Description
Book SynopsisThis book develops our understanding of the global literary field in the long nineteenth century by discussing nine different places outside the established metropoles. It shows how different economic, geographical and political factors combined to give each place its own distinctive literary culture and symbolic capital. Taking a geocritical approach, the book shows how its different case studies can be seen as ‘literary capitals’ in terms of their role within the wider nation, region or empire. The volume is divided into three parts. Part One discusses Kolkata, Hong Kong and Buenos Aires. Part Two considers ‘semi-peripheral’ European cities: Pest-Buda (Budapest), Helsinki and Dublin. Part Three focuses on cities within Italy: Trieste, Florence and Rome. Drawing on a wide range of literary texts and different genres, the book reads the nineteenth-century literary field as a constellation where different connections can be plotted across various points on the map at different times.
Table of Contents1 Introduction: Literary Capitals in the Long Nineteenth Century—Spaces beyond the Centres Part I Beyond Europe2 Producing the Colonial Capital: Calcutta in Handbooks 3 World-Weaving in Nineteenth-Century East Asia: The Case of Hong Kong’s Earliest Chinese Newspaper, Gems from Near and Afar (Chinese Serial) 4 Turn-of-the-Century Buenos Aires: A Capital of Queer Spectacles Part II Redefining Peripheries 5 Bilingual Authors, Multilingual Printing Presses and‘Informal Capital’: Pest-Buda in the Early Nineteenth Century 6 Helsinki or Helsingfors? Jean Sibelius and the Stage 7 ‘A Place in Hungary’: The Phantasmal Dublin of Ulysses Part III Polycentric Italy 8 Trieste’s ‘Adventurers of Culture and Life’ 9 Untimely, Modern City: Literary Interventions on Florence as an Intellectual Capital at the Turn of the Century 10 From World Capital to National Capital: Literary Periodicals and the Construction of Modern Rome
