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2020 | Book

Comparative Print Culture and Alternative Literary Modernities: A Critical Introduction to Frameworks and Case Studies Read chapter Read first chapter

Comparative Print Culture

A Study of Alternative Literary Modernities

Editor: Rasoul Aliakbari

Publisher: Springer International Publishing

Book Series : New Directions in Book History

Part of: Springer Professional "Wirtschaft+Technik" , Springer Professional "Wirtschaft" , Springer Professional "Technik"

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About this book

Drawing on comparative literary studies, postcolonial book history, and multiple, literary, and alternative modernities, this collection approaches the study of alternative literary modernities from the perspective ofcomparative print culture. The term comparative print culture designates a wide range of scholarly practices that discover, examine, document, and/or historicize various printed materials and their reproduction, circulation, and uses across genres, languages, media, and technologies, all within a comparative orientation. This book explores alternative literary modernities mostly by highlighting the distinct ways in which literary and cultural print modernities outside Europe evince the repurposing of European systems and cultures of print and further deconstruct their perceived universality.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter
Chapter 1. Comparative Print Culture and Alternative Literary Modernities: A Critical Introduction to Frameworks and Case Studies
Abstract
This introductory chapter draws on several fields including comparative literary studies, postcolonial book history, and literary, multiple, and alternative modernities in order to conceptualize comparative print culture for the study of alternative literary modernities. The former term, as this chapter designates it, concerns a range of scholarly practices that discover, examine, document, contextualize, and/or historicize various printed materials and their reproduction, circulation, and uses across genres, languages, media, and technologies, all within a comparative orientation. Additionally, the present essay demonstrates the latter, alternative literary modernities, mostly by highlighting the distinct ways in which literary and cultural print modernities outside Europe evince the repurposing of European systems and cultures of print, further deconstructing their perceived universality. This chapter accomplishes the above-said goals by describing, contesting, and/or contextualizing previous exemplary as well as forthcoming scholarly works.
Rasoul Aliakbari
Chapter 2. Song Dynasty Classicism and the Eleventh Century “Print Modernity”
Abstract
The rapid growth of woodblock print in eleventh-century China helped to create a sense of temporal rupture with the previous dynasties. The association of print with canon-formation became instrumental in the circulation of editions of the Tang dynasty prose stylists Han Yu and Liu Zongyuan, and in spurring the development of Song dynasty neoclassicism. As shown in a telling introduction to Han’s work by the writer and statesman Ouyang Xiu, the role of print in circulating authoritative editions caused a greater consciousness of the relationship of style to rapidly shifting social conditions. As a newly-prevalent technology which became the bearer of a “classical” style, print occupied a paradoxical position which required readers to become more self-conscious about their moment in literary history.
Daniel Fried
Chapter 3. Alternative Imaginaries of the Modern Girl: A Comparative Examination of Canadian and Australian Magazines
Abstract
In this chapter, Kuttainen and Lippmann offer a much-needed analysis of overlooked literary modernities in settler colonies. They focus on the figure of the Modern Girl in the female-oriented interwar magazine print cultures of Australia and Canada, and draw attention to the ways in which texts for and about women have been especially overlooked in these domains. As well as considering the appearance of the Modern Girl in magazine print culture of the 1920s and 1930s, and uncovering many images and texts featuring flapper-like figures, Kuttainen and Lippman explore the methodological implications of comparing various segments of magazine print culture. This chapter thus not only recovers absent and overlooked representations of the Modern Girl in the alternative literary modernities of Canada and Australia but also examines what it means to position this figure and the texts in which she was represented in relation to differentiated readerships.
Victoria Kuttainen, Jilly Lippmann
Chapter 4. The Making of a National Hero: A Comparative Examination of Köroğlu the Bandit
Abstract
The legend of Köroğlu the bandit affords a good example of how print culture played a role in the formation of a modern national identity in both Turkey and Azerbaijan. Originating in Anatolia and the Caucasus, where it was first published in the mid-nineteenth century, the legend found its way to Europe, where it enjoyed further publication, translation, and popularization. Émigré intellectuals from Ottoman Turkey and Azerbaijan encountered the Köroğlu stories in Paris and brought them back to their home countries, where the hero was further transformed in poetry and other art forms to constitute a unifying national symbol for these two emerging modern nations.
Judith M. Wilks
Chapter 5. Between Poetry and Reportage: Raúl González Tuñón, Journalism and Literary Modernization in 1930s Argentina
Abstract
This chapter examines journalistic chronicling in the 1930s Argentina as a reworking of a French genre catering to the distinct Argentinian circumstances of the time. Working from a series of reportages written by one of Argentina’s foremost avant-garde poets, Raúl González Tuñón, the chapter draws attention to the retooling of the genre for the constitution of an Argentinian vernacular modern literariness based on periodicalism. The chapter also shows the overlapping of reportages and avant-garde poetry in both themes and techniques. The essay argues that literary modernization was the result not only of the highbrow European Modernism, but also of exchanges across borders of high/low culture, of genre, and of national polities, at a time when the rise of mass culture coincided with the rise of avant-garde art.
Geraldine Rogers
Chapter 6. New Fiction as a Medium of Public Opinion: The Utopian/Dystopian Imagination in Revolutionary Periodicals in Late Qing China
Abstract
Invented by Liang Qichao, New Fiction (xin xiaoshuo) was considered a political instrument for delivering a Chinese print-based modernity. Most of these novels were primarily published in late Qing’s journals and newspapers. With reference to Rudolf Wagner’s concept of the Chinese public sphere, this chapter demonstrates that New Fiction served to form of public opinion. This chapter selects the topical issue of China’s partition (1903–1904) to investigate the way in which three revolutionary periodicals—the Jiangsu Journal, Study Abroad and Translation Magazine, and The Alarming News from Russia—were involved in public articulation. By demonstrating New Fiction’s prediction of either a prosperous, utopian future or a dystopian China as a form of criticism of the Qing court, this chapter will shed light on the utopian and dystopian imaginations in revolutionary periodicals and their contribution to popularizing a sense of a new China at the turn of the twentieth century in the Chinese public sphere.
Shuk Man Leung
Chapter 7. Nineteenth-Century African American Publications on Food and Housekeeping: Negotiating Alternative Forms of Modernity
Abstract
Le Dantec-Lowry examines two guides for servants by Robert Roberts (The House Servant’s Directory or, A Monitor for Private Families. Kansas City: Andrews McMeel Publishing, 2013. Originally Published: Boston: Munroe and Francis, 1827) and Tunis Campbell (Hotel Keepers, Head Waiters, and Housekeepers’ Guide. Boston: Coolidge and Wiley, 1848), and one cookbook by Abby Fisher (What Mrs. Fisher Knows About Old Southern Cooking, Soups, Pickles, Preserves, etc. San Francisco: Women’s Co-operative Printing Office, 1881), published by African Americans at a time when blacks were kept on the margins of US society. These books offer a counter-narrative to the white dominant discourse on race by highlighting African Americans’ skills and professionalism, their search for respectability and responsibility, and their possible gender solidarity beyond racial differences. They provide alternative modernity, within the United States, through their authors’ uncommon participation in American culture of print, on white terms but also through their own vision of modernity inflected by the specific interests and contributions of black men and women in their quest for progress and justice.
Hélène Le Dantec-Lowry
Chapter 8. Progressing with a Vengeance: The Woman Reader/Writer in the African Press
Abstract
This chapter traces the history of black women’s entry into public print culture in 1930s South Africa, focusing in particular on the weekly national newspaper, The Bantu World. It argues that The Bantu World’s Women’s Page both facilitated and constrained the development of black women’s public print engagements by reaffirming western models of exemplary femininity and opening up spaces of gender debate and contestation. It argues further that normative Western print genres were not simply reproduced in African spaces but rather became sites of improvisation, refashioning, and indigenization thus opening the way for the development of alternative print cultural practices and a female-centred African modernity, which sought to refashion the cultural dominant to new and more emancipatory ends.
Corinne Sandwith
Chapter 9. Fashioning the Self: Women and Transnational Print Networks in Colonial Punjab
Abstract
This essay examines the earliest articulations of “civic subjecthood” and women’s networks that were facilitated by the newly emergent print cultures in colonial Punjab, through a close reading of the novel Cosmopolitan Hinduani (1902) by Susila Tahl Ram. It argues that the formation of women’s identities at the time must take into account cultural flows between the colonies and the imperial centre, in the form of print networks, travel, and commercial publishing, rather than employing only communal and nationalist perspectives. Cosmopolitan Hinduani is discussed to exemplify how print space was used by middle-class women to re-fashion the self, contest the matrices of power in which they were situated, and imagine new, transnational grids of relationships and social imaginaries beyond the local, provincial, and national boundaries. The essay re-inscribes women into histories of print technology, literary cultures, and language debates at the turn of the nineteenth century in Punjab.
Arti Minocha
Chapter 10. Crafting the Modern Word: Writing, Publishing, and Modernity in the Print Culture of Prewar Japan
Abstract
This chapter examines the print culture of prewar Japan as an arena in which various articulations of modernity struggled for influence. These included both Western models and a state-sanctioned attempt to construct a distinctly Japanese alternative. However, this arena also included a range of competing articulations developed by writers and publishers, many of which playfully questioned or undermined the official discourse. The chapter sheds light on a selection of these articulations from middlebrow and highbrow publishing and how they drew on distinct conceptions of categories, particularly “modern” and “traditional,” and “Western” and “Japanese,” to produce their own alternative perspectives. In doing so, the chapter also touches on debates in prewar literature over gender, canonization, and the nature of literature.
Andrew T. Kamei-Dyche
Chapter 11. “Books for Men”: Pornography and Literary Modernity in Late Nineteenth-Century Brazil
Abstract
This chapter argues for an alternative Brazilian nineteenth-century literary modernity grounded in popular erotic prints. In the late nineteenth century, bookstores sold several thousand copies of locally produced pornographic paperbacks. On the margins of elite circles was a dynamic market of popular erotic prints, with an abundant selection of titles, formats, genres and prices, implying thousands of readers eager for material. This body of works was ignored because it eluded the nationalist conceptualization of subjectivity and classical definitions of literature as austere and pedagogical. This chapter examines how European humanist, libertine, and naturalist literatures were repurposed and used to develop pornographic material for popular consumption, and how such literature did more than the European bourgeois novel to shape the contours of an emerging modern reading culture in late nineteenth-century Brazil.
Leonardo P. Mendes
Chapter 12. Print Culture and the Reassertion of Indigenous Nationhood in Early-Mid-Twentieth-Century Canada
Abstract
This chapter presents a comparative print-cultural examination of Euro-Canadian colonial settler literature and Indigenous Canadian literature in the early-mid-twentieth century, demonstrating the latter as constituting an alternative, counter-colonial (literary) modernity centred on articulating Indigenous communal subjectivities. Discussing the literary efforts of Charles A. Cooke (Thawennensere) (Kanien’kehá:ka, 1870–1958) and Edward Ahenakew (Nēhiyawēwin, 1885–1961), Edwards demonstrates that Indigenous reasons for embracing the printed word were motivated by a desire to articulate and use this Western tool of communication for their own social and political purposes, and to answer and correct the negative, offensive, and inaccurate representations of “Indians” depicted in the writings of Europeans and settler North Americans.
Brendan Frederick R. Edwards
Backmatter
Metadata
Title
Comparative Print Culture
Editor
Rasoul Aliakbari
Copyright Year
2020
Electronic ISBN
978-3-030-36891-3
Print ISBN
978-3-030-36890-6
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-36891-3