, 228 Chamisso, Adelbert von, 45 Cheah, Pheng, 21, 29, 36, 219–222, 224, 226 Cheshikhin, Vsevolod E., 246 Chronotope, 73, 219 Circulation, 6, 8, 11–13, 16, 18, 20, 23, 24, 26, 29, 36, 56, 61, 63, 72, 93, 113, 116, 141, 143, 154–162, 170, 170n31, 186n44, 219–222, 224, 226, 230, 231, 233, 239, 244, 247 Citationality, 144, 144n5, 187, 242 Civil religion, 40 Classic of the Antiquity, 46, 86, 104, 104n15, 110, 111, 114, 114n22, 125, 152, 159, 179, 180, 187, 203 national, 51, 83, 121, 125, 127, 129–137, 161, 233, 241, 242n13, 246, 251 Classical tradition, 20, 50, 51, 109, 111, 114, 142n1 Classicism, 37, 100, 102n12, 104, 157, 233, 242

280 

INDEX

Cohen, Deborah, 248 Colonialism, 18, 95 Commodification, 23–25, 97 Comparative literature, 5–6, 8, 13, 21, 26, 28, 64, 70, 103, 134, 141–145, 163n19, 214, 224–226, 229, 230 Compromise, 20, 21, 28, 29, 81, 188, 199–217 Connel, Liam, 24n3 Conrad, Sebastian, 142 Consecration, 68, 82, 239, 251 Cooppan, Vilashini, 26 Cˇop, Matija, 4, 5, 19, 20, 22, 52–54, 70, 118n24, 120, 122, 123, 123n30, 134, 136, 147, 158, 159, 167, 168, 173–186, 174n36, 178n40, 183n43, 186n44, 188–192, 189n46, 205, 206, 209, 215, 227, 233, 234, 237, 237n9, 238, 240–244 Copyright, 7, 144, 230 Cornea, Paul, 81 Cosmopolitan discourse, enablers and agencies of, 6, 161, 169 Cosmopolitanism aesthetic, 22, 182, 232 literary, 19, 147, 162–171, 188, 190, 241 nationalist, 164 Romantic, 19, 20, 172, 187, 192, 241 Costa, Etbin Henrik, 120, 127n32 Counter-Reformation, 99 Cultural capital, 38, 39, 43, 62, 75, 86, 117, 118, 145, 189 Cultural memory, 41, 55, 56, 83 Cultural saint, 40, 41, 43–46, 48, 146, 232, 233, 245 Cultural transfer, 6, 19, 44, 106, 141–147, 163–164n19, 172, 180n41, 182, 188, 190, 241

Culture elite/high, 10, 30, 50, 68, 82, 109, 160, 161, 165, 183, 185 folk, 123, 124 market, 12 mass/popular, 10, 48, 50 planning, 43, 43n3, 100, 123n30 Cultured/educated class, 10, 19, 22, 39, 45n7, 47, 94, 99, 100, 109, 112, 122–124, 153, 177, 182–184, 242 Czech literature, 236, 243 D Dalmatin, Jurij, 99 Damrosch, David, 7, 8, 10, 12–14, 27, 36, 38, 55, 61, 64, 65, 83, 186, 230, 238, 246 Dante Alighieri, 39, 48–50, 51n12, 54, 91, 95, 114n22, 117, 133, 179, 180n41, 187, 205 De Lillo, Don, 23 Defoe, Daniel, 67 Denial (Verleugnung), 18, 71 Denmark, Kingdom of, 47 Dependence, 16, 61, 67, 103, 103n14, 130, 144, 147, 177, 201, 213, 214, 224 Dependent vs. hegemonic literatures, 2, 6, 9, 11, 13, 17, 23, 25, 47, 49, 56, 61, 63, 64, 88, 96, 97, 109, 111, 114, 118n24, 143n4, 169, 171, 172, 185, 186, 203, 215, 219, 233, 234 Derrida, Jacques, 220 Dev, Anton Feliks, 86, 101, 101n12, 103n14, 105–111, 109n19, 114, 118, 120, 125, 135 D’haen, Theo, 7, 8, 10, 157, 160–162, 230, 232 Dialogism, 8, 10, 13, 16, 144, 202, 214

 INDEX 

Dialogue, 8–13, 69, 121, 135, 136, 169, 170, 207, 230 Diffusionism, 13, 14, 64, 70 Dobrovský, Josef, 239, 244 Dolnicˇar, Janez Gregor, 104n15 Domestification, 101–111, 129, 136 Domínguez, César, 61, 229 Dostoevsky, Fyodor Mikhailovich, 71, 228 Dovic´, Marijan, 40, 41, 43, 44n6, 45, 52, 74, 136n41 Du Bellay, Joachim, 95 ˇ urišin, Dionýz, 12, 15, 18, 61, 66, D 67, 70, 92, 100, 101, 145, 244 Duval, Alexandre, 191 Dvorˇák, Karel, 240 E East-Central Europe, 30, 52n14, 72, 170 Eckermann, Johann Peter, 7, 9, 35, 155, 169, 190, 191, 240 Ecology of literature cosmopolitan, 94, 96, 98 epichoric, 93, 94 global, 93, 119 national, 95, 97, 100 panchoric, 93, 94 vernacular, 94, 95, 95n6, 99n8, 107, 109, 112, 147 Egilsson, Sveinn Yngvi, 44n6, 45, 46 Elegy, 5, 52, 105–107, 111, 114n22, 129, 192, 206, 207, 216, 236 Elysium, 19, 84–91, 95, 101, 135, 136 Emergence, of a literary system, 3, 25, 41, 46, 62n1, 67, 85–87, 91–97, 100, 118, 161 Emerson, Caryl, 200 Eminescu, Mihai, 43, 51n12

281

Empire, 5, 19, 22, 23, 25, 37, 49, 63, 70, 86, 94, 97, 103, 104n15, 110, 112n20, 113, 123, 137, 150, 171, 205, 215, 223, 227, 233, 234, 239, 244–247, 249, 250 Emulation, 50, 110, 111, 157, 185, 242 Endres, Johannes, 152, 159n15, 164n21, 165–167, 165n23, 166n26, 167n27, 168n29 Engels, Friedrich/Frederick, 10, 11, 19, 35, 36, 156n12, 168n29 Enlightenment conservative, 52, 182 radical, 222, 223 Entangled history, 143, 145, 146, 221 Eoyang, Eugene Chen, 63, 63n2, 251n18 Epic modern, 199, 203, 211, 216 national, 114, 200, 202, 204, 205, 209, 211, 216 Espagne, Michel, 143 Eurocentrism, 30, 64, 159, 188, 232 Eurochronology, 18, 65 Europe, 3, 8, 10, 15, 17, 19, 21, 37, 38, 40, 42, 47, 66–69, 72, 74, 91, 94–96, 98, 99, 114, 115, 123, 143, 151, 153, 160, 163n18, 164, 165, 165n23, 167–170, 173, 180n41, 181, 184, 185, 189, 201, 223, 224, 227, 231, 234, 242, 244, 245 European literature, 15, 16, 19–21, 44, 46, 54, 72, 109, 111, 147, 165n23, 166, 167, 174, 182, 184, 188, 189, 191, 200, 232, 242n13 Even-Zohar, Itamar, 43, 62n1, 67, 68, 109, 111, 143n4, 229 Exoticism, 69, 70 Eysteinsson, Ástrádur, 61, 75, 227

282 

INDEX

F Family romance, and nationalism, 96 Folk poetry, 124, 235, 239–241 Frank, André Gunder, 24 Frassinelli, Pier Paolo, 14, 64, 70, 141 Friedman, Susan Stanford, 75 Furst, Lilian R., 205 Fusillo, Massimo, 202 G Gálik, Marián, 244 Genre system, 200, 205 Gentile, Emilio, 40 Geoculture, 11, 13, 15, 36, 56, 230 German Confederation, 113, 159 German language, 86, 103, 171, 171n32, 180, 181, 183, 250 German literature, 8, 10, 66, 96, 100, 143, 159, 160, 162, 163, 172, 173, 178, 180, 241, 245 German Romanticism, 149, 152, 174 on theory and poetry, 149 Ghazel, 5, 114n22, 180, 187 Gills, Barry K., 24 Gleim, Johann Wilhelm Ludwig, 222 Globalization, 5, 6, 8, 10, 14, 17, 23–28, 24n3, 24n4, 29n5, 36, 64, 92, 220, 224–226, 229, 230 Global literature, 35, 65, 221 Glonar, Joža, 246, 248 Glosa, 115, 116n23, 117–119, 187 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 2, 3, 6–13, 16, 17, 19, 20, 24, 26, 29, 35, 36, 48, 49, 51, 53, 64, 66, 92, 111, 133, 134, 134n40, 136, 141, 144n5, 147, 152, 154–162, 156n12, 157n13, 158n14, 159n15, 160n16, 166, 168–172, 168n29, 169n30, 175n36, 179–181, 183, 183n43, 188–192, 189n46, 190n48, 203, 209, 216, 225, 226, 228, 230, 238–241, 243, 245

Goßens, Peter, 141 Grimm, Jacob, 239 Grün, Anastasius (Anton Alexander von Auersperg), 4, 132n36, 245 Gspan, Alfonz, 102, 119 Guenther, Johannes von, 247 Guillory, John, 43, 43n4, 81, 86, 100n9 Gunn, Giless, 24n3 Gupta, Suman, 23–25, 24n3 H Habjan, Jernej, 39, 213 Habsburg/Austrian Empire, 5, 19, 22, 23, 47, 70, 86, 95n6, 103, 110, 112n20, 113, 123, 137, 147, 167, 182, 205, 215, 223, 227, 233, 234, 239, 244, 245, 247, 249 Hafez, 9, 157, 158 Hallgrímsson, Jónas, 17, 43–45, 45n7, 47, 48 Hammer, M. Gail, 40 Hammer-Purgstall, Joseph von, 157 Hamsun, Knut, 71 Hancke, Gottfried Benjamin, 105 Haupt, Heinz-Gerhard, 142 Hayot, Eric, 8, 16, 21, 48, 56, 219, 220, 224, 226 Hazard, Paul, 21, 228 Hegel, Georg W. F., 200–202 Hegemony, 8, 10, 11, 14, 16, 24, 130, 144, 230 Heideggarianism, 29 Heidegger, Martin, 21, 29, 219, 220, 224 Heilbron, Johan, 62, 63 Heiliger, Wilhelm, 76 Heine, Heinrich, 45, 167n27 Helgason, Jón Karl, 40, 41, 43, 44n6, 45, 46, 136n41 Helgesson, Stefan, 61, 68 Helicon, 88–90, 89n4, 106, 120, 121, 129

 INDEX 

Herder, Johann Gottfried von, 22, 96, 123, 152, 157, 166, 170, 171, 173, 234 Hermannsthal, Franz Hermann von, 192 Hesiod, 88–90, 89n4, 125 Heteroglossia, 42, 51, 185, 200–203 High culture, 10, 30, 82, 109, 165, 183, 185 Hladnik, Miran, 132n36 Holly, Jan, 202 Holy Roman Empire, 104n15, 167 Homage, 119–121, 120n26, 136, 158 Homer, 50, 89, 89n4, 91, 117, 125, 136, 176, 202, 205 Horace, 91, 125 Hroch, Miroslav, 118n24, 153, 154, 216 Huggan, Graham, 14 Humanism, 3, 7–11, 20, 55, 64, 71, 241 Humboldt, Wilhelm von, 96, 152 Hybrid, 27, 149, 150, 203, 206, 216 Hybridization, 24 Hyper-canon, 16, 19, 23, 38, 43, 51, 54, 55, 75, 111, 114, 132, 142n1, 227, 248 I Ibsen, Henrik, 71 Icelandic literature, 17, 36 Ideology aesthetic, 8, 10, 36, 37n1, 133, 148 romantic, 85, 116, 117, 142 Imagined community, 50, 87, 97, 98, 118, 124, 202 Imperialism, 95, 220, 225, 226 In-between peripherality, 73 Indian literature, 163n19 Influence, 13, 18, 22, 46, 62, 66, 68, 71, 75, 81, 101n11, 103, 105n16, 112, 134, 143–146, 154, 163, 165, 166, 175–177, 182, 199, 221, 237, 244, 246, 247, 251n18

283

Intercultural understanding, 10, 157 Interliterariness, 14, 70, 141, 143, 144, 229, 244 Interliterary community, 22, 92, 233, 234, 237, 239, 244 Inter-state system, 6, 15, 16, 161, 230 Intertextuality, 3, 114, 118, 134, 143, 144, 157, 158, 174, 181, 220 Ivanov, Vyacheslav, 246, 247 J Jacobsen, Jens Peter, 71 Jameson, Fredric, 24n3, 75 Jena Romanticism, 148 Jónsdóttir, Guðríður Borghildur, 44 Jungmann, Josef, 236, 241, 242n13 Jurcˇicˇ, Josip, 21, 131, 203, 204, 212–214, 216 Juvan, Marko, 3n1, 3n2, 5, 7, 15, 20, 44n5, 65, 113, 136n41, 143, 148, 181, 187, 201, 202, 207, 210, 212, 213 K Kadir, Djelal, 16, 21, 23, 48, 224–226 Kaelble, Hartmut, 145n6 Karadžic´, Vuk, 239 Kastelic, Miha, 119, 122, 186 Keller, Adolf, 40 Kemal, Namik, 67 Khomeini, Sayyid Ruhollah Mu¯savi, 2 Kidricˇ, France, 167, 174, 182, 189, 190 Kirby, John T., 36, 38 Kliger, Ilya, 14, 18, 66, 68 Knobl, Pavel, 102n12 Koch, Manfred, 7–9, 152, 154–157, 161, 190 Kocka, Jürgen, 142 Kollár, Ján, 45, 129 Kontje, Todd, 158

284 

INDEX

Kopitar, Jernej/Bartholomäus, 4, 5, 22, 52, 105, 105n16, 116n23, 122–124, 123n30, 135, 136, 182, 186, 186n44, 190, 234, 235, 237–239, 237n9, 244 Koropeckyj, Roman, 43, 50 Korsh, Fyodor E., 246 Koruza, Jože, 101n11, 101n12, 103n14, 105–108, 105–106n17 Korytko, Emil, 4 Kos, Janko, 167, 174, 180, 182, 183, 185, 188, 190, 192, 205, 206, 222, 234n3 Koseski, Janez/Jovan Vesel, 49, 127, 128 Kosovel, Srecˇko, 18, 72–76 Košuta, Miran, 1 Kozler, Peter, 112n20 Krasicki, Ignacy, 67 Krejcˇí, Karel, 126 Kreutzwald, Friedrich Reinhold, 43 Kristeva, Julia, 181 Kumerdej, Blaž, 103n14 Kundera, Milan, 232 Kvapil, Miroslav, 235 Kvyatkovskij, A. P., 246 L Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe, 84, 148, 149 Lamartine, Alphonse de, 159 Lamberg, Franz Adam, 106n17 Language cosmopolitan, 94, 97, 111, 185 cultivation of, 42, 172–180, 185 Latin, 92 literary, 43, 62n1, 83, 86, 95, 96, 100, 100n9, 104, 105n16, 111, 114, 117, 122–124, 126, 129, 142n1, 147, 151, 154, 172, 176, 178, 179, 182, 184, 186, 205, 232, 233, 242

major, 15, 76, 226, 245, 248, 249, 251 as national attribute, 175 small, 2, 123 standard, 18, 38, 42, 43n4, 100, 102, 112, 185 standardization of, 22, 51, 100n9 vernacular, 42, 98, 114, 118, 122, 153, 177 world, 13, 27, 55, 61–63, 71, 224, 230, 231, 251 Latinity, 86, 95n6, 108 Latour, Bruno, 10 Lawall, Sarah, 12, 13, 55, 66 Leerssen, Joep, 44, 152, 154 Lefevere, André, 62 Legiša, Lino, 101n11, 102, 106, 108, 234n3 Lermontov, Mikhail, 202 Levec, Fran, 245–246 Levstik, Fran, 126–129, 126n31, 131, 132, 132n37, 136 Library, 8, 20, 22, 54, 55, 131, 132, 186, 188, 189, 189n46, 189n47 and world literature, 175 Linhart, Anton T., 99, 136, 204 Liska, Vivian, 75 Literary, 15 Literary history, 18, 21, 27, 39, 42, 65, 72, 81, 98, 114, 132n37, 143, 151, 162, 165n22, 166, 166n26, 167, 178n40, 213, 214, 229, 230 Literary innovation, 18 Literary journal/review, 7, 22, 45n7, 113, 121, 127, 161, 190, 191, 217, 228, 229n1, 238 Literary production, 8, 10, 36, 55, 62n1, 63n2, 96, 110, 112, 117, 127, 171, 227, 229, 231, 241 Literary system/field emergent/nascent, 9, 100, 118, 160, 215, 234

 INDEX 

national, 6, 19, 20, 48, 55, 97, 118, 121, 122, 127, 128, 180n41, 227 peripheral, 3, 16, 46, 49n10, 85–87, 100, 215 vernacular, 86, 152 world/literary world-system, 3, 3n1, 9, 13, 15, 22, 44n5, 51, 64, 66, 69–72, 76, 146, 172, 186, 213, 219, 229, 230, 234, 239, 244 Literization and literarization, 94, 99 Littérature-monde, 64 Lotman, Yuri, 18, 66, 68 Lukács, Georg, 202, 214 Luther, Martin, 94 M Maiorescu, Titu, 49 Malavašicˇ, Franc, 85, 127 Mani, Bala Venkat, 7, 8, 73, 189n46 Mannoni, Octave, 214 Manzoni, Alessandro, 159 Maran, René, 67 Marincˇicˇ, Marko, 205, 206 Marsh, Nicky, 24n3 Martin, Mircea, 49 Martinez, Guillaume, 1 Marx, Karl, 10, 11, 35, 36, 75, 156n12, 157n13 Mazzini, Giuseppe, 223 McGann, Jerome, 85, 116 Mediator, 9, 112, 145, 157, 162, 164n19, 171, 180, 186, 188, 229, 229n1, 239 Megiser, Hieronymus, 99 Metalanguage, 147–152 Meta-poetry/metapoem, 83, 85, 95, 117, 150, 187 Metelko, Franc Serafin, 123, 123n29, 136, 233, 237, 238, 244 Metropolis, 1, 2, 13, 28, 159, 249

285

Metternich, Klemens von, 5, 165, 190n48, 223 Meyer, Richard, 66 Micic´, Ljubomir, 74 Mickiewicz, Adam, 5, 43, 48, 50, 114, 133, 187, 202, 205, 209, 240, 249 Middell, Matthias, 145n6 Middle Ages, 38, 94, 100, 104n15, 111, 114n22, 167, 174, 189, 189n47, 201, 207 Mignolo, Walter D., 28 Miha˘ilescu, Ca˘lin-Andrei, 51n12 Millán-Zaibert, Elizabeth, 150, 151 Miller, J. Hillis, 26 Mimetic literature, 67 Minor/small literature, 2, 66, 69, 71–73, 75, 101, 248 Mix, York-Gothart, 164n19, 180n41 Miyoshi, Masao, 24n3 Mock-heroic, 126, 128 Mocˇnik, Rastko, 42, 47, 98 Modern/romanic poetry, 76, 149, 179 Modern classic, 39, 43, 46, 134, 158 Modernism, 42, 71, 75 Modernity, 9, 14, 15, 17, 45, 46, 50n10, 54, 65, 69, 72, 109, 150, 152, 174, 180, 189n47, 205, 215 Monolingualism, 14 Monolingual literature, 96 Monolingual paradigm, 96 Monti, Vincenzo, 191, 192 Moore, Thomas, 43, 159, 189n47 Moretti, Franco, 7, 12–15, 21, 25, 27, 28, 30, 40, 61, 62, 64, 66–68, 71, 72, 93, 199, 200, 202, 203, 211, 213, 216, 219, 229, 230 Morson, Gary Saul, 200 Moulton, Richard G., 66 Multilingual literature, 85 Muses, 85, 88, 89n4, 90, 91, 103–108, 108n18, 110, 111, 114n22, 121, 125, 129

286 

INDEX

N Nancy, Jean-Luc, 84, 148, 149 Napoleon (Napoleon Bonaparte), 40n2, 161, 165 Nation cultural (Kulturnation), 180 “historical” vs. “unhistorical,” 131 National classic (author), 16, 17, 51, 83, 92, 121, 125, 127, 129–137, 161, 233, 241, 242n13, 246, 251 Nationalism, 19, 22 cultural, 15, 17, 36, 37, 37n1, 48–51, 70, 87, 95, 98, 112, 124, 154, 176, 183, 200, 201, 215, 227, 233, 239, 245 dominating and dominated, 63 methodological, 26, 28, 141, 143, 144 Nationalization, of literature, 37n1, 97–101, 114, 142n1 National literature, 6, 8–13, 15, 16, 19–22, 30, 35, 37, 38, 42–43, 46–49, 49n10, 54, 62, 65, 70, 81–137, 142, 147, 151–155, 157, 162, 165, 168, 169, 169n30, 172–174, 180n41, 181, 187, 188, 190, 227, 228, 232, 238, 240, 241, 242n13, 244 National movement, 3, 15, 16, 18, 19, 39–41, 40n2, 43, 47, 50, 51, 54, 83, 86, 98, 112, 112n20, 113, 113n21, 118n24, 119, 120, 137, 146, 153, 154, 175, 181, 182, 201, 214–217, 223, 228, 234, 238, 245 phases of, 118n24, 147 National poet, 3, 5, 16, 17, 19–21, 23, 35–56, 87, 114, 129–131, 133–136, 211, 216, 219–251

National revival/awakening, 18, 22, 111–118, 188, 234, 235, 237, 243 Nation-building, 38, 39, 41, 42, 44, 47, 85, 110, 116, 119, 122, 152–154, 166n26, 200, 203 Nation-state, 6, 15, 16, 38, 40, 41, 93, 95, 96, 98, 141, 142, 142n2, 153, 206 Nemoianu, Virgil, 38, 41, 42, 46, 48, 50, 51, 134, 232 Nethersole, Reingard, 8, 73, 189 Neubauer, John, 41–43, 50, 51n13, 52n14 Neupokoyeva, Irina Grigorevna, 15, 92 Njegoš, Petar Petrovic´, 43, 50, 51n12, 202, 205, 228 Novak, Boris A., 246 Novel, 1, 2, 8, 21, 30, 40, 67, 68, 101n10, 114, 146, 151, 172, 200–203, 206, 207, 213–217 O O’Connor, Maura, 143n3, 145n6 Ocvirk, Anton, 21, 27, 145, 228, 229, 229n1 Old Slovenians, 126, 127n32, 128, 135 Oriental literatures, 163, 166, 168 Orožen, Martina, 99, 105n16 Orpheus, 87, 88, 90, 91, 114n22, 131, 132n38 Óskarsson, Þórir, 44 Osterhammel, Jürgen, 142n2 Other/otherness, 8, 9, 11, 12, 16, 28, 30, 37, 43, 44, 49, 52, 56, 65, 69, 144, 155, 158, 169n30, 204, 210, 220, 230, 232, 241 Ottava rima, 179, 207 Outsidedness, 37, 38 Ovid, 102n12, 117, 206

 INDEX 

P Paine, Thomas, 223 Palacký, František, 234, 235, 237, 244 Pan-Slavism, 185 Parnassus, 19, 84–91, 95, 96, 101–111, 114, 114n22, 119–121, 125–130, 127n33 Parody, 68, 85, 121, 128 Paternu, Boris, 127, 127n33, 174–180, 183, 205, 206, 223, 234n3, 245 Pegasus, 85, 88, 101n11, 108, 128, 129 Pencˇev, Boyko, 43, 50, 50n11 Peripherality, 2, 12, 72 Periphery, 16–20, 29, 36, 45, 64–72, 74, 86, 114, 118, 159, 181, 199, 204, 206, 213, 215, 226, 235, 243, 244 Perkins, Mary Ann, 40, 131 Perspectivism, 18, 65 Peter, Klaus, 7, 104n15, 165, 168n29 Peto˝fi, Sandor, 43, 50 Petrarch (Petrarca, Francesco), 4, 45, 54, 91, 114n22, 117, 134–136, 134n40, 179, 180n41, 187 Pirjevec, Dušan, 136, 137, 214 Pizer, John, 7, 8, 26, 66, 158–162, 159n15, 183 Plato, 176 Plutarch, 91 Podkovyrova, Vera G., 246, 247 Pogacˇnik, Jože, 105, 234n3 Pohlin, Marko, 102, 102n12, 102n13, 103n14, 106n17, 107, 122 Polyphony, 54, 185, 216, 232 Polysystem theory, 67, 229 Pope, Alexander, 43, 126, 128 Popovic´, Jovan, 202 Pospíšil, Ivo, 235 Possible world, 219, 221

287

Postcolonial studies/post-colonialism, 8, 13, 18, 64, 65 Postnational paradigm, 17, 64, 143 Post-Romanticism, 19, 38, 83 Potocˇnik, Blaž, 120, 121 Prendergast, Christopher, 14, 65 Prešeren, France, 3, 43, 70, 87, 147, 202, 222 Prešernian structure, 3n1, 136, 136n41, 137 Pribac, Bert, 74, 76 Prijatelj, Ivan, 131, 228, 234n3 Primic, Julija, 4 Print culture, 36, 42, 50 Print media, 8, 97, 100, 110, 154 Prosaics, 40, 200 Public sphere, 16, 18, 20, 22, 38, 42, 44, 47, 52, 85, 87, 96, 97, 113, 129, 147, 181 Publishing, 4, 5, 14, 23, 25, 35, 44, 47, 62, 63, 65, 71, 83, 113, 122, 231, 247, 250, 251 Puchmajer, Antonín Jaroslav, 235 Purism, 104, 121, 124, 161, 177, 183 Pushkin, Alexander S., 48, 133, 202, 205, 228, 240, 250 R Racine, Jean, 48, 133 Rajan, Tilottama, 205 Raphael (Raffaello Sanzio da Urbino), 91 Rationalization, 151 Reformation/Protestantism, 86n2, 94, 95, 99 Renaissance, 5, 7, 12, 26, 51n12, 91, 104n15, 106, 109, 114n22, 178, 180, 205 Republic of letters (respublica litteraria/litterarum), 8, 9, 22, 46, 49, 95, 160, 188, 239

288 

INDEX

Restoration/Pre-March Period (Vormärz), 40, 131, 155, 161, 171, 208, 222 Revolution, 2, 7, 73, 165, 223 Reymont, Władysław Stanisław, 228 Rimbaud, Arthur, 76 Ringler, Dick, 44 Rizal, José, 67 Rizzi, Vinzenz, 127n34, 245 Robinson, William I., 24n3 Romance metric/poetic forms, 179 Romance poetry, 164n19, 178, 187 Romantic classic, 20, 45, 87n3 Romanticism, 3, 4, 17, 19, 20, 38, 41, 51, 84, 92, 100, 114, 136, 147–152, 164n19, 175, 180, 181, 183, 188, 189n47, 215, 241 Ronsard, Pierre de, 202 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 40, 170 Runeberg, Johan Ludvig, 43 Russian Empire, 246, 247 S Sacred text, 21, 203, 212, 214, 216 Sacrificial narrative, 39, 40, 130–132 Šafárik, Pavel Josef, 178n40, 186, 186n44, 235, 235n4 Samhaber, Edward, 23, 245, 248 Sannazaro, Jacopo, 91 Sapiro, Gisèle, 16, 62, 63n2, 68, 142, 142n1, 145, 147, 231 Sappho, 91 Satire, 85, 115, 121, 122, 126, 128, 129, 135, 187, 236 Saussy, Haun, 24n3 Savio, Francesco Leopoldo, 158, 159, 191 Schamoni, Wolfgang, 36 Scherr, Johannes, 167n28, 246 Schiller, Friedrich, 43, 45, 51, 114, 134n40, 151, 152, 168n29, 205

Schlegel, August Wilhelm, 159, 163, 163n19, 164, 168n29, 171, 190n48 Schlegel, Friedrich von, 19, 148–150, 149n8, 149n9, 149–150n10, 152, 156, 159n15, 163n18, 164–168, 164n21, 165n23, 166n24, 166n25, 167n27, 168n29, 172–179, 176n38, 178n39, 183 Schlegelianism, 175, 180–192 Schlözer, August Ludwig, 35–36, 157 Schmidt, Siegfried J., 16, 47, 84, 97, 187 Schönbach, A. E., 246 Schönleben, Janez L., 99 Schulz-Buschhaus, Ulrich, 41, 91, 92 Schulze, Ernst, 202 Schwanitz, Dietrich, 84 Scott, Walter, 67, 159, 213, 214 Self-reference/self-referentiality, 84–87, 101, 115, 153, 187 Self-reflection, 9, 20, 65, 129, 149, 150, 157, 171 Semi-periphery, 68, 201, 243 Shakespeare, William, 39, 48–50, 54, 82, 132n37, 133, 163n19, 180n41, 228 Shango Lokoho, Tumba Alfred, 64 Shaw, George Bernard, 228 Shishkin, A. B., 246, 247 Sigurdsson, Jón, 46 Škulj, Jola, 142, 144 Slapšak, Svetlana, 50, 51n12 Slavic literatures, 69, 126, 176, 182, 235n4, 239, 249n16 Slavic reciprocity, 223, 235, 237, 244 Slodnjak, Anton, 3n2, 85, 174, 174–175n36 Slovenia, 5, 17, 19, 20, 27, 28, 75, 112, 112n20, 113, 136, 154, 216, 245, 246, 248, 249, 251

 INDEX 

Slovenian language, 52, 75, 86n2, 98–100, 99n8, 101n10, 110, 113, 113n21, 114, 120n26, 122, 123, 132n36, 137, 178n40, 185, 215, 228, 235, 241, 245 Slovenian Romanticism, 4, 158, 174, 175, 182 Smole, Andrej, 4 Snoj, Vid, 28, 29, 29n5 Social networks/networking, 3, 24, 47, 97, 235 Sonnet, 5, 51, 114n22, 123, 125, 130, 131, 134, 179, 187, 206, 207, 236 Sonnet wreath/wreath of sonnets, 23, 114n22, 129, 132, 246, 247 Spiridon, Monica, 67 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, 14, 64, 232 Spring of Nations, 113, 126, 216 Staël, Anne Louise Germaine, Madame de, 19, 163n19, 167, 168n29, 205 Stanovnik, Majda, 228, 248 Štefan, Rozka, 68, 190 Steiner, Ann, 71 Strich, Fritz, 7–13, 155, 157–161, 157n13, 160n16, 169n30, 191, 240 Strindberg, Gustav, 71 Stritar, Josip, 19, 20, 45, 48, 49, 127, 129, 131–136, 132n38, 134n40, 227, 228, 232, 245, 246 Strobel, Jochen, 164n19, 179, 180n41 Strosetzki, Christoph, 179 Susan S. Fried Friedman, Susan Stanford man, 18 Swaan, Abram de, 63 Symbolism, 72, 85, 209n3, 247

289

T Tedaldi-Fores, Carlo, 191, 192 Temporary subcenters, 18, 71, 243 Terence, 91 Terian, Andrei, 16, 49, 52, 67 Terza rima, 47, 114n22, 121, 179, 187, 204, 205, 207 Thomas, Dominic, 14 Thomsen, Mads Rosendahl, 7, 8, 14, 69, 71, 76, 230, 243 Thorarensen, Bjarni, 46 Tihanov, Galin, 69–72 Tilly, Charles, 145n6 Tolstoy, Lev Nikolayevich, 71, 228 Tominšek, Josip, 228 Topos, 2, 85–89, 91, 101n11, 106, 107, 109–111, 114, 120, 129, 135 Tötösy de Zepetnek, Steven, 73 Translation, 5–7, 13, 14, 16, 17, 21–23, 25, 27, 36, 44, 45, 55, 56, 61–76, 91, 94, 99, 102n12, 106, 109, 142n1, 157, 158, 161–166, 163n19, 171n32, 175n37, 176, 177, 179, 180n41, 183, 186, 186n44, 187, 190, 219–251 supply-driven, 228, 251n18 Translation Index (TI), 63, 63n2 Transnationalism/transnational literary studies, 13, 18, 26, 64, 65, 141–147, 229 Trauma narrative, 173, 173n33 Traveling concepts, 14, 15, 66 Travesty, 110, 126, 136 Trubar, Primož, 94, 99, 136 Tsu, Jing, 93n5 Turgenev, Ivan, 71 Tutek, Hrvoje, 3n1 Tynyanov, Yuri, 68

290 

INDEX

U Uhland, Ludwig, 245 Universalism, 10, 12, 19, 20, 122, 133, 163n18, 170, 172–180, 182, 185, 188, 190, 215, 216, 227, 241, 242 national, 170, 172–180, 185, 190, 227, 241 Untranslatability, 75 Utopia, 10, 86, 118, 132n38, 222, 224 V Valvasor, Janez V., 99, 204 Velde, Henk te, 145n6 Venuti, Lawrence, 230, 248 Vermeulen, Pieter, 61, 65, 68 Vernacular vs. cosmopolitan model of a national classic, 16 literature, 19, 38, 55, 108–111, 227 manifesto, 95, 102 Verse tale, 5, 114n22, 128, 130, 203, 206, 207, 216 Vidmar, Luka, 103–104n15, 109n19, 239 Vimr, Ondrˇej, 251n18 Vinkler, Jonatan, 234, 235, 239n12, 240, 242n13, 244 Virgil, 90, 91, 102n12, 108, 202, 204–206 Virk, Tomo, 21, 27 Vodicˇka, Felix, 233n2, 234, 235, 240, 243 Vodnik, Valentin, 4, 101n12, 119–121, 120n25, 120n26, 126–127, 127n32, 132, 136 Voegelin, Eric, 40 Voigt, Frederik A., 40 Vojvodic´, Jasmina, 145 Voloshin, Maximilian A., 246, 247 Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet), 170 Vraz, Stanko, 185

W Walkowitz, Rebecca, 1, 35 Wallerstein, Immanuel, 14, 15, 24, 64, 66, 219 Watson, David, 14, 64, 70, 141 Weber, Max, 39, 151 Weimar Classic, 152, 180 Wellek, René, 97 Weltliteratur, 2, 5–8, 10, 14, 15, 17, 19, 20, 24, 26–28, 35, 36, 47, 48, 54, 64, 66, 72, 157, 159–161, 159n15, 169, 172, 190, 192, 225, 230, 232, 241 the first and the second, 15, 72 Werner, Michael, 155, 156, 156n12 Western-centrism, 17, 65 Widdowson, Peter, 16, 97 Winckelmann, Johann Joachim, 152, 179 World classic (author), 20, 30, 49, 117–119, 158, 174, 228 World/global literary market, 230 World history, 19, 131, 165, 166n26, 167, 168, 172, 176, 204, 205, 216 Worlding, 6, 16, 18, 21–23, 29, 30, 48, 52, 54, 56, 134, 147, 152, 172, 174, 181, 182, 211, 219–251 inner and external, 22, 232, 233, 245 internal, 21, 174, 227, 228 outer, 227 World language, 13, 27, 55, 61–63, 71, 224, 230, 231, 251 World literary space, 2, 3n1, 9, 13, 37, 38, 54, 135, 219, 227, 232, 243 World literary system/literary world-­ system, 3, 3n1, 9, 13, 15, 22, 25, 26, 30, 44n5, 51, 64, 66, 69–72, 76, 93, 111, 142n1, 146, 151, 172, 186, 192, 213, 219, 229–231, 234, 239, 244

 INDEX 

World literature, 2, 35–56, 61–76, 83, 141–192, 211, 219 the epoch of, 70, 155, 160 World-making, 29, 220–222, 226 World market, 9, 36, 156, 157 World-system, 2, 3, 3n1, 6, 8, 15, 21, 24n4, 25–27, 30, 35, 36, 46, 63, 64, 66, 71, 72, 93, 95, 111, 142n1, 151, 160n16, 181, 192, 203, 211, 214, 219–251 World text, 199–217 World translation system/world-­ system of translation, 21, 23, 64, 71, 219–251 Writing, 2, 12, 20–23, 29, 35, 41, 43n3, 47, 61, 69, 73, 75, 81, 96, 98–100, 115, 118, 121, 122, 124, 150, 160, 165, 166, 175, 180n41, 181, 183, 184, 191, 199–205, 215, 230, 233, 236, 237, 241 classical vs. modern, 21, 41, 199–205, 215

291

Writing literature, as labor and vocation, 115, 175 Y Yildiz, Yasemin, 96 Young Italy, 146, 223 Young, Robert, 10 Young Slovenians, 5, 45n7, 121, 126–129, 131, 132n36, 135, 146 Z Zaleski, Wacław, 190 Závodský, Artur, 235, 238 Zelenka, Miloš, 244 Žigon, Avgust, 174, 174n36, 175, 189 Zimmermann, Bénédicte, 143n3, 145n6 Žirmunski, Viktor, 207 Žižek, Slavoj, 52, 210, 211 Zois, Sigismund (Žiga), 105, 135, 136, 239