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panitia inagurasi aicom XI

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Jumat, 04 Januari 2013

The novel as national literature

The novel as national literature, 19th-century developments

Charles Dickens on the cover of L'Eclipse June 14, 1868 on his way across the English Channel
By the beginning of the 19th century, prose fiction had moved from a field of questionable entertainment and precarious historicity into the centre of the new literary debate. A new arrangement of the sciences taught at modern universities would finally protect the development. Theology, law, medicine, and philosophy had been the four traditional faculties. National literature became the object of a new university system in which the natural sciences acted as exact sciences, the social sciences with an outlook on the modern societies, and the humanities with a responsibility for history and culture. Literature in a definition that turned fiction into a central literary production would be a subject of the philologies in the latter segment of research.
The traditional task of literary historians, to review the sciences, was referred to the individual sciences and their respective academic journals. The general debate of literature was turned into an exploration of poetry and fiction.[93]
The modes of this exploration were new. Poetry had been analysed in poetological treatises asking for perfection and the rules that had to be mastered in the different genres. Early-18th-century critics had been ready to see the opera as the central poetic production of the modern era. One would differentiate between an Italian and a French style and consider an international production. This arrangement was discredited in the course of the 18th century. Operas became music and the new literary histories offered in the 19th century focused on the greatest works an outstanding nation or language had brought forth. The new interest lay in interpretations. Georg Gottfried Gervinus' Geschichte der poetischen National-Literatur der Deutschen, published in its successive volumes between 1835 and 1842 became the European model with a project that rather resembled Pierre Daniel Huet's Treatise on the Origin of Romances (1670) than any of the previous works on poetry or on literature (the sciences). The new literary historian spoke about the cultural significance of the works he analysed. Unlike Huet Gervinus was solely interested in the works of his nation – whose history and mentality he hoped do better understand. Other nations were of interest as they had threatened the intellectual development to be observed. Huet had given a world history of fiction. The 19th-century literary historian offered his project with the controversial promise to show how the nation had freed and found itself in its fictional production.
The project persuaded scholars in France and Italy to bring forth similar histories for their nations while the Anglophone world remained rather uninterested. Hippolyte Taine eventually offered the first history of English literature at first in French, a year later, in 1864 in an English version that opened with a look back on the 1st century of modern literary history:
HISTORY, within a hundred years in Germany, and within sixty years in France, has undergone a transformation owing to a study of literatures.
      The discovery has been made that a literary work is not a mere play of the imagination, the isolated caprice of an excited brain, but a transcript of contemporary manners and customs and the sign of a particular state of intellect. The conclusion derived from this is that, through literary monuments, we can retrace the way in which men felt and thought many centuries ago. This method has been tried and found successful.
      We have meditated over these ways of feeling and thinking and have accepted them as facts of prime significance. We have found that they were dependent on most important events, that they explain these, and that these explain them, and that henceforth it was necessary to give them their place in history, and one of the highest.[94]
Charles Dickens offering a public reading of his works, a symbol of the new literary life. Harper's Weekly, December 7, 1867.
Émile Zola, the political novelist in the centre of the public outrage he unleashed (painting by Henry de Groux, 1898).
The essentially nationalistic analysis of poetical fictions had begun in Germany in the late 1720s with a look back on three decades of international European fashions. German authors had embraced French "gallantry" as the essence of elegance and style. The country had gained nothing in the wars the European nations had supported on behalf of the Empire. The comparatively European decades of the Nine Years War (1689–1697), the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714) and the Great Northern War (1700–1721) had eventually left the intellectual elite disenchanted. The discussion of the nation's poetry Johann Christoph Gottsched proposed at the end of the 1720s formulated a national project connected with the offer to reform the entire market of German poetry. Johann Jakob Bodmer, Johann Jakob Breitinger, and Gotthold Ephraim Lessing adopted Gottsched's project and created the national discourse that finally gained national importance between 1789 and 1813 when Germany had to define itself in the events of the French Revolution and the ensuing Napoleonic Wars.
At the turn into the 19th century the first German territories implemented the new field of research in their national school curricula. Three decades later the first histories of German literature apperaed with proposals of the canon the young nation would need.[95] Literature made its way into the educational systems, it became the object of the university philologies, of German classes at schools, and of criticism in the public media.
The new topic was of immense interest thanks to its focus on the nation,[96] thanks to its controversial perspectives on the nation's history and identity, thanks to its attempts to reform the markets of fiction. The secularization pushed the new topic in France and Germany. Literature offered worldly texts to be interpreted in schools and at universities where religious texts had been interpreted thus far.[97]
The Anglophone world adopted the new topic reluctantly. London had developed a commercial production of the belles lettres, independent from the markets of Amsterdam and Paris, as early as the early 18th century. The new market had found its own commercial criticism and did not need an academic variant with a distinctly national perspective. Shakespeare had become an object of national veneration without the help of academic critics by the 1760s. A rediscovery of the past had followed, with such doubtful discoveries as the Ossian-fragments. Critics discussed the belles lettres in fashionable English journals. Latest theatre performances were discussed in the newspapers at the end of the 18th century. The continental debate of "literature" remained uninteresting with all the academic institutions it promised to generate.
Great Britain did not need new national platforms. State politics and religion were open platforms – in Britain protected by modern press laws since the 1690s. The continent had opted for a fundamental secularisation. Britain rested on the union of state and church, the USA on the opposite notion of private religiosity and a state that would not interfere. Neither country needed a topic for school lessons, in which worldly texts would be used in much the same way as religious texts had been used before. As for criticism of plays and fictions one could well live with the commercial criticism the market brought forth. Germany invented a dualism of "Literaturwissenschaft", literary criticism formulated by university professors, and "Literaturkritik", literary criticism as to be found in the newspapers. A single word remained enough to speak of literary criticism in English.
Oscar Wilde on trial in 1895.
The new topic was eventually adopted both in Britain and the USA in the 1870 and 1880s. The educational systems of the Western nations developed international standards. The Western canon became the project of a new international competition.[98] The Western nations defined themselves as "Kulturnationen" as exporters of a specific Western civilisation in the middle the second European colonization wave. To do this they eventually shared the same academic institutions that monitored, evaluated and basically organised their public controversies. Literature and culture had been topics the nations could hope to handle with more competence than religion. The "Republic of Letters", the "respublica literaria", the early modern scientific community that had coined the term literature had definied itself as the first truly pluralistic institution.[99] The universities it required would be state run and controlled by the respective nations.
The new topic spread in win-win situations. The publishing industry promoted fiction, literature, Belletristik. New authors profited from the exchange. The reading public eagerly followed the debate and was ready to identify with the greatest authors now produced.
New commercial rules began to structure the exchange. Most of the early-18th-century authors of fiction had published anonymously. They had offered their manuscripts and received all the payment to be expected for the manuscript. The new copyright laws introduced in the 18th and 19th centuries[100] promised a profit share on all future editions and created a new strategy with the revolutionary work, readers would initially hardly understand. One would publish such a work in a small first edition hoping for critics to prove it into an eternal classic. Novelists, a scandalous branch of authors a century ago, assumed entirely new roles as public voices; they spoke as their nation's conscience, as national sages, as far sighted judges in newspapers, in public debates and in entirely new celebrations of their public status. The novelist who reads in theater halls and book shops is a 19th-century invention.[101]
Fiction gained new qualities in the exchange. The literary market gave rise to difficult texts that could not hope to be understood without critical interpretations. New novels openly addressed the present political and social issues – sure to be discussed by media focusing on the same issues. Responsibility became a key issue: Responsibility of the citizen whose voice is heard or responsibility of the artist whose work future generations will have evaluate. The theoretical debate concentrated on the moral soundness of modern novels,[102] on the integrity of individual artists, and on the provocative claims of aestheticists such as Oscar Wilde and Algernon Charles Swinburne who proposed to write "art for art's sake",[103] that is with a responsibility the present audience and the present critics might not be able to understand.
The up-market of works deserving to be read as "literature" was matched by a growing market of "popular fictions", "trivial literature" – a market that discontinued the production of chapbooks and grew in the former field of elegant belles lettres. New institutions like the circulating library affected the market as platforms publishing houses would address with their first editions. Fiction became the object of a new mass reading public[104] protected, monitored and analysed by nationwide debates and by institutions the new states would hope to control.
The developments did not lead to stable definitions of the terms it popularized. "Art", "literature" and "culture" became much rather the field of controversies authors, critics, and readers would feed in ever new attempts to find platforms for their interests. The exchange affected from now onwards children at school as much as intellectuals who risked their lives in public controversies.

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