Introduction: Other Capitals of the Nineteenth Century

Abstract

Walter Benjamin’s description of Paris as the capital of the nineteenth century creates a spatio-temporal approach to modernity that underpins works such as Pascale Casanova’s The World Republic of Letters (1999), which posits Paris as the capital of the transnational literary field. Pierre Bourdieu’s analysis of nineteenth-century French literature in terms of both economic and symbolic capital provides an alternative to the core-periphery model of cultural hegemony. The introduction to this volume sets out its approach to nineteenth-century capital(s) from the geographical, economic and symbolic perspectives, proposing an alternative mapping of literary and cultural space by focusing on different loci and sources of capital. This is based on a transversal reading of various places, agents, institutions and texts, which are conceived as nodal points on a map that reflects different aspects of the long nineteenth century.