National Literary Canon Research Articles

‘I sing to you / from my place with my righteous kin’: Judith Wright’s decolonial poetics

ABSTRACT Widely celebrated as one of the most influential twentieth-century Australian poets, Judith Wright occupies a central and uncontested space in the national literary canon. The political drive of her poetry, intertwined with her lifelong commitment to ecological and Indigenous rights activism, transformed the platform afforded her as a ‘poet of the land’ into a discursive space through which to contest the legitimacy of her own positioning – as a settler, as a poet, and perhaps most significantly as an anticolonial ally. Despite this, and despite the growing urgency of conversations about institutional decolonization, Wright’s complex legacy as a decolonial agent remains largely uncontested. This article considers Wright’s poetic capacity to strike at the foundation upon which she stands and to excavate the violent histories beneath it; however, it also illuminates the inherited literary traditions that stunt her disruptive efforts. Drawing her contribution as a writer-activist into broader reflections on decolonization, I demonstrate the lasting significance of Wright’s reparative gestures – acknowledging and attending to active silences – as a timely model for literary canon reformation. Such (re)considerations of Wright’s legacy raise pertinent questions about what constitutes decolonial literary activism and gesture towards the silences as yet unbroken by the broader decolonial project.

Guimerà: la persistència d’un mite popular i els debats al voltant del cinquantenari de la seva mort (1909–1974)

Few authors are able to represent and exemplify in life the continuity between national literary canon and territorial identity as well as Àngel Guimerà i Jorge (1845–1924). This article sets out to trace the continuities and permanence in Catalan culture of the figure of Guimerà, but at the same to highlight the contrasting or contradictory elements that have characterized public evaluations of his legacy. Beginning with brief consideration of the monumentalization of Guimerà in the early 20th century and immediately following his death in 1924, we will go on to focus on debates around his significance towards the end of the Franco dictatorship, as it was then that new generations of intellectuals and artists who had not directly experienced the civil war would consider the continuing relevance or validity of his writings. This process culminated in 1974 on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of his death: when there was open debate in the press about the place of Guimerà in Catalan culture, and, more specifically, on the Catalan stage. Here we aim to contextualise these debates, elucidating both the challenges presented by different aspects of his figure and work for recovery in the Catalan society of the period and the light they shed on the ways in which literary figures are resignified over time.

The Margins versus the Centre of the National Literary Canon: The Reception of ‘The Legend of Master Manole’ in Romanian Education

The main purpose of the article is to outline a panorama of the reception of ‘The Legend of Master Manole’ in Romanian education, from the beginning of its introduction to the Romanian national literary canon until the post-communist era. The paper explores how the discourse created around this text in the 19th century and perpetuated by interwar critics (e.g. George Călinescu, Mircea Eliade), and the ideology of protochronism during Ceaușescu’s regime, is preserved in post-communist textbooks. Although there have been some attempts at the feminist decanonisation of the ballad since 1989, they did not influence the main narrative presented in school manuals. The didactic literature still emphasises the male perspective of Manole, and his sacrifice for the act of creation, ignoring the perspective of Ana, the female character in the ballad, and her sacrifice. Starting from the premise that the canon is a certain set of beliefs which can be constantly engaged in polemics that should be continuously shaped and deconstructed, the article also proposes some new literary contexts in which ‘The Legend of Master Manole’ could appear in school textbooks.

Третий лишний? Попытки литературной канонизации А.Н. Толстого в 2000–2020-е гг.

In the early 1990s, against the background of the loss of the authority of Soviet culture, the name of Alexey Tolstoy fell out of the core of the national literary canon. There was a consensus regarding the figure of the writer, first of all, as an opportunist who collaborated with the authorities and fulfilled a “social order.” Such assessments often had an emotionally colored character and pushed the discussion about the poetics of Tolstoy’s texts into the background. However, since the beginning of the 2000s, there has been a shift towards a more objective assessment of the writer’s role in the national literary process. Especially the publication of Tolstoy’s biography, written by A.N. Varlamov, has contributed to this course. Since the same period, representatives of various institutes of canonization have actualized the discussion about Tolstoy’s place in the national pantheon of literature. This article examines the mechanisms of the writer’s canonization in the 2000–2020s. The focus of attention, first of all, was on fiction, critical, and media discourses, where there were regular mentions of Tolstoy and references to his literary texts. Despite the intensification of interest in the personality and work of the writer, it is not necessary to assert that his name has entered the core of the national literary canon. It is due to several reasons, in particular, the sharp decline in the authority of Soviet classics after the collapse of the USSR and the absence in modern Russia of systematic attempts by representatives of the major institutions of literary canonization to return Tolstoy’s figure to the national pantheon.

Decolonizing Reading Publics, Decompartmentalizing German Studies

This essay focuses on the contemporary German literary public spheres, zooming in on the relation between a republic and its reading public. In the fraught political topography of contemporary Germany, marked by the arrival and eventual acceptance of over one million Syrian refugees since 2015, the rise of the extreme right-wing party Alternatives for Germany, resurgence of discussion on German colonialism in Africa, and extended public debate around the controversial Humboldt Forum in Berlin, the essay centralizes questions of race, colonialism, and migration. Connecting these key terms with current debates on decolonizing and diversifying the literary canon, the essay argues that decolonization is a direction, not a destination; it is a method, not a product, and attempts to decolonize a national literary canon must be conducted in connection with the larger public spheres, indeed by decompartmentalizing the classroom and the society.

Реконструкція літературного канону в незалежній Україні (90‑і рр. ХХ ст.)

The article reveals the peculiarities of the national literary canon changing during the beginning of 1990th, which we also called the transitional period. It was a time of radical break of social and cultural life of Ukraine. It was necessary to ensure the completeness of the national culture, which it had previously been deprived of due to its colonial status. This proved to be a difficult task that could be realized only in a longer time perspective. That task needed the efforts of several generations which represented different regions in their writings. A fundamentally new configuration has emerged in the literature of the period of independence of Ukraine. This configuration is embodied by several distinctive features of this time. Firstly, we are talking about the literature of socialist realism. For a long time, it was functional and dominant in the reader’s perception. Those texts have lost their significance. Secondly, we had a situation when an understanding of the global literary context emerged. The reason for this had become the numerous significant works from the West and from neighbouring Central European countries, which were translated, published and discussed in Ukrainian and which reflected the postcolonial thoughts. Thirdly, an impressive retrospective of national literature was opened. There much of literary works had not been known or properly appreciated before. Fourthly, a new discourse began to fill in. It was provided by the literary texts of Yurii Andrukhovych, Oksana Zabuzhko, Ihor Rymaruk, Leonid Kononovych, Volodymyr Danylenko, Oles Ulianenko, Yurii Gudz, and many others. That discourse contributed to the accumulation of the aesthetic quality that will become the way for creating a new national canon of literature. The creation of such a canon began at the beginning of the XXI century, when real prerequisites emerged at the level of school and university literature teaching. Also, the basis of the new canon is clearly manifested in the content of modern textbooks and anthologies that represent contemporary Ukrainian literature.

Sámi Literature in Norwegian Language Arts Textbooks

Sámi Literature in Norwegian Language Arts Textbooks

On Becoming “Princesse Bibesco”: The Intimacy of Modern Identity, Between the Self and the World

With the exception of Eva Behring who does not regard Martha Bibescu (1886–1973) as an “exile writer,” the few dictionaries and lexicons tackling Romanian exile writers only mention this turn-of-the-century Romanian-French woman writer’s name with modest assertiveness. This narrative of her censorship is probably the story of any exile woman writer, yet with a few entanglements created by her special social status (she became a “Princess” by marriage), by her outstanding political allegiances, and by her Bovaric spirit: malicious critics commented that her epitaph is a composition of four personae, none of them authentic. In this article, we present reasons and contexts of/for Martha Bibescu’s exclusion from the Romanian national literary canon. Moreover, assuming “a new geographical consciousness” that might bring to the fore the transnational routes of emancipation, our specific aim in the present article is to move away from the enduring narrative of censorship in Martha Bibescu’s case and to propose her as a candidate figure for a transnational literary canon, forging a specific, modern, intimate écriture. Our stance is that shaping a complex intimacy, in-between the ways of the Self and the ways of the world, represents these women writers’ major contribution to modernity and should be counted as one of the characteristics of modernism.

Ivan Kozlenko’s Tanzher and the Odesa Myth: Multidirectional Memory As a Strategy of Subversion

Ivan Kozlenko’s novel Tanzher (Tangier) became one of Ukraine’s biggest cultural events of 2017, vigorously debated in the country’s media and shortlisted for multiple prizes. This ambitious Ukrainian-language novel by a native of a predominantly Russophone city is simultaneously a love letter to Odesa and a daring subversion of the superficial version of the city’s popular myth, widely disseminated both by mass media and by scholarly discourse. A novel whose plot centres on two pansexual love triangles, one taking place in the 1920s, the other in the early 2000s, Tangier employs strategies of intertextual engagement and multidirectional memory to construct an alternative affirming narrative. It focuses on the episodes in Odesa’s history during Ukraine’s wars of independence in 1918–20 and the time it served as Ukraine’s capital of filmmaking in the 1920s and seeks to reinsert this queer-positive narrative into the national literary canon. This article analyzes the project of utopian transgression the novel seeks to enact and situates it both in the domestic socio-cultural field and in the broader contexts of global countercultural practices. It also examines the challenges faced by post-communist societies struggling with the new conservative turn in national cultural politics.

How Vitezovic read Mrnavic

Plorantis Croatiae saecula duo (1703) by Pavao Ritter Vitezovic (1652-1713) and Vita Petri Berislavi (1620) by Ivan Tomko Mrnavic (1580-1637), two significant works in the Croatian literary corpus written in Latin that deal with important historical characters and events from Croatian history with the explicit intent of preserving them from oblivion, have unjustifiably been omitted from the national literary canon. Following recent scholarly interest in these works in the last fifteen years or so, this paper reinvestigates and confirms intertextual references, with special emphasis on Vitezovic's relation to Mrnavic. The article focuses on determining traces and re-stylizations of parts of the Vita in around sixty lines of verse from the first canto of the Two Centuries of Croatia in Mourning, which are shown to be a complete episode, paradigmatic in its ideological concept for the whole poetic work. Keywords: re-stylization; Vitezovic; Mrnavic; contraction, versification, expansion

Discussing Media Manipulation in José Ricardo Morales’s Play Cómo el poder de las noticias nos da noticias del poder

ABSTRACT This article critically analyzes the media practices that intertwine private and public interests and the distortion of reality carried out by journalists in José Ricardo Morales’s play Cómo el poder de las noticias nos da noticias del poder (1969). This play is used as a case study to analyze the playwright’s ideas about using media as a manipulation tool to control and distract the audience in modern capitalist societies. The play’s analysis addresses interviews and the commodification/objectification of women as discursive devices of distraction producing false information in the media industry. This study establishes that Morales’s play reveals the cultural space of distraction used by the media, which contributes to creating a parallel narrative of possible futures, both defying national literary canons and anticipating several issues related to media intervention by corporate media and politicians in the 1960s.

The Transformation of the Canon, the Struggle With the Canon, the Re-creation of the Canon as the Basis of Fanfiction Culture

To understand the transformation of canons and the struggle with them, we may productively explore fanfiction, a particular reader's, viewer's, and author's practice, within non-professional and non-commercial texts based on the plots and heroes of other people's works. Fanfiction is a paradoxical phenomenon: it is wholly based on a specific canon — collectively selected film and literary texts, moves by worship, emotional attachment, and attention, while initially working as a criticism of the canons and changing the canons. Canon is not only a research concept but also an intra-cultural designation of the original work as the basis of a fan text. Fans also create their canon — “fanon”, a set of characteristic plot solutions and ways to change characters established in fanfiction. The article examines the intersections of the cultural canon of high and popular culture, the national literary canon, and the canon and the fanon in the understanding of fans with different types of attitudes to the canons — disintegration, transformation, struggle, re-creation. The argument is based on a critical analysis of the research literature with a focus on metaphors that help authors describe the relationship of fiction writers with the canons and on the experience of empirical research about fanfiction devoted to samples of popular culture (“Harry Potter” franchise, “Doctor Who” series, “Sherlock” series, and others), fanfiction and sequels to novels by Jane Austen, the British writer of the 19th century, and fanfiction devoted to Russian classical literature.

POETIC INTERSECTIONS IN IVAN FRANKO'S NOVEL “FATEFUL CROSSROADS” AND ANTUN GUSTAV MATOŠ'S SHORT STORY S “CAMAO”

Abstract Background: Ukrainian-Croatian literary relations have often been the subject of research by Slavic scholars. The subject of research have been both direct contacts between representatives of the literature of these two nations and the reception of Croatian literature in Ukraine and Ukrainian literature in Croatia. Of peculiar interest are comparative literary studies, which outline the parallels and differences between the works of representatives of these Slavic cultures who refer to eternal images or important philosophical concepts. Purpose: The special place of Ivan Franko in the history of Ukrainian culture has been the cause which led to the interest of researchers in various Slavic aspects of studying his work. However, in our opinion, the issues of studying poetic parallels in the works of Ivan Franko and his Croatian contemporaries are still insufficiently covered. Such comparative investigations will help to look at Ivan Franko's works from the point of view of the Central European context of the time, to identify the features of the dominant artistic paradigm and the writer's originality in its interpretation and departure from it. Rich material for such a study is provided by comparing Ivan Franko's prose works marked by the features of modernism and the prose of representatives of the first period of Croatian modernism. Results: In the proposed article we analyse the poetic intersections in Ivan Franko's novel “Fateful Crossroads” and Antun Gustav Matoš's short story “Camao”. Such a choice is caused both by the prominent place of the writers in the national literary canon, the influence of their creative work on the formation of the modernist artistic paradigm in Ukrainian and Croatian literature, and the fact that both works were published in 1900. The study was carried out using historical and literary, comparative, hermeneutical methods, as well as the method of textual analysis with elements of close reading. Comparative reading of Ivan Franko's novel “Fateful Crossroads” and Antun Gustav Matoš's short story “Camao” reveals many common motifs and numerous poetic parallels, which makes it possible to draw conclusions about the peculiarities of the functioning of modernist poetics in the works of the classics of Ukrainian and Croatian literature. Key words: modernism, poetics, Croatian literature, Ukrainian literature, Ivan Franko, Antun Gustav Matos.

«СТОЛИЦА» И «ПРОВИНЦИЯ»: ФИЛОЛОГИЯ В СИСТЕМЕ МЕЖДУНАРОДНОГО ИНТЕЛЛЕКТУАЛЬНОГО ОБМЕНА

The paper, written on the basis of a report read at Tyumen University, is devoted to the prospects of international exchange in philology in the context of widely spread institutional and disciplinary preconceptions about “metropolitan” and “provincial” science. The focus is on the specifics of the subject and prevailing practices in both cases (the study of concepts / the study of contacts); the specifics of the treatment of the national literary canon; the choice of methodological approach and research contexts, etc. The main vectors of philological exchanges that overcome the “peripheral” limitations of local philological research, mostly seen in its subordinate informative function for world science, are comprehended. Among them, the methodological reflection, independent of specific national and cultural material, stands out. The assumption is made that general ideas and theoretical questions asked to the subject are best derived from a separate tradition into international circulation and have the greatest chance of being picked up by researches from other countries to enter into a dialogue with their own concepts. Such questions are asked to masterpieces of national classics, “big data” studied by specialists in “world literature”, and to great theorists of the past, whose legacy reconfigured the history of ideas. It is also indicated that the export of ideas is especially effective in the situation of revision of disciplinary divisions, the collapse of old and the formation of new research paradigms. Philology in this perspective acts as an epistemological reference point, helping to clarify the relationship between a culturally limited “science for oneself” and a cosmopolitan “science for everyone”.

Rethinking nineteenth-century literary culture: British worlds, southern latitudes and hemispheric methods

Drawing on hemispheric, oceanic, and southern theory approaches, this article argues for the value of considering the nineteenth-century literary cultures of the southern settler colonies of Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa from within an interconnected frame of analysis. First, because of their distinctive historical and structural conditions; second, because of the density of their interregional networks and relations across intersecting oceanic spaces; and third, because of the long history of racialized imperialist imaginaries of the south. This methodological position rethinks current approaches to “British world” studies in two important ways: first, by decoupling the southern settler colonies from studies of settler colonialism in North America; and second, by rebalancing its metropolitan and northern locus by considering south-south networks and relations across a complex of southern islands, oceans, and continents. Without suggesting either that imperial intercultural exchanges with Britain are unimportant or that there is a culturally homogenous body of pan-southern writing, we argue that nineteenth-century literary culture from colonial Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa — what we call a “southern archive” — can provide a counterbalance to northern biases and provide new purchase on nation-centred literary paradigms — one that reveals not just south-south transnational exchanges and structural homologies between southern genres, themes, and forms, but also allows us to acknowledge the important challenges to foundational accounts of national literary canons initiated by southern theory and Indigenous studies scholars.

Teoría ascendente del poder, contrato colonial y literatura nacional. Las clases bajas porteñas y la narrativa portuaria de Valparaíso como disidencia política y cultural

En este artículo se hace una genealogía de la configuración de la “literatura nacional” en contraposición con las “literaturas regionales” y las “literaturas marginales”. Este trabajo se realiza a partir de una genealogía de la formación de las clases bajas como expresión de la potencia política emancipadora que se moviliza en la modernidad desde el despliegue de la teoría ascendente del poder y el municipalismo hispano, en la formación de la república de Chile y de la sociabilidad chilena desde la historia social y la teoría del contrato colonial. Esto permitirá destacar los procesos de organización política y cultural de las clases bajas en Valparaíso, expresadas en escrituras que, si bien son marginadas del canon literario nacional en pleno contexto de la construcción unitaria de la nación, son vectores de una geopoética portuaria y del bajo pueblo desde una posición de minoridad disidente.

La Reconfiguración del Canon Literario Cubano: Crítica Literaria Contemporánea y Perspectiva de Género en Cuba (1989 – 2012)

El trabajo problematiza la relación entre crítica literaria y canon en el campo cultural cubano. Evalúa las intervenciones de la crítica literaria genéricamente marcada en la reconfiguración del canon literario nacional. Plantea que la crítica tradicional (patriarcal, hegemónica, autoritaria) cubana se fundamenta en mitos construidos históricamente sobre la literatura de las autoras, particularmente en los de su presunta precariedad, ahistoricidad e inferioridad, los cuales han sido el argumento para su deliberada discriminación. Estudia el ensayo y la crítica literaria escrita por académicas cubanas (Luisa Campuzano, Nara Araújo, Mirta Yáñez, Susana Montero, Zaida Capote) desde una perspectiva de género conscientemente asumida. Ofrece un panorama del desarrollo de los estudios de género en Cuba desde la década del ochenta hasta 2012.

Hybridising the Media’s Corporate-Political Discourse through Rhetorical Strategies: An Analysis of "Cómo el poder de las noticias nos da noticias del poder" (Morales, 1971)

This article presents a theoretical conceptualisation of the pervasiveness of mechanisms of economic and political power in modern media, as represented in José Ricardo Morales’ play Cómo el poder de las noticias nos da noticias del poder (1971). This article focuses on two interconnected research questions: 1) What are the specific rhetorical strategies hybridising corporate-political discourse in the media that are represented by José Ricardo Morales in his play? 2) How do the rhetorical strategies and discourses represented in the play contribute to a new understanding of the impact of media intervention, both by corporate media and politicians, on audiences/readers today? This article critically analyses and discusses Morales’s unique, oblique critical approach to the media, and the political and discursive challenges made in the play. These orientate contemporary sets of beliefs while re-signifying the material and symbolic configurations of the Western globalised social fabric. The analysis shows that the dramatic piece contains a predictive discourse in presenting the role of journalism, both defying national literary canons and anticipating several issues related to media intervention by corporate media and politicians in the 1970s, especially in the Chilean context.

Chaste Bodies, Chaste Canon: Nationalist Discourse and the Female Performing Body in Munshi Premchand’s Sevasadan

Through a close reading of Munshi Premchand’s 1917 novel Sevasadan, the essay attempts to examine how constructions of the female performing body in early 20th century Indian fiction were shaped by the discourses of womanly chastity, domesticity and piety. The essay proposes to discuss how the Hindi literary tradition, that came of age in the early decades of the 20th century, and whose evolution paralleled the genesis of a newly constituted national, autonomous cultural order, accommodated the female performing body within its narrative framework. As the yardstick of “normative” womanhood embodied in the figure of the chaste Hindu wife crucially informed the constructions of femininity around this time, women performers like the tawaifs came to be derided in public debates and popular imagination as embodiments of moral decline. The central dilemma of the nationalist literary imagination, as reflected in the novel’s narrative design, is to resolve the many ambiguities that emerge from the delineation of the non-monogamous, unconventional sexual practices of the courtesan in the chaste idiom of Hindi. The resolution of this tension is worked out through certain narrative templates whereby the courtesan experiences a series of “shifts” – topographical, ideological, and cultural – which position her outside the envisioned “respectable” national order followed by her reconfiguration in a rhetoric of domesticity and piety that enables her assimilation into the nation-space as well as into the national literary canon. Through an interdisciplinary approach which looks at the intersections between gender, sexuality, nation and performance in the Indian colonial context, the essay intends to establish how the claims for a chaste literary canon were premised upon the erasure of the courtesan’s sexual burden and her embodiment of the standards of womanly chastity.

Commemorating Mme de Staël and Jane Austen across Britain and France

ABSTRACT This article focuses on the transnational commemorations and on the literary canonisation of Jane Austen and Madame de Staël in France and Britain. Adopting Dović and Elgason’s model for the study of national literary canons, significant analogies are found in the evolution of the two writers’ reception from 1817 to 2017. Both authors’ works were translated soon after their publication: however, de Staël became a symbol of the anti-Napoleonic fight in Britain thus influencing her early canonisation. Austen, conversely, received few reviews in France and was associated early with an interpretation based on eighteenth-century sentimental novels. In the twentieth century their “sanctification” was supported by literary societies created in the 1930s, and they had a “shrine” in the form of their birthplaces transformed into monuments. This essay analyses the ways in which this canonisation has travelled across Britain and France. Their reception underwent a significant variation in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries: with the development of women’s studies, the English-speaking academic community adopted de Staël as a canonised writer. The analysis ends by raising the question of the incomplete canonisation of both female writers in France.