European Literature

One of the most difficult and uncertain areas of research offered the historian of literature today is the attempt to define ‘European literature’ as a corpus and an object of literary and/or historical analysis. The various efforts of the past few years – in the form of anthologies as well as histories of literature – usually remain torn between a unitary presupposition that seems to be the only acceptable political-historical way of justifying the body of European literature and an irreducibly composite – not to say heterogeneous – reality that is not amenable to the representations of Europe as reduced to this superficial unity. If we are to reflect on the modalities and specificities of such a historical undertaking – which has so few equivalents in the world that it is all the harder to model – and shake off political models and representations, it seems to me that we need to work from another hypothesis. One of the few trans-historical features that constitutes Europe, in effect, one of the only forms of both political and cultural unity – one that is paradoxical but genuine – that makes of Europe a coherent whole, is none other than the conflicts 3 and competitions that pitted Europe’s national literary spaces against one another in relentless and ongoing rivalry. Starting from this hypothesis, we would then have to postulate that, contrary to commonly accepted political representations, the only possible literary history of Europe would be the story of the rivalries, struggles and power relations between these national literatures. As a consequence, rather than a unity that remains if not problematic at least far from being achieved, it would no doubt be better to speak of an ongoing literary unification of Europe, in other words a process that occurs, occurred and is still occurring – paradoxically – through these struggles. This upside-down history would trace the models and counter-models, the powers and dependences, the impositions and the resistances, the linguistic rivalries, the literary devices and genres regarded as weapons in these specific, perpetual and merciless struggles. It would be the history of literary antagonisms, battles and revolts

Aesthetics · Art · Epistemology · Literature · Modalities · Political science · Politics · Presupposition · Rivalry · Social science · Sociology · Unitary state · Universality (dynamical systems · European Cultural and National Identity · History · Law · Philosophy

• La création des identités nationales

  Anne‐marie Thiesse, Anne-Marie Thiesse•La création des identités…•2001

  Add to list

• The Nationalization of Culture

  Open Access•Orvar Lofgren•Ethnologia Europaea•1989

  Add to list