This 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.
Author(s): Arunima Bhattacharya, Richard Hibbitt, Laura Scuriatti
Series: Literary Urban Studies
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Year: 2022
Language: English
Pages: 271
City: Cham
Preface and Acknowledgements
Contents
Notes on Contributors
List of Figures
Chapter 1: Introduction: Literary Capitals in the Long Nineteenth Century—Spaces beyond the Centres
II
Works Cited
Part I: Beyond Europe
Chapter 2: Producing the Colonial Capital: Calcutta in Handbooks
Calcutta Handbooks: Background and Purpose
Heritage and Historiography as Governmental Policy
Intertextuality and Calcutta Handbooks
Nostalgia, City Space and Power: The Form and Layout of Calcutta Handbooks
Conclusion: Heritage and the Politics of Nostalgia
Works Cited
Chapter 3: World-Weaving in Nineteenth-Century East Asia: The Case of Hong Kong’s Earliest Chinese Newspaper, Gems from Near and Afar (Chinese Serial)
Cultural Capital and the Form(at) of Gems from Near and Afar
Extracting the Colonial Particularity of Hong Kong
Conclusion
Works Cited
Chapter 4: Turn-of-the-Century Buenos Aires: A Capital of Queer Spectacles
A Queer Invasion
Feathers in the Boulevards: The Streets as Drag Space
A Spectacular Containment
Works Cited
Part II: Redefining Peripheries
Chapter 5: Bilingual Authors, Multilingual Printing Presses and ‘Informal Capital’: Pest-Buda in the Early Nineteenth Century
The City and Its Inhabitants: Pest-Buda in the Early Nineteenth Century
Printing for the Empire: The Buda University Press
Acts of Staging
Literary Sociability and the Press
The Literary Mediator: Mihály Vitkovics
Conclusion
Works Cited
Chapter 6: Helsinki or Helsingfors? Jean Sibelius and the Stage
City and Nation
City and Language
Sibelius and the Theatre
Works Cited
Chapter 7: ‘A Place in Hungary’: The Phantasmal Dublin of Ulysses
Works Cited
Part III: Polycentric Italy
Chapter 8: Trieste’s ‘Adventurers of Culture and Life’
Francesco Dall’Ongaro and Pacifico Valussi’s La Favilla
Italo Svevo’s Una Vita
Luigi Di San Giusto’s Schemagn Israel
Works Cited
Chapter 9: Untimely, Modern City: Literary Interventions on Florence as an Intellectual Capital at the Turn of the Century
Florence’s Untimely Modernity
Mabel Dodge’s Deadly Re-Enactment of the Renaissance
Modern But/Because International
Cafés and Trams: The Futurists’ Modern(ist) Florence
Interruption, Circularity, Repetition: Mina Loy’s Florentine Temporalities
Works Cited
Chapter 10: From World Capital to National Capital: Literary Periodicals and the Construction of Modern Rome
Making a Capital
Fanfulla della Domenica: Networking the New Capital
Cronaca Bizantina: The Worldly City
Il Convito: Aestheticism and Nationalist Myth
Conclusion
Works Cited
Index
