Abstract
In the nineteenth century, national poets were invented to represent their respective communities to the Other symbolized by canonicity of world literature. Through “worlding,” national communities imagined their iconic poets as universal. Epitomizing Pan-European nationalization of literary discourse, Slovenians and Icelanders canonized their respective national poets France Prešeren (1800–1849) and Jónas Hallgrímsson (1807–1845) to counter dependency and peripherality of their emerging literatures. In the international arena, national poets were believed to demonstrate that a particular nation—especially if stateless—resembles the established nations and meets universal aesthetic standards of the world canon. These poets themselves initiated their worlding by rendering the topics of national importance in the aesthetic codes they transferred from the core literary systems of modern Europe.
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Notes
- 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.
- 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.
- 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).
- 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.
- 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).
- 8.
More on this in Chap. 4.
- 9.
A detailed discussion of the concept follows in Chap. 7.
- 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 stimulates 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.
- 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.).
- 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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Juvan, M. (2019). The Canonicity of World Literature and National Poets. In: Worlding a Peripheral Literature. Canon and World Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-32-9405-9_2
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