The Politics of Literary History

This book looks at literary historiography in Russia, Latvia, the Czech Republic and Finland, focusing on how seismic shifts in state politics and ideology after 1990 changed the writing of national literary histories in these countries. While Russia saw a return to a more nationalist way of thinking about literature and a new emphasis on Orthodox religion after the fall of the Soviet Union, the opposite is true for Latvia, the Czech Republic and Finland. In these countries, literary historiography fosters connections between Western scholarship and literatures written in the national language and engages with questions such as transnationalism, minorities, culture and power, and the cultural construction of identities. This book scrutinizes the different ways in which the construction of national, cultural and European identities has occurred in and through the literary historiography of North-Eastern Europe in the last few decades. Liisa Steinby is Professor Emerita of Comparative Literature at the University of Turku, Finland. Her publications include Myth in the Modern Novel: Imagining the Absolute (2023), co-edited volumes Narrative Concepts in the Study of Eighteenth-Century Literature (2017), and Herder and the Nineteenth Century (2020). Benedikts Kalnacs is Senior Researcher at the Institute of Literature, Folklore and Art, University of Latvia, and Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Liepaja, Latvia. His publications include A New History of Latvian Literature: The Long Nineteenth Century (ed., with Pauls Daija, 2022). Mikhail Oshukov is Assistant Professor at Petrozavodsk State University, Russia. His publications include the articles "Ezra Pound’s Dramatic Works: Vorticist Noh Theater" (2019), "E.E. Cummings: geometry and grammar of revolution" (2017), and "Familiar Otherness: Peculiarities of dialogue in Ezra Pound’s poetics of inclusion" (2013). Viola Parente-Capková is Professor of Finnish Literature at the University of Turku, Finland. Her publications include co-edited volumes Women Writing Intimate Spaces: The Long 19th Century at the Fringes of Europe (2023), and Nordic literature of Decadence (2020).