Literary Capitals in the Long Nineteenth Century: Spaces beyond the Centres (Literary Urban Studies) 3031130596, 9783031130595

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LITERARY URBAN STUDIES

Literary Capitals in the Long Nineteenth Century Spaces beyond the Centres Edited by Arunima Bhattacharya Richard Hibbitt · Laura Scuriatti

Literary Urban Studies Series Editors

Lieven Ameel Comparative Literature Tampere University Tampere, Finland Patricia García University of Alcalá Madrid, Spain Eric Prieto Department of French and Italian University of California Santa Barbara, CA, USA Markku Salmela English Language, Literature & Translation Tampere University Tampere, Finland

The Literary Urban Studies Series has a thematic focus on literary mediations and representations of urban conditions. Its specific interest is in developing interdisciplinary methodological approaches to the study of literary cities. Echoing the Russian formalist interest in literaturnost or literariness, Literary Urban Studies will emphasize the “citiness” of its study object—the elements that are specific to the city and the urban condition—and an awareness of what this brings to the source material and what it implies in terms of methodological avenues of inquiry. The series’ focus allows for the inclusion of perspectives from related fields such as urban history, urban planning, and cultural geography. The series sets no restrictions on period, genre, medium, language, or region of the source material. Interdisciplinary in approach and global in range, the series actively commissions and solicits works that can speak to an international and cross-disciplinary audience. Editorial board Ulrike Zitzlsperger, University of Exeter, UK Peta Mitchell, University of Queensland, Australia Marc Brosseau, University of Ottawa, Canada Andrew Thacker, De Montfort University, UK Patrice Nganang, Stony Brook University, USA Bart Keunen, University of Ghent, Belgium

Arunima Bhattacharya Richard Hibbitt  •  Laura Scuriatti Editors

Literary Capitals in the Long Nineteenth Century Spaces beyond the Centres

Editors Arunima Bhattacharya Edinburgh Napier University Edinburgh, UK

Richard Hibbitt University of Leeds Leeds, UK

Laura Scuriatti Bard College Berlin Berlin, Germany

ISSN 2523-7888     ISSN 2523-7896 (electronic) Literary Urban Studies ISBN 978-3-031-13059-5    ISBN 978-3-031-13060-1 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-13060-1 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the ­publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and ­institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: Dace Kundrate / Alamy Stock Photo This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

This book is dedicated to all those who choose peace, dialogue and collaboration. In memory of all those who lose their lives due to war.

Preface and Acknowledgements

Some of the chapters in this volume are based on papers given at the 2017 Annual Meeting of the American Comparative Literature Association, which took place at Utrecht. Other chapters were specially commissioned. It has been a difficult few years since we began editing the book, and we would like to thank all our contributors for their patience, promptness, generosity and collaborative spirit. Many thanks also go to Richard Cleminson, Pirjo Lyytikäinen and Richard Robinson for their comments on various chapters of the book, and to Elizaveta Vasserman for her expert indexing. We would also like to thank the publishing team at Palgrave Macmillan and the editors of the Palgrave Literary Urban Studies for their support of the book. Leeds; Berlin 2022  

Arunima Bhattacharya Richard Hibbitt Laura Scuriatti

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Contents

1 Introduction:  Literary Capitals in the Long Nineteenth Century—Spaces beyond the Centres  1 Arunima Bhattacharya, Richard Hibbitt, and Laura Scuriatti Part I Beyond Europe  29 2 Producing  the Colonial Capital: Calcutta in Handbooks 31 Arunima Bhattacharya 3 World-Weaving  in Nineteenth-Century East Asia: The Case of Hong Kong’s Earliest Chinese Newspaper, Gems from Near and Afar (Chinese Serial) 61 Michael Tsang 4 Turn-of-the-Century  Buenos Aires: A Capital of Queer Spectacles 87 Carlos Gustavo Halaburda

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Part II Redefining Peripheries 115 5 Bilingual  Authors, Multilingual Printing Presses and ‘Informal Capital’: Pest-Buda in the Early Nineteenth Century117 Zsuzsanna Varga 6 Helsinki  or Helsingfors? Jean Sibelius and the Stage145 Philip Ross Bullock 7 ‘A  Place in Hungary’: The Phantasmal Dublin of Ulysses165 Catherine Toal Part III Polycentric Italy 183 8 Trieste’s  ‘Adventurers of Culture and Life’185 Elena Coda 9 Untimely,  Modern City: Literary Interventions on Florence as an Intellectual Capital at the Turn of the Century207 Laura Scuriatti 10 From  World Capital to National Capital: Literary Periodicals and the Construction of Modern Rome233 Stefano Evangelista Index253

Notes on Contributors

Arunima  Bhattacharya is lecturer in English at Edinburgh Napier University. Before this she was a postdoctoral research assistant on an AHRC-­funded project titled The Other from Within: Indian Anthropologists and the Birth of a Nation in the School of History at the University of Leeds. Her most recent publication is ‘Everyday Objects and Conversations Experiencing “Self ” in the Transnational Space’ in Asian Women, Identity and Migration: Experiences of Transnational Women of Indian Origin/ Heritage (Routledge, 2021). She is currently finishing her first monograph on ‘Calcutta Handbooks’ in British India. Her research interests include colonial and postcolonial literatures; heritage and cultural legacy; spatiality and city studies; travel literature and island literatures. She is involved in the ‘Curating Discomfort’ project at the Hunterian Museum (Glasgow). She is also a staff reviewer and blog editor for Sanglap: Journal of Literary and Cultural Inquiry. Philip Ross Bullock  is a professor of Russian literature and Music at the University of Oxford, and a fellow and tutor in Russian at Wadham College, Oxford. His books include The Correspondence of Jean Sibelius and Rosa Newmarch, 1906-1939 (Boydell, 2011), Pyotr Tchaikovsky (Reaktion, 2016), Song Beyond the Nation: Translation, Transnationalism, Performance (Oxford University Press, 2021, co-edited with Laura Tunbridge), Music’s Nordic Breakthrough: Aesthetics, Modernity, and Cultural Exchange, 1890-1930 (Boydell, 2021, co-edited with Daniel M.  Grimley) and Rachmaninoff and His World (University of Chicago Press, 2022). He is a recipient of the Philip Brett Award of the American xi

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Musicological Society and a Philip Leverhulme Prize, and has held fellowships at the Institute for Advanced Studies, Princeton, and the Paris Institute for Advanced Studies. Elena  Coda teaches Italian and Comparative Literature at Purdue University, where she serves as Associate Head of the School of Languages and Cultures. Her research interests include Triestine literature, modernism, modern and postmodern landscapes in literature, and essayistic narrative. Her essays have appeared in peer-reviewed collections and journals such as Quaderni d’Italianistica, MLN, Nuova Prosa, Journal of European Studies and Lettere Italiane. Most recently, she edited the volume My Karst and My City and Other Writings by Scipio Slataper, co-­translated with Nicholas Benson (Toronto University Press, 2020). Other publications include the book Scipio Slataper (Palumbo, 2007) and the edited volumes Balleriniana, co-edited with Beppe Cavatorta (Montanari, 2010), and Revisioning Terrorism, co-edited with Ben Lawton (Purdue University Press, 2016). She also serves as the Italian editor for the series Purdue Studies in Romance Literatures. Stefano Evangelista  is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Oxford University and fellow of Trinity College, Oxford, and a fellow of the Centre for British Studies, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. He works on nineteenth-century English and comparative literature and is especially interested in Aestheticism and Decadence, the reception of the classics, and the relationship between literary and visual cultures. He is the author of British Aestheticism and Ancient Greece: Hellenism, Reception, Gods in Exile (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009) and Literary Cosmopolitanism in the English Fin de Siècle: Citizens of Nowhere (OUP, 2021), as well as a number of edited volumes including The Reception of Oscar Wilde in Europe (Continuum, 2010) and Happy in Berlin? English Writers in the City, the 1920s and Beyond (Wallstein, 2021). His current projects include studies of Decadence and translation, and japonisme as a transnational literary network. Carlos Gustavo Halaburda  is a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada postdoctoral fellow at the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, University of Toronto, where he teaches graduate modules on Latin American Studies. His areas of specialisation include modern and contemporary Hispanic literature, postcolonial theory and medical humanities, with a particular focus on Latino LGBTQ archives. His work

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has appeared in Taller de Letras and Latin American Theatre Review. He has upcoming articles to be published by Revista Canadiense de Estudios Hispánicos, Symposium and El lugar sin límites. Revista de Estudios y Políticas de Género. He has been a guest researcher at the Berlin IberoAmerikanische Institut (IAI) and a research fellow with the Sexualities Project at Northwestern University. Richard  Hibbitt teaches French and Comparative Literature at the University of Leeds, where he co-directs the Centre for World Literatures. His research is on aesthetics, poetics and cultural exchange from the eighteenth century to the present day, with a particular interest in the long nineteenth century. His publications include Dilettantism and its Values: From Weimar Classicism to the Fin de Siècle (Legenda, 2006), the edited volume Other Capitals of the Nineteenth Century: An Alternative Mapping of Literary and Cultural Space (Palgrave, 2017) and Oysters, Nightingales and Cooking-Pots: Selected Poetry and Prose of Tristan Corbière, translated by Christopher Pilling and co-edited with Katherine Lunn-Rockliffe (White Rose University Press, 2018). He is a general editor of Comparative Critical Studies, the house journal of the British Comparative Literature Association, and a member of the Writing 1900 research group. He also sits on the Executive Committee of the European Society of Comparative Literature. Laura  Scuriatti is Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Bard College Berlin. Her research focuses on modernist literature, with special interest in questions of gender and aesthetics. She is a member of the international research network Writing 1900. She is the author of Mina Loy’s Critical Modernism (2019), the editor of Groups, Coteries, Circles and Guilds: Modernist Aesthetics and the Utopian Lure of Community (2019) and the co-editor of The Exhibit in the Text: the Museological Practices of Literature (2008). She has published articles on Mina Loy, H.G. Wells, Mario Praz, Carl Van Vechten, modernist aesthetics, life writing, feminism and film. Catherine Toal  is Professor of Literature and Dean of the Faculty at Bard College Berlin. She studied at Trinity College Dublin (BA) and Harvard University (MA, PhD), and held a Research Fellowship at Emmanuel College, University of Cambridge. In 2019, she was a visiting researcher at Sorbonne Université. Her book The Entrapments of Form: Cruelty and Modern Literature (2016) was published by Fordham University Press,

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with the support of a grant from the Modern Language Initiative of the Mellon Foundation. Essays on nineteenth-­century, ­modernist and contemporary literature have appeared in the journals Comparative Literature, Nineteenth-Century Literature, the Journal of European Studies and ABEI. Michael Tsang  is Lecturer in Japanese Studies at Birkbeck College. His research interests lie in world and postcolonial literatures with an East Asian focus, specialising in Hong Kong, Japanese, and Chinese literatures and cultures. He is the co-editor of Murakami Haruki and Our Years of Pilgrimage (Routledge, 2022), and has been published in various journals and volumes such as Japan Forum, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, Wasafiri, Sanglap and others. He is a founding co-editor of Hong Kong Studies (Chinese University Press), the world’s only bilingual academic journal specifically devoted to Hong Kong. He is also a staff reviewer at Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, where he has established an extensive profile of reviews of Asian literature. Zsuzsanna  Varga teaches Central and East European studies at the University of Glasgow. Her research interests focus on nineteenth-century Austro-Hungarian cultural history, with particular interest in the cultural representation of the urban, in periodical studies and in book history. Her publications include Reflections in the Library: Antal Szerb’s Selected Literary Essays 1926-1944 (Legenda, 2017), Popular Cinemas in East Central Europe (IB Tauris, 2017) and Worlds of Hungarian Writing (Fairleigh Dickinson, 2016). She is co-chair of COST Action Dynamics of Placemaking and Digitization in Europe’s Cities, and is co-editor of the journal Slavonica (Taylor and Francis), focusing on East European literary and historical studies. She also serves on the Executive Committee of the European Society of Comparative Literature and is secretary to the American Hungarian Educators’ Association.

List of Figures

Fig. 2.1 Fig. 2.2 Fig. 4.1

Central Telegraph Office, Kolkata. Nicknamed the ‘Dead letter office’, BBD Bagh (Dalhousie Square) Content pages taken from E.B. Eastwick’s Handbook of the Bengal Presidency Queer cruising. The caption reads: ‘Julio Giménez (the man in the circle) known with the name “The Breeze of Spring”, seducing a visitor in the city dressed in female attire’

44 46 103

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Literary Capitals in the Long Nineteenth Century—Spaces beyond the Centres Arunima Bhattacharya, Richard Hibbitt, and Laura Scuriatti

Why might we refer to a space outside the large metropoles of the nineteenth century as a ‘literary capital’? What are the distinctive qualities of the ‘world literariness’ of particular authors, genres and texts, and how is ‘world literariness’ conceived and produced through the lens of place? The

A. Bhattacharya Edinburgh Napier University, Edinburgh, UK e-mail: [email protected] R. Hibbitt (*) University of Leeds, Leeds, UK e-mail: [email protected] L. Scuriatti Bard College Berlin, Berlin, Germany e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 A. Bhattacharya et al. (eds.), Literary Capitals in the Long Nineteenth Century, Literary Urban Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-13060-1_1

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present volume explores the complex ways in which literary and cultural capital was produced and reproduced in a variety of texts and documents, spanning different genres—prose, poetry, drama, academic and reference books, dictionaries, magazines, popular culture, political pamphlets, musical scores—and how, in turn, these texts have helped shape the image and identity of places whose political status was contested or unstable, whether locally or globally. Taking a closer look at the forms of so-called world-­ genres in relation to their local manifestations is a good point of entry into the intricacies of these processes and formations. The example of detective fiction is particularly useful for this purpose: in his work on empire and nineteenth-century crime fiction, Upamanyu Pablo Mukherjee (2003, 2018) identifies ‘a paradigmatic moment in the late nineteenth century, when an individual narrative model within the genre—one provided by Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes canon—became a worldly phenomenon’ (2018, 275). Mukherjee proceeds to ‘compare the paradigms of crime fiction such as Conan Doyle’s with others from the semi-­ peripheries of the Victorian world-system—in particular […] one provided by the Bengali detective and author Priyanath Mukherjee. Mukherjee mobilised narrative devices differently from Conan Doyle, but he did so in response to related but non-identical problems and pressures faced by his British counterpart’ (275). Upamanyu Mukherjee’s analysis shows how the problems that Doyle’s and Priyanath Mukherjee’s texts (1892–1903) respond to are different, although both are created by the compulsions of the modern world-system of imperial capitalism. This explains their distinctive relationship to the narrative function of clues in their works and the dissimilar but related solutions the texts offer. Mukherjee’s reading argues against the view of ‘crime-fiction as a “world-literary” genre marked by a strong Holmesian “core” and peripheral copies’, pointing out that the two writers are ‘simply answering a different set of artistic and ideological needs that arise […] from the singular but uneven nature of the modern world-system itself’ (286). Crime fiction produced in and about London, the imperial capital of the British Empire, therefore, had a very different way of registering the circulation of capital compared to the semi-peripheral colonial capital of British India, Calcutta. In Upamanyu Mukherjee’s analysis, Doyle’s and Priyanath Mukherjee’s texts deal with the moral and cultural problems caused by rapid urbanisation and the limits of administrative information and control. However, they differ in their preference for narrative devices: Holmes focuses on clues, and Priyanath Mukherjee’s ‘Daroga’ (constable) emphasises procedures.

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We can extend this thesis to the enquiry of the present volume, Literary Capitals in the Long Nineteenth Century: Spaces beyond the Centres, which examines how the flow of capital is registered in literary form and content. In the opening chapter, Arunima Bhattacharya analyses the ‘technologies of rule’ from the UK to India and back, showing how capital circulates between the two regions, creating a circuitous movement that informs the representational politics of the collection of travel handbooks that she terms the ‘Calcutta handbooks’. These handbooks were safety valves that were meant to bridge the gap between the expectations about the ‘Orient’ and its actual corporeal experience. At the same time, it must be noted that the ‘vernacular’ genres that were produced in response to the rapid urbanisation and infrastructural development of Calcutta in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were not similar in intent and form to the handbooks. They were not designed to provide accurate and considered descriptions that confirmed a semblance of order and colonial administrative control over the city. These indigenous texts were in fact answering very different moral and cultural problems that urbanisation had created. The commercial and political importance of Calcutta as a colonial capital was explored in several innovative genres such as the naksha (Hutom Pyanchar Naksha 1862) or ‘sketches’ (Harder 2016, 444), which Priyanka Basu describes as ‘an assortment of kaleidoscopic vignettes’ (2021, 949). These genres included farces, poems, plays, short satirical sketches and songs that aimed incisive criticism at the middle-class city dweller caught up in the changing tide of modernisation and its affinities to ‘western’ culture. Such texts, along with performance pieces and songs performed on the streets that were later documented (Banerjee 2013; Biswas 2000), sought to rethink the modern urban experience and the attendant shift in traditional moral values and categories of social status like caste. The circular flow of capital within the imperialist capitalist system constructed Calcutta as a semi-periphery and set up a circuitous movement of literary techniques, modes and forms. The ‘world literariness’ of genres, forms, texts and authors was constituted through a continuous bidirectional and reciprocal movement between core and semi-periphery—and through a constant proliferation of texts. These travels through unequal capital exchanges secured for the texts produced from the periphery a ‘world literary’ validation. This circuitous movement persists today in current literary efforts to make sense of the remainders of capital in what is now a postcolonial regional capital, renamed as Kolkata.1 Abir Mukherjee, a Scottish South Asian crime fiction writer born of South Asian parents

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who migrated from Calcutta to the UK in the late 1970s, has recently published a series of crime fiction novels based on early twentieth-century colonial Calcutta. He has been referred to as the ‘new Godfather of Anglo-­ Asian crime writing’ (Nixson 2021). Mukherjee has spoken about his texts having helped him to ‘make sense of [his] heritage’ and deal with what he considers as his individual, and institutionalised, ‘cultural schizophrenia’ (2021) regarding the interconnections between Calcutta, India and the UK. Crime fiction then for Abir Mukherjee becomes a genre that is able to communicate unpalatable versions of national histories that still hold relevance in current reassessments of heritage and identity in both countries. Mukherjee’s books form a suitable addition to the ‘world l­ iterariness’ of crime fiction discussed above. Abir Mukherjee’s Wyndham and Banerjee series of crime novels set in Raj-era India have the effect of reverting the literary time of Kolkata to the early twentieth century. Present-day Kolkata abets this anachronistic association, because the topography and architecture of much of the central administrative district and its cultural and religious institutions remain the same. The architectural persistence of British colonial heritage in today’s Kolkata helps transpose literary and cinematic portrayals of the city back to its colonial origins. This is a common motif in much of contemporary Indian fiction and cinema that uses the city as a setting. Therefore, though the colonial empire is an issue of the past century in modern British sentiment and politics, imaginative representations of Kolkata are still tied to the city’s colonial heritage, reimposing a ‘shadow’ of capital back onto the postcolonial city, relegating it into the fantastic, exotic ‘other’ capital, the ‘City of Dreadful Night’ (Kipling 1888). The ‘literary’ is therefore an expansion and interpretation of the relations of ‘capital’. The different examples of literary capital discussed in the present volume document how literary modes register cities where capital was physically invested in architecture, economy and sociocultural practices. Many of these cities were eventually transformed through their coeval modernities into the capitals of post-imperial nation-states, such as Buenos Aires, Budapest, Helsinki and Dublin. However, like the persistence of colonial Calcutta in present-day Kolkata, there remains to varying extents the persistence of the inherited colonial legal systems, educational institutions, nationalised finance systems and production units that still perpetuate imperial management structures, a sense of protocol, and bureaucracy. The shadow of capital therefore influences all subsequent

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literary forms and modes that emerge from these capitals and their postcolonial urban milieus. In ‘Genre and the African City: The Politics and Poetics of Urban Rhythms’, Sam Okoth Opondo engages with the genre-city intertext to make conceptual distinctions between the ‘city’ and the ‘urban’ by illustrating how certain ‘textual representations and disciplinary practices in their constitution of the African city are actively involved in the killing of the plurality of rhythms, or heterogeneity central to urban life’ (2008, 59). Opondo focuses on certain modes of reading and writing about the African city such as colonial autobiographies and Eurocentric ethnographies that align with cultural and administrative institutions, which are in turn part of nation-building practices (e.g. museums and colonial or postcolonial urban planning). These literary modes contribute to creating and maintaining strict codes of ‘non-contamination or non-contradiction’ that elide urban heterogeneity in order to uphold ‘a generic image of Africanness or citiness’. Opondo calls this the ‘violence of rhetorical gestures’ (60). He insists that unless we are attentive to the ‘politics of genre, narratives of the type that Out of Africa represents will continue to teach us what they have always taught us: to forget the other side of the story; to see an Africa caught up in perpetual rurality and accessible only through sites and reading practices that silence the various voices and positioned utterances through which meanings in everyday life are mediated’ (60–61). In the first two chapters of the present volume, both Arunima Bhattacharya and Michael Tsang consider different genres that evolved as ‘literary infrastructure’ (Davies 2017) and transformed commodity and labour capital into information, and information into cultural capital, implicating these semi-peripheral colonial port cities, Calcutta and Hong Kong respectively, into the colonial world-system. Bhattacharya shows that the Calcutta Handbooks aimed at emphasising a ‘generic image of citiness’—to use Opondo’s term—that identified the characteristic heterogeneity of the colonial city as a threat to controlled order. The focus on genres, particularly ones that coded behaviour, trade-related information, travel and ethnographic exchange, is significantly underdeveloped in discussions of world literature, despite the fact that specific genres occur at the forefront of creating the networks through which textual and literary forms travel, derive ‘world literary’ significance, and go on to popularise literary strategies, forms and expressions among regional and vernacular writing. One of the principal aims of the present volume is to consider how different genres contributed to the formation of literary capital in various

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imagined communities (Anderson 2006), be they trading centres such as Hong Kong or Trieste, or the aforementioned capitals of new nation-­ states. As Benedict Anderson has shown, the construction of imagined communities to create national identities relied to a large extent on print media, from novels to newspapers and periodicals. It also involved a negotiation between international and national influences, which we can interpret, among other things, as a negotiation between the cosmopolitan and the vernacular. In their general introduction to the four-volume series The Cosmopolitan-Vernacular Dynamic: Conjunctions of World Literature, the editors propose that approaching literature from the starting point of the cosmopolitan-vernacular dynamic avoids ‘systemic, deterministic or “global” claims’ (Helgesson et al. 2021, xiv). In contrast, they argue that it allows the critic to analyse ‘the always situated negotiation of cosmopolitan and vernacular orientations in the temporal understanding of literary practice’ (2021, xvii). While allowing for the study of production, circulation and reception, this approach to literature also lends itself to close reading, with particular advantages for reading against the grain of national or linguistic models. The relational pair of ‘cosmopolitan-vernacular’—or equally ‘vernacular-cosmopolitan’, as the editors emphasise—builds in particular on earlier work by Homi K. Bhabha (1996), Sheldon Pollock (2006) and Alexander Beecroft (2015). It considers the transhistorical and transnational conjunctions of competing literary languages, tracing the changing relationships between dominant cosmopolitan literatures and local, regional and national vernacular literatures. The fluctuating development of this relationship is exemplified by both English and French: from their early position as European vernaculars in contradistinction to the cosmopolitanism of Latin, the language of the empire, they gradually became dominant cosmopolitan imperial languages themselves. Another advantage of the cosmopolitan-vernacular dynamic is that it allows for a flexible variation on several further sets of relational pairs, such as the core-periphery, the colonial-postcolonial, the global-local and the monolingual-multilingual. These distinct approaches to the study of literature overlap, converge and diverge according to different contexts of both time and space; within these specific contexts, they are also subject to further interpretation and challenge. A further advantage of the cosmopolitan-vernacular dynamic is that it enables us to explore the relationship between so-called dominant and dominated spaces: as the editors write, ‘[s]ometimes, but not always, it works as an expression of resistance to the hegemony of cultural centres’

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(Helgesson et al. 2021, xxvi). It is in this respect that the focus on the cosmopolitan-vernacular dynamic is especially germane to the present volume on spaces outside the centres in the long nineteenth century, which assesses a number of loci that existed in a particular relationship to different metropoles or imperial capitals. Immanuel Wallerstein’s theory of world-systems analysis is also of great use here, in particular with regard to his identification of the ‘semi-periphery’ to denote space that shares qualities with both core and periphery (2004, 28). As in the case of Calcutta outlined above, all of the places discussed in the present book can be seen in some sense as semi-peripheral, insofar as they were in the orbit of larger political and cultural centres while playing significant roles of their own. But, as with the cosmopolitan-vernacular dynamic, the semi-peripheral model varies according to location and historical moment; in some cases, no single core can be identified. What all these places share, however, is the propensity to combine different geographical, political, linguistic and cultural influences, irrespective of their size or location. As the discussion of Calcutta and the reflections on African cities above show, the ‘world literariness’ of any place must acknowledge both the co-existence of the cosmopolitan and the vernacular in order to resist dominant readings with regard to the ongoing processes of representation, production, circulation and reception. Much of the critical work on literature and space has focused on representations of the major metropoles of the western world, particularly where this overlaps with the Modernist city or imperial capital. At the same time, the different roles of spaces beyond the centres have become increasingly important in the field of literary urban studies. A central tenet of this approach is proposed by Lieven Ameel, Jason Finch and Marku Salmela in their introduction to Literature and the Peripheral City: ‘And yet to us it would seem that the city is defined by peripherality as much as by the aspect of centrality’ (2015, 5). Their edited volume shows how peripherality is manifest not simply in geographical distance or literal marginality but also in the organisation and perception of social spaces within cities. The analysis of peripherality is further applied to different kinds of literary practice: ‘The “outskirts” of the literary institution can be mapped out in terms of other art forms and media, literary genres, or even individual writers’ (2015, 11). When construed in this sense, peripherality becomes a useful tool with which to explore the various correlations between space and text. In a second volume of essays, Literary Second Cities, the same team of editors propose a variation on the concept of

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peripherality (Finch et al. 2017): the focus here is on specific cities themselves—from eighteenth-century Bristol to contemporary Las Vegas—and the insights and paradigms that arise from comparing them. The concept of ‘secondariness’ allows the editors to explore ‘another relation of otherness to the metropolis in literature’ (2017, 6), and to consider cities in terms of their function, rather than their size or symbolic status. This interest in the significance of spaces outside the metropoles is the central point of convergence with our own volume. In an essay entitled ‘Impartial Maps: Reading and Writing Cities’, Hana Wirth-Nesher considers how what she calls the ‘cityness’ of cities consists of an amalgam of the actual and the imagined: ‘The metropolis is rendered legible, then, by multiple acts of the imagination; it is constantly invented and reinvented through narrative’ (2001, 53). Wirth-Nesher places the word ‘real’ in inverted commas in order to acknowledge that the reality of the city is made up of both its actual fabric and its literary representations. As a result, the city itself becomes a kind of text, read anew by each inhabitant and each visitor: ‘The city text is a palimpsest, therefore, of the history of its representation in art, religion, politics—in any number of cultural discourses’ (2001, 54). Wirth-Nesher’s work here and elsewhere (1996) anticipates what has become known as the ‘spatial turn’ in literary studies, in particular the writing about real and fictional spaces by Bertrand Westphal (2011) and Robert T. Tally Jr (2011, 2013, 2019). Westphal’s argument for what he calls a ‘geocritical’ approach to the study of space is based on considering spaces as mutable referents: ‘The referent is no longer necessarily the one you think it is. In short, the writer becomes the author of the city’ (2011, 156). Starting from this geocritical approach, the essays collected in the present volume all show how places were constructed by a variety of writers—including poets, playwrights, novelists, critics, translators, journalists, politicians and compilers of travel guides. Tally has developed Westphal’s geocritical thinking as part of a wide-­ ranging engagement with what he calls ‘literary cartography’, defined as ‘the practice by which writers figuratively represent, or attempt to represent, the social space of the narrative or text, as well as the relationship of the individual or collective subject to a larger spatial, social, and cultural ensemble’ (2019, 131). But no form of representation is objective, figurative or otherwise; as Tally observes, ‘neither does literal mapping faithfully reproduce the “real” world’ (131). We extend Tally’s definition here to argue that all forms of representation are to some extent literary, be they literal or figurative, factual or fictional. Tally proposes that literary

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cartography is ‘part of any narrative project’ (131). The writers discussed in the present volume are all involved in this activity of literary cartography: the mapping of space through literature, from the literal maps in Calcutta travel guides and newspaper articles about Hong Kong and Trieste, to the contested presents and imagined futures of novels about Buenos Aires and Dublin, the poetry about Florence, the periodicals based in Rome, and the theatres of Pest-Buda and Helsinki. Although Wirth-Nesher refers to the ‘imaginative mapping’ inherent in the acts of reading and writing the city (2001, 54), she does not develop the reference to ‘impartial maps’ in the title of her essay. This may be because the impartiality of any map is an impossible ideal, however much one tries to question conventional perspective and received wisdom. With regard to the study of literary space, another way of rethinking mapping is to consider each locus as a discrete place in a loose set of regional, national and global networks, liable to change over time. The different terms used to describe the function of these loci include the concept of ‘nodal point’ proposed by Linda Hutcheon and Mario J. Valdes (2002), and the similar notion of ‘node’ proposed by Marcel Cornis-Pope and John Neubauer (2010). Literary space can also be perceived as polycentric, or multicentred, with the aim to de-hierarchise our understanding of the global literary field. Cornis-Pope’s use of the term ‘marginocentric’ is particularly useful here, allowing us to see apparently peripheral or smaller cities as centres of different networks, outside of dominant views of history and geography (2006, 4–9). In this respect, our own approach to the literary field also corresponds to the ‘transversal reading’ pioneered by Christophe Charles and Daniel Roche in their work on cultural capitals (2002): by beginning with a cross-section of the field rather than a consideration of size, wealth or other measure of importance, the tenets of hegemonic views can be called into question. But although all these approaches allow us to rethink both literary space and literary history, it would be naïve to deny the fact that places such as the great metropoles, imperial capitals and new ‘megacities’ both play and have played a fundamental role in particular configurations of time and space. In other words, the core/semi-­ periphery/periphery model still holds true to some extent, even if we can fruitfully switch our focus to considering every locus as its own nodal point in a group of different networks. A further way of considering the relationship between these loci is by means of an analogy with the night sky. Since 1922, it has been accepted by the International Astronomical Union that there are 88 different

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constellations (Rey 1976). Within these constellations (sets of stars), there are numerous smaller asterisms (groups of stars), some of which—such as the Pleiades and Hyades—transcend more than one constellation, like the central part of a Venn diagram, or a map of the Mediterranean encompassing parts of Africa, Asia and Europe. Some of these constellations are known primarily for one of their asterisms: for example, Ursa Major (The Great Bear) is renowned for the group of seven stars known in English as the Plough or Big Dipper. But although this may now be the standard view of the celestial sphere, our perception of it will always depend on where we are—in the southern or northern hemisphere, or on the Equator—and how much we can see at any time, depending both on the calendar and on the meteorological conditions. In a similar vein, although we may know that Berlin, London, Paris and New  York were the four most populous world cities in 1900 (Chandler 1989, 330), a host of other towns and cities played their own unique role in the intertwined histories of cultural, economic, industrial and political development. Approaching the literary field from different spaces beyond the centres is therefore similar to a view of the cosmos that chooses to approach it by focusing on a cross-section of stars, asterisms and constellations, instead of beginning with a list of the largest or most famous. This spatial analogy also has a temporal dimension: the history of astronomy, as with the history of literature and indeed any type of history, varies in both content and nomenclature depending on the place and time of its production, be it China, Greece, Mesopotamia or elsewhere (Marchant 2020). Our mapping of global literary space must also take into account different histories and perspectives. If we consider the transnational literary field as its own constellation, we can see individual stars of different sizes that form different asterisms, or networks, both established and new. In the nineteenth century, the predominant networks are both geographical and imperial: for example, Calcutta and Hong Kong belong to the same south-east Asian land mass, but are also defined in different ways by their relationship to the British Empire, which places them in a further network with Dublin and numerous other cities across several continents. After Argentina gained its independence in 1816, Buenos Aires became a national and regional capital city within Latin America and also part of a global network of immigration and export. Florence, Rome and Trieste can be seen as part of an Italian asterism or polycentric network, but Trieste also belongs in a further grouping with Budapest and other cities in the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

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Other cities are invariably defined by overlapping national and regional factors: nineteenth-century Helsinki was the capital of the Grand Duchy of Finland within the Russian Empire, but also a centre for Swedish-­ language culture. By comparing all of these loci to stars in the night sky, we are able to plot different asterisms or groupings while acknowledging the undoubted significance of fixed points of the constellation or literary field. The impetus for the present study comes from the Writing 1900 research group, which has been meeting since 2010 to discuss transnational approaches to literature in the long nineteenth century, conceived broadly as stretching from the French Revolution to the Modernist heyday after World War I. The group’s publications include Other Capitals of the Nineteenth Century: An Alternative Mapping of Literary and Cultural Space (Hibbitt 2017a), which is the companion piece to the present volume. The first book aimed to consider other capitals from three perspectives: geographical, economic and symbolic. In retrospect, it is possible now to identify a shared methodological approach with the use of peripherality discussed above, namely the desire to rethink our knowledge of both space and text by means of alternative conceptualisations. Other Capitals of the Nineteenth Century drew principally on the work of three theorists: Walter Benjamin (1999), Pierre Bourdieu (1996) and Pascale Casanova (2004). Benjamin’s analyses of why Paris might be viewed as the archetypal city of modernity provided a fruitful model for the study of similar phenomena in other loci, such as Melbourne; similarly, Casanova’s claim for the hegemonic status of Paris in nineteenth-century literary space also allowed us to consider the role of ‘shadow capitals’, such as Brussels. Bourdieu’s work was especially useful with regard to his consideration of the interplay between economic and symbolic capital in the literary field, which enables another way of mapping space; small places such as Bayreuth and Coppet, or the largely forgotten writers of regional ‘local-­ colour literature’, were all invested with particular significance. As with peripherality, considering capital as both a space and a set of values allows us to see literature—and culture tout court—through a different lens, the limitations of Eurocentric approaches notwithstanding. The present book acknowledges its debt to the theorists above, particularly the work of the late Pascale Casanova, while incorporating insights from some of the recent research in geocriticism and into the intersections between world literature and postcolonial literature. It also develops our approach to the study of literary capitals with regard to both space and

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time. In terms of space, it analyses three loci outside of Europe, three ‘semi-peripheral’ European cities and three cities that became part of unified Italy. In terms of time, it examines how the changes in the world-­ system in the nineteenth century also exerted a specific influence on the early decades of the twentieth century, with regards not only to World War I but also to literary Modernism. Part I, ‘Beyond Europe’, considers the ways in which Calcutta, Hong Kong and Buenos Aires were created through different genres: travel guides, journalism and fiction. Part II, ‘Defining Peripheries’, explores the relationship between imperialism, independence and modernity in Pest-Buda (Budapest), Helsinki and Dublin. Part III, ‘Polycentric Italy’, discusses Trieste, Florence and Rome, three cities which played distinctive roles in the creation of both Italian and cosmopolitan literary culture. The presence in post-Risorgimento Italy of different cultural and political centres also reflects on how a ‘national culture’ is constructed. In this respect, the book ends by showing in nuce how a polycentric model of a specific literary field also constitutes a paradigm for wider readings of the transnational field, on regional, national, continental, imperial, postcolonial and global scales. The tripartite structure of the book allows us to see these nine case studies in the global literary field as three asterisms within the wider constellation of global literary space. But our aim is to show that the value of the book also lies in the synoptic reading of how all these loci responded in different ways to imperialist or nationalist projects, resulting in a fluctuating nexus of political, economic and symbolic capitals. It is here where the focus on the world literariness of the places comes into sharper focus: the various texts discussed here encompass canonical works, in particular James Joyce’s Ulysses, as well as poetry, plays, song settings, short stories, novels, travel writing, journalism, letters, dictionaries and language textbooks, often by little-known writers. The different chapters analyse the various literary strategies and techniques used to write about these loci, showing how different genres, styles and narrative modes are employed to convey enthusiastic, ambivalent, critical and contentious views. In this respect, our work echoes Thomas Piketty’s emphasis on the value of literature in Capital and Ideology: ‘Literature’s unique ability to capture the relations of power and domination between social groups and to detect the way in which inequalities are experienced by individuals exists, as we shall see, in all societies’ (2020, 15). In the second part of this introduction, we will trace how the concept of literary capital is constituted in diverging and converging ways in each chapter of the book.

1 INTRODUCTION 



13

II

Writing about the British government’s increasing involvement in the colonisation of India from the late eighteenth century onwards, Piketty observes how the colonial project ‘could proceed only on the basis of rigorous administration and solid knowledge’; as discussed above, trade alone was insufficient (2020, 328). The first chapter in the present book considers a specific example of how this knowledge was created. In ‘Producing the Colonial Capital: Calcutta in Handbooks’, Arunima Bhattacharya analyses a particular subgenre of travel writing that she terms the ‘Calcutta Handbook’. Written ostensibly to introduce visitors and new residents to the city, these little-known travel guides also exemplify the construction of a specific image of the empire. Bhattacharya shows how changes in the handbooks both reflected and instrumentalised the British government’s desire to create ordered representations of the colonial capital and to suppress references to Indian independence movements, becoming in this respect emblematic of the empire itself. By the early twentieth century, the handbooks were already indulging in a form of imperialist nostalgia through the memorialisation of colonial history in the city, conveying Lord Curzon’s aim to historicise Calcutta’s status as the ‘capital’ of British India (a position that it lost to Delhi in 1911). On a textual level, these handbooks encouraged reading the city through maps that were anything but impartial, with demarcations of ‘white-town’ and ‘black-­ town’ that carefully created the hierarchy of colonial space. But the textual construction of empire is frequently more subtle: Bhattacharya also shows how the apparently benign travel guide devices of lists, tables and model dialogues were all part of the drive to reassure readers of the normalcy of colonial subjugation. We can now see the Calcutta handbooks as an example of what has become known as ‘soft power’: the use of culture for political aims. Michael Tsang makes this point explicitly in the second chapter here, ‘World-Weaving in Nineteenth-Century East Asia: The Case of Hong Kong’s Earliest Chinese Newspaper, Gems from Near and Afar (Chinese Serial)’. Tsang shows how a newspaper written in Chinese with a British editor was able to create a narrative of trade and progress based on imperial assumptions of cultural and scientific superiority. Nostalgia is also at play here, but in a more insidious way: by extolling the achievements of past Chinese history in comparison to its belated embracing of industrial modernity, the newspaper’s editorials posited China as a problem to which

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the technological advances of Britain are the solution. In this respect, the entrepôt of Hong Kong stands as a possible synecdoche for China as a whole. As with the knowledge provided by the Calcutta handbooks, the commodity prices provided by the newspaper were a source of cultural capital, added here to the economic insights required for trade: the combination of editorial content, commodity values and the early use of paid advertisements epitomised this fusion of capitals. In response to Pheng Cheah’s thesis that postcolonial literature offers alternatives to capitalist globalisation (2016), Tsang analyses how Hong Kong became imbricated in the capitalist global system. He proposes the concept of ‘world-­weaving’ as a variation on Cheah’s concept of ‘world-making’, arguing that the metaphor of weaving gives a more nuanced understanding of what ‘making’ entails in this context: the bringing together of different threads. ‘World-weaving’ simultaneously sheds a new light on the circulation of nineteenth-century capital while illuminating the ways in which we can see another contemporary concept that complements soft power: knowledge transfer. Tsang’s chapter challenges assumptions based on colonial binaries that imagine unidimensional literary flows along imperial trade routes and social networks by means of reading the impact of a peripheral genre on colonial capital, both economic and cultural. His chapter unpacks the complex nuances of local contexts of production and dissemination of genres that are a product of imperial ‘contact zones’ (Pratt 1992). Moreover, Tsang pushes the meaning of the word ‘weaving’, deriving from anthropological conceptions of textiles, emphasising how this process lends itself to alterations made through adding and removing strings to the weave. Here it may appear as a means of describing the nuance of coeval and co-created modernities (Harootunian 2000) and their attendant literatures in complex and differential colonial exchanges, like that of Hong Kong in relation to China and Britain. Tsang also engages with the missionary background of the monthly periodical’s editorship that introduced the omnipresent yet dormant theme of religion that structures so much of what emerged as coeval modernities in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries at the peak of empires in this region, namely Dutch, British, Portuguese and French. In this case, the newspaper Gems from Near and Afar not only worked as a tool of introducing world literary sensibility to its Chinese readers but also provided a ‘vernacular’ platform of engaging with global trade (in terms of commodity prices) and cultural capital.

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While the British government was attempting to defend, consolidate and extend its presence and influence in south-east Asia, various countries on the American continent were gaining their independence from colonisation. In Argentina, the colonial power was inherited by the criollos, a term used to designate the hegemonic group of European descent that took control of the country after the declaration of independence in 1816 and the civil wars between Buenos Aires and the provinces, which finally ended in 1880. Known alternatively as Conservative Argentina, the Conservative Republic, or the Conservative Order, the period from 1880 to 1916 was characterised not only by a conservative nationalist government but also by Argentina’s emergence on the world stage as a modern trading nation-state, by the architectural development of Buenos Aires as a modern capital city, with appropriate new institutions of administration, education and culture, and by a great influx of European immigrants. In ‘Turn-of-the-Century Buenos Aires: A Capital of Queer Spectacles’, Carlos Gustavo Halaburda shows how the political image and spatial construction of the city were contested by a variety of queer forces that challenged its identity as a heteronormative and endogamic social space. These disruptive forces embraced a range of figures among the new European citizens, from those considered as ‘socially inferior’ and therefore a risk to the ‘purity’ of the criollo lineage, to the transvestite sex workers who catered for illicit homosexual desire on the city’s streets. Through the analysis of two novels, one short story and a piece of journalism, Halaburda argues that the literary mapping of fin-de-siècle Buenos Aires represented, criticised and encoded these examples of transgressive erotic dissidence. He shows that the influence of Naturalism on Argentinian literature is manifested here in the reactionary and xenophobic critique of otherness evident in the different texts under discussion, which saw these ‘outsiders’ as a threat to the positivist doctrines of progress and reproduction, epitomised by Miguel Cané’s short story ‘De cepa criolla’ (Criollo Lineage, 1884). In Julián Martel’s novel La Bolsa (The Stock Market, 1891), anti-­ Semitic and Decadent tropes are conflated when the protagonist is killed by a monstrous femme fatale representing the risk of currency speculation. In Eugenio Cambaceres’s novel En la sangre (In the Blood, 1887), an Italian immigrant rapes the daughter of a well-known family, resulting in her social and financial ruin. The final example, Juan José de Soiza Reilly’s article ‘Buenos Aires tenebroso: ladrones vestidos de mujer’ (Gothic Buenos Aires: Thieves Dressed like Women, 1912), discusses the practice of ‘feathering’, a combination of gay cruising and pickpocketing.

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Halaburda shows here how some immigrant transvestite sex workers took advantage of the performative space of the city in order to transgress both vestimentary and legal codes. The erotic capital of queer forces disrupted the literary construction of the conservative capital city and prefigured the ongoing struggle between conservative and liberal movements throughout the twentieth century. Elleke Boehmer and Dominic Davies’s Planned Violence: Post/Colonial Urban Infrastructures, Literature and Culture investigates ‘the violence embedded in contemporary post/colonial urban infrastructures’, offering ‘a forensic analysis of those precise, intimate relations through which urban structural violence manifests and comes apart in a range of narrative structures’ (2018, 13). Halaburda’s chapter looks at the connections between architecture, modernity and sexual transgression as a part of modernisation and its attendant moral reorganisation in turn-of-the-­ century Buenos Aires. The chapter explains how the modern insertions in the urban architecture of the post-independence capital formed the spatial context for presumed threats to the city’s traditional codes of social morality. The term ‘queer’, used here broadly to connote transgression of normative orders, considers how the persona of the outsider/transgressor is interwoven with the architectural markers of modernity, such as opulent houses, theatres and city streets which had become enabling spaces to explore sexual dissidence. An unfamiliar sensory opulence is created through architectural innovations, signalling the intrusions of the modern ‘Other’ that has moral connotations of ‘contaminating’ the city. Halaburda teases out the spatial aspect of these incursions into traditional upper-class morality by analysing how they are imagined as forms of sexual violence on the female body, facilitated by architecture that implements and hides these transgressions. He reads the spatialisation of sexual and moral transgressions as directly linked to the performative aspect of such acts, showing how they transform the representation of city streets and theatre houses into spectacles of sexual dissidence, crime and violence. Here modernity is envisioned as the violence embedded in urban infrastructures. However, these very same architectural motifs were simultaneously the means of translating the growing intellectual and cultural capital of Buenos Aires at the turn of the century into the material heritage of its cosmopolitan modernity. Buenos Aires can be seen as an archetypal capital of a ‘new’ country formed in the nineteenth century, similar to Brussels in newly created Belgium. One could make a similar claim for Budapest, which became the

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official capital of the Kingdom of Hungary within the dual monarchy of Austria-Hungary in 1873. But the twin cities of Pest-Buda had already been the administrative capital of the Kingdom of Hungary under the Habsburg Monarchy from 1784, which had catalysed their development as a regional centre. In ‘Bilingual Authors, Multilingual Printing Presses and “Informal Capital”: Pest-Buda in the Early Nineteenth Century’, Zsuzsanna Varga traces the different ways in which this polyglot city was able to create a multilingual literary culture, where Hungarian co-existed with German, Serbian, Slovak and Romanian. Budapest’s semi-peripheral status and its relative autonomy—with at this stage limited interference from Vienna—allowed it to coalesce organically as a type of literary capital that anticipates the multilingual postcolonial cities of our own century, but without the hegemony of a primary language. Varga reads this informal multilingual tradition (Judson 2016) as a type of ‘informal capital’, which manifests itself through a variety of media, institutions and forms: printing presses, theatres, journals, salons, literary societies, textbooks, dictionaries and translations. She discusses the example of the bilingual poet, translator and critic Mihály Vitkovics, who epitomised the patriotic cosmopolitanism of writers that aimed to promote their own mother tongues through openness and collaboration. In retrospect we can see Pest-Buda in the early nineteenth century as exemplifying a period of different language renewal movements that gradually led to Romantic nationalism and was eventually replaced by the creation of several new nation-states. But, as with the concept of ‘world-weaving’, the concept of ‘informal capital’—here primarily cultural and symbolic—transcends the specific instance of its application to become a part of our critical understanding of what literary capital entails. Pest-Buda’s status as an autonomous capital city within a larger empire is mirrored by the position of Helsinki, which was established as the capital of the Grand Duchy of Finland in 1812 after the country had been ceded from Sweden to the Russian Empire in 1809. In many respects, the creation of Helsinki’s administrative apparatus follows the imperial playbook of replicating institutions and procedures, leading to a growing nationalist movement that culminated in the Finnish declaration of independence in 1917. This long century is frequently characterised by the rise of Romantic nationalism and the rejection of Russian influence. Philip Ross Bullock reads against the grain of this narrative, focusing on the hybridity of Finnish culture during the period, initially with regard to Swedish influences and their manifestation in the theatre. In the same way that Hong

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Kong served as an entrepôt for the trade in commodities, Helsinki became an entrepôt for the import and export of culture, aided in this respect by its semi-peripheral status between two larger cultures, not to mention wider European influences. The title of Bullock’s essay—‘Helsinki or Helsingfors? Jean Sibelius and the Stage’—refers specifically to the Swedish name for the city and to his main case study, the composer renowned for his expressions of Finnish nationalism. Bullock shows how Sibelius, a native speaker of Swedish who learnt Finnish at school, complemented his famous orchestral works with song settings of poems in Swedish and lesser-known incidental music for the theatre. But this bicultural heritage was also part of a wider transnational context of fin-de-siècle literary cosmopolitanism, where Sibelius contributed music to productions of plays by Hofmannsthal, Maeterlinck, Shakespeare, Strindberg and others. In this respect, the artistic production in Helsinki becomes part of both Nordic Symbolism and international modernism. Bullock reconfigures the Finnish capital as a hybrid cultural centre that harks back to the heterogeneity of Pest-Buda at the start of the century, while also mirroring the confluence of nationalism and cosmopolitanism seen in fin-de-siècle Paris. The Hungarian capital city plays a different role in Catherine Toal’s essay ‘“A Place in Hungary”: The Phantasmal Dublin of Ulysses’, which reads Joyce’s novel alongside Arthur Griffith’s pamphlet The Resurrection of Hungary: A Parallel for Ireland, published in 1904. Griffith argued that Ireland’s elected representatives should follow the Hungarian model of campaigning for an independent legislature, as opposed to advocating home rule. The Ausgleich or Compromise of 1867 had re-established a legislature in Pest as part of the dual monarchy of Austria-Hungary, which led eventually to the unification of Budapest in 1873. Toal traces Joyce’s nuanced engagement with Griffith’s ideas through a combination of biographical sources and a sustained close reading of Ulysses itself. She argues that the representation of Dublin in the novel should not be read as a self-­ contained historical fait accompli that looks back at a single day in 1904 with the benefit of hindsight, but rather as the creation of a phantasmal, dispossessed and expectant city that also contains the absence of its others, in this case an alternative political solution. Toal proposes that the year of the novel’s setting and the Hungarian origins of Leopold Bloom are part of its intertextual dialogue with Griffith’s pamphlet. Bloom wanders through the city in the same way that Ferenc Deák, the moderate Hungarian leader, wandered through the streets of Pest. She also analyses the role that newspapers play not only in Ulysses but also in The Resurrection

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of Hungary itself: by quoting from the Austrian press, Griffith shows how the newspapers attempted to maintain the illusion of Hungarian loyalty; moreover, the British press largely ignored the Hungarian calls for greater autonomy. As in the case of Hong Kong, we see here a further example of how newspapers were used to propagate imperial discourse. Toal also questions here a distinction that Bertrand Westphal makes between literary and non-literary texts, suggesting that both novel and pamphlet are experimenting with different imaginary topographies. In this respect, her reading of both texts exemplifies Robert T.  Tally Jr’s wider view of the creation of literary cartographies. Her reading of Ulysses sheds a new light both on Dublin and on the wider context of other capitals negotiating their relationship with empire. Joyce suggested that Ulysses could be used as a blueprint to reconstruct Dublin if the city were ever destroyed. If we read the novel as an alternative ‘Dublin handbook’, as opposed to the imperial Calcutta handbooks, in this case it is the empire writing back from both Pest-Buda and Dublin itself. It has been argued so far that Hong Kong was an entrepôt for trade and Helsinki an entrepôt for culture. Both the literal and the metaphorical uses of the term ‘entrepôt’ are exemplified by Trieste, which was granted the status of a free port in 1719. Trieste is in one sense an archetypal peripheral city, on the edge of the Habsburg Empire until it became part of Italy at the end of World War I. Yet it was also a commercial and artistic ‘marginocentric’ hub, where, as in the case of Pest-Buda, its cosmopolitan culture was multi-ethnic and multilingual. Although Austrian and Italian were the major influences, nineteenth-century Trieste was also home to Serbs, Slovenes and merchants from a variety of backgrounds. In ‘Trieste’s “Adventurers of Culture and Life”’, Elena Coda shows how commerce and culture were part of the same fabric of the city: rather than perpetuating a dichotomy between art and money, or between symbolic and economic capital, the city’s artists embraced its financial power. Nor was this simply a case of philanthropic industrialists financing culture, as was seen at the time in cities such as Manchester (Wolff 2013). The eponymous ‘adventurers of art and life’ discussed in Coda’s essay were interested in fusing the commercial and creative drives as part of a Weltanschauung or modus vivendi, with commerce, like art, as a lingua franca through which to transcend peacefully any political differences. As Coda shows, Trieste in the early nineteenth century constitutes an interesting illustration of Goethe’s contemporaneous writings on Weltliteratur: here the intellectual exchange between peoples and nations was also manifested in the

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burgeoning amount of translations, as Goethe had advocated. She traces Trieste’s literary activities through three Italian case studies, beginning with the journal La Favilla (The Spark), published between 1836 and 1846 and financed by the merchant shipping line Austrian Lloyd. The editors and contributors fostered a sense of innovation in their celebration of the tolerant and largely secular modern city, reflecting on the ‘poetry of commerce’ and the central role of the city’s stock exchange, while publishing translations from contemporary European writers. Coda’s next example is the best known: Italo Svevo, pseudonym of Aron Ettore Schmitz, a successful businessman himself. Svevo’s first novel, Una Vita (A Life, published in 1892), portrays a bank clerk who fails both in his attempts to join the Triestine upper classes and in his desire to mediate between cultures as a translator. In a variation on the Argentinian novel La Bolsa, Una Vita portrays a failed attempt to acquire cultural capital; the novel also uses the plot device of seduction, but here the protagonist’s seduction of his manager’s daughter leads to demotion, embarrassment and suicide. Coda’s final case study is a largely forgotten novel: Luigi di San Giusto’s Schemagn Israel (‘Hear, O Israel’), the story of a Jewish family during the first year of World War I, written between 1914 and 1915 and published under the Fascist regime in 1926. Luigi di San Giusto was the pen name of Luisa Gervasio, whose novel illustrates how Triestine identity was not simply pro-Italian in the war, with both Zionism and international socialism offering alternatives to nationalism. Coda argues that the novel’s open ending eschews any particular allegiance and thereby remains true to the peaceful cosmopolitanism espoused by the editors of La Favilla. In this sense, we can also read Schemagn Israel as a requiem for nineteenth-­ century Trieste as a multicultural entrepôt. Trieste’s modernity in the long nineteenth century is in sharp contrast to the modernity of Florence, the second Italian city under discussion. In ‘Untimely, Modern City: Literary Interventions on Florence as an Intellectual Capital at the Turn of the Century’, Laura Scuriatti proposes that the fabric of the Tuscan city combined not only the temporal palimpsest of its glorious Renaissance past but also, as in the case of Dublin, projections of its possible futures. After the Risorgimento had led to the creation of the unified Kingdom of Italy in 1861, Florence became capital of Italy in 1865, replacing Turin. Although this period lasted just six years—in 1871, the status of capital was transferred to Rome—it was long enough to add a further layer to the city’s identity. Scuriatti shows how Florence’s cultural capital was subject to competing claims from different

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parties, resulting not only from its status as the intellectual birthplace of European humanism but also from the large number of expats residing in the city. This led on the one hand to an apparently paradoxical desire to renew Florence through a return to the transnational ideals of the Renaissance, a return which, like the cultural movement of Decadence, was both reactionary and progressive. On the other hand, it gradually led to a desire from others for a more radical rupture with both the city’s past and its contested present, exemplified in the early twentieth century by Futurism: in 1913, the journalist Giovanni Papini argued against the ‘musealisation’ of the city in an article entitled ‘Contro Firenze’ (Against Florence), following Marinetti’s similar article about Venice. Florence was ‘wrongly modern’ because its modernity was always disputed: Scuriatti draws here on Nietzsche’s concept of the ‘untimely’, suggesting that the advantages that Nietzsche attributed to thinking against the grain of the time were in scant evidence in the competing views of Florence. Yet, with the benefit of hindsight, we can now read Florence in the long nineteenth century as untimely in this positive sense, as Scuriatti shows through the wide range of literary examples discussed in her chapter, including memoirs, letters, articles and ‘playlets’ written by both Italian and foreign writers. Her final example is the British-born expat writer Mina Loy, whose poems about Florence deliberately avoid wearily familiar tropes about the city’s past. By refusing to name famous monuments or tourist sites, her poems create an ‘alternative, reluctant Baedeker’: a Florentine handbook that focuses on the everyday lives of the city’s poorer residents through brief, subtle present-tense vignettes. In this respect, lyric poetry engenders a different form of literary capital from the more discursive forms of essay, short story and novel. Florence emerges from Scuriatti’s analysis as a paradigmatic locus for the intersection of the temporal and spatial axes: the city’s past, presents and futures are inflected by its status as a regional, national and international centre, resulting in a particularly diverse repository of cultural capital. The conversion of economic capital into symbolic capital in Florence over the centuries is characteristic of former financial centres that become destinations for artists, expats and tourists, such as Bruges (Hibbitt 2017b). The case of Rome, the last of the three cities discussed in the section on ‘Polycentric Italy’, provides a further variation on this transformation of historical capital. In 1870, the papal state of Rome was a depopulated and underdeveloped provincial city under the protection of Emperor Napoleon III of France; when the loss of the Franco-Prussian War led to

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the end of this protection, the city was occupied by Italian forces and annexed to the Kingdom of Italy. In the following year, Rome became the capital city of unified Italy and found itself in an unusual position: the Eternal City, home of the Catholic Church and once capital of the Roman Empire, was now obliged to reinvent itself as the national capital of a newly established nation-state undertaking an accelerated process of modernisation. As in the case of other ‘new’ nineteenth-century European capitals such as Pest-Buda and Helsinki, the construction of a synecdochic national city entailed what might be called the nationalist paradox: in order to forge a distinctive national identity, it was also necessary to embrace some of the cosmopolitan aspects of modernity, both technological and cultural. As an aspiring literary capital, Rome’s identity was also shaped by the fact that it belonged to the world and had already been used as the setting for works by numerous foreign writers. In ‘From World Capital to National Capital: Literary Periodicals and the Construction of Modern Rome’, Stefano Evangelista analyses the different roles that three literary journals played in this process of establishing Italy’s position in world literary space. Fanfulla della Domenica (The Sunday Fanfulla) set out to be an apolitical journal focusing on aesthetic autonomy. However, as Evangelista shows, this aim was impossible to achieve because the concept of aesthetic autonomy in the fin de siècle was unavoidably influenced by other national models, especially French and English. Any attempt to forge a distinctively Italian identity entailed some form of cultural nationalism, intentional or otherwise. The journal Cronaca Bizantina (Byzantine Chronicle) took a different approach, looking back to Rome’s past through the ambivalent reference to Byzantium, one-time capital of the Roman Empire and also known as Nova Roma. Its title also alluded to the contemporary interest in Decadence as an alternative view of both culture and politics. By acknowledging classical Rome’s debt to ancient Greece, the journal’s editors advocated looking beyond the dominant French aesthetic model for further influences. At the same time, Cronaca Bizantina also featured regular sketches of fashionable Roman society, thereby combining an interest in a cosmopolitan past with a simultaneous focus on a cosmopolitan present: Rome as a new centre to rival the other fashionable world cities at the turn of the century. The final example, Il Convito (The Banquet), placed a further importance on the visual aspects of the periodical, in common with many magazines of the period. Here, however, the aesthetic objectives were linked to an explicitly nationalist rhetoric and a commensurate critique of the spiritual decay in the contemporary city.

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The description of capitalism, free trade and copied modernity as ‘barbarism’ played into a xenophobic script that championed regeneration of the Latin spirit based on a masculinist nostalgia for ideals of the past. If we consider these three journals together, Evangelista argues, we can see how Rome established itself as a multifaceted literary capital for Italian literature: although in one respect it conforms to Casanova’s model of the entry into autonomous world literary space, at the same time it espoused a spectrum of views concerning cultural nationalism that drew on palimpsests of the past to suggest blueprints for the present and future. In terms of their relationship to different imperial powers, Rome’s status among all the literary capitals discussed here remains sui generis. No longer part of any empire, it was both post-imperial and pre-imperial, insofar as the nascent colonial ambitions that led to the establishment of the Italian Empire from 1936 to 1943 were already evident in Italy’s acquisition and occupation of territory in East Africa in the 1880s and 1890s. But although it did not have to consider its relationship with a colonial power like most of the loci discussed here (Florence is the other exception), it still had to negotiate its relationship with the soft power of French, English and other literary influences. In this respect, we can see an interesting analogy with the case of Buenos Aires, where the imported French models of the Naturalist and Decadent novel were used to criticise other aspects of European behaviour in order to create a specific national narrative. If we look at all of the literary capitals discussed in the present volume, one of the key characteristics they share is that of the entrepôt, understood here in its broader sense of a place of import and export. Of course, this is germane to all places of all sizes: one has only to look at the great interest in Belgian, Russian and Scandinavian literature in fin-de-siècle Paris, for example. But the spaces beyond the major centres discussed here all constitute different variations on this model of import and export, which in itself harks back to Goethe’s aspirations for Weltliteratur as intellectual commerce, as we have seen. In the case of the Calcutta Handbooks or Gems from Near and Afar, the trade deficit is clearly unequal: the imperial power is exporting a certain kind of knowledge while capitalising on local resources. In the other examples, however, there is a greater sense of balance between the imported influences and the resultant domestic literary output, whether it is exported through translation or not. We began this introduction by considering the ‘world literariness’ of the different genres discussed in the book and emphasising the

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importance of considering vernacular forms on their own merits, instead of invariably reading them through Eurocentric eyes. It is our hope that this analysis of the cosmopolitan-vernacular, or the vernacular-­ cosmopolitan, is sustained throughout the volume, embodied in the figure of Mihály Vitkovics, the patriotic cosmopolitan agent (in Bourdieu’s sense) who epitomised the transnational origins of Hungarian nationalism, or by Jean Sibelius, James Joyce, Luisa Gervasio, Mina Loy and many of the other writers discussed here. Although the informal capital identified in early-nineteenth-century Pest-Buda may differ from the more formal requirements of the newly established Rome, or the conservative nationalism of Buenos Aires, in its process of creation all forms of literary capital are to some extent informal; however restrictive governments may be, queer forces and organic counter-narratives will find their own ways to challenge hegemonies. In this same respect, the untimely modern capitals identified in Florence are evident everywhere; in some respects, Trieste was way ahead of its time, surprisingly prophetic of Dubai but, sadly, more tolerant of otherness. What city was timely, even if we accept Casanova’s enticing view of Paris as the Greenwich Meridian of nineteenth-century world literary space? Here we also see the advantages of Michael Tsang’s concept of world-weaving: bringing together the different strands of the colonial and the colonised, the cosmopolitan and the vernacular, the informal and the untimely. If our interventions into literary cartography here can be seen as the creation of different asterisms within the wider constellations of the global literary field, we hope that they will enable readers to see other stars differently in future work on literary capital(s). The editors of the Palgrave Literary Urban Studies series provide an alluring metaphor for peripherality in their interest in the ‘outskirts’ of literature, as discussed above. In our contribution to the series, we hope to show that the spaces beyond the centres, or the ‘outskirts’ of the great nineteenth-century metropoles, are all in their own right equally valuable as examples of literary capital and as centres of different networks of their own.

Note 1. Calcutta was renamed Kolkata on 24 August 1999 to coincide with the 390th birthday of the city (Goldenberg 1999).

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Works Cited Ameel, Lieven, Jason Finch, and Markku Salmela. 2015. Introduction: Peripherality and Literary Urban Studies. In Literature and the Peripheral City, ed. Lieven Ameel, Jason Finch, and Markku Salmela, 1-17. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Anderson, Benedict. 2006. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. edn. London: Verso. Banerjee, Sumanta. 2013. Unish Shataker Bangali o Saraswati r Itor Santaan. Kolkata: Anushtup. Basu, Priyanka. 2021. The Observant Owl: Sensory Worlds of Colonial Calcutta in Hutom’s Vignettes. South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies 44 (5): 948-965. Beecroft, Alexander. 2015. An Ecology of World Literature. London: Verso. Benjamin, Walter. 1999. The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press. Bhabha, Homi. 1996. Unsatisfied: Notes on Vernacular Cosmopolitanism. In Text and Nation, ed. Laura Garcia-Morena and Peter C. Pfeiffer, 191-207. London: Camden House. Biswas, Adrish. 2000. Battala r Boi. Kolkata: Gangchil. Boehmer, Elleke and Dominic Davies. 2018. Planned Violence: Post/Colonial Urban Infrastructures, Literature and Culture. In Planned Violence: Post/ Colonial Urban Infrastructures, Literature and Culture, ed. Elleke Boehmer and Dominic Davies, 1-26. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1996. The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field, trans. Susan Emanuel. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Casanova, Pascale. 2004. The World Republic of Letters, trans. M. B. DeBevoise. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Chandler, Tertius. 1989. Four Thousand Years of Urban Growth, rev. edn. Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen. Charle, Christophe and Daniel Roche (eds.). 2002. Capitales culturelles, capitales symboliques: Paris et les expériences européennes XVIIIe-XXe siècles. Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne. Cheah, Pheng. 2016. What is a World? On Postcolonial Literature as World Literature. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Cornis-Pope, Marcel. 2006. Introduction: Representing East-Central Europe’s Marginocentric Cities. In History of the Literary Cultures of East-Central Europe, ed. Marcel Cornis-Pope and John Neubauer, vol. 2, 8-11. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Cornis-Pope, Marcel and John Neubauer (eds.). 2010. History of the Literary Cultures of East-Central Europe, vol. 4. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Davies, Dominic. 2017. Imperial Infrastructure and Spatial Resistance in Colonial Literature, 1880-1930. Lausanne: Peter Lang.

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Finch, Jason, Lieven Ameel, and Markku Salmela (eds.). 2017. Literary Second Cities. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Goldenberg, Suzanne. 1999. Calcutta Becomes Kolkata as Name-dropping Spreads. The Guardian, 22 July. https://www.theguardian.com/world/1999/ jul/22/suzannegoldenberg. Harder, Hans. 2016. Urbanity in the Vernacular: Narrating the City in Modern South Asian Literatures. Asiatische Studien / Études Asiatiques 70 (2): 435-466. Harootunian, Harry. 2000. History’s Disquiet: Modernity, Cultural Practice and the Question of Everyday Life. New York: Columbia University Press. Helgesson, Stefan, Christina Kullberg, Paul Tenngart and Helena Wulff. 2021. Series Introduction. The Cosmopolitan-Vernacular Dynamic: Conjunctions of World Literature. In Literature and the Making of the World: Cosmopolitan Texts, Vernacular Practices, ed. Stefan Helgesson, Helena Bodin and Annika Mörte Alling, xiii-xxxiii. New York: Bloomsbury. Hibbitt, Richard (ed.). 2017a. Other Capitals of the Nineteenth Century: An Alternative Mapping of Literary and Cultural Space. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Hibbitt, Richard, 2017b. Bruges as Symbolic Capital. Forum for Modern Language Studies 53 (1), special issue on Literary Communities in the Late-Nineteenth and Early-Twentieth Centuries: Space, Place and Identity, ed. Philip Bullock, Stefano Evangelista and Gesa Stedman, 349–359. Hutcheon, Linda and Mario J.  Valdes. 2002. Rethinking Literary History: A Dialogue on Theory. New York: Oxford University Press. Judson, Pieter M.. 2016. The Habsburg Empire: A New History. Cambridge and London: Belknap Press. Kipling, Rudyard. 1888. The City of Dreadful Night and Other Sketches. India: A.H. Wheeler & Co. Marchant, Jo. 2020. The Human Cosmos: A Secret History of the Stars. Edinburgh: Canongate. Mukherjee, Abir. 2021. Time, Place and Committing Murder to Scratch an Itch. You Tube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HQFLiASZzbA. Mukherjee, Upamanyu Pablo. 2018. Detecting World-Literature: (Sub-)Urban Crimes in the Nineteenth Century. In Planned Violence Post/Colonial Urban Infrastructure, Literature and Culture, ed. Elleke Boehmer and Dominic Davies, 273-288. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Mukherjee, Upamanyu Pablo, 2003. Crime and Empire: Representing India in the Nineteenth-Century. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Nixson, Matt. 2021. Only the British Would Put up a Statue to the Man who Kicked Them Out. Daily Express, 19 November. https://www.pressreader. com/uk/daily-­express/20211119/282187949274979. Okoth Opondo Sam. 2008. Genre and the African City: The Politics and Poetics of Urban Rhythms. Journal for Cultural Research 12 (1): 59-79.

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Piketty, Thomas. 2020. Capital and Ideology, trans. Arthur Goldhammer. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Pollock, Sheldon. 2006. Cosmopolitan and Vernacular in History. Public Culture 12 (3): 591-625. Pratt, Mary Louise. 1992. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. London: Routledge. Rey, Hans Augusto. 1976. The Stars: A New Way to See Them. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Sinha, Kaliprasanna. 1862. Hutom Pyanchar Naksha. www.boierboi.net. Tally Jr, Robert T. (ed.). 2011. Geocritical Explorations: Space, Place, and Mapping in Literary and Cultural Studies. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Tally Jr, Robert T. 2013. Spatiality. Abingdon: Routledge. Tally Jr, Robert T. 2019. Topophrenia. Place, Narrative and the Spatial Imagination. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Wallerstein, Immanuel. 2004. World-Systems Analysis: An Introduction. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Westphal, Bertrand. 2011. Geocriticism: Real and Fictional Spaces, trans. Robert T. Tally, Jr. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Wirth-Nesher, Hana. 1996. City Codes: Reading the Modern Urban Novel. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wirth-Nesher, Hana, 2001. Impartial Maps: Reading and Writing Cities. In Handbook of Urban Studies, ed. Ronan Paddison, 52-66. London: Sage. Wolff, Janet. 2013. Manchester, Capital of the Nineteenth Century. Journal of Classical Sociology 13 (1): 69-86.

PART I

Beyond Europe

CHAPTER 2

Producing the Colonial Capital: Calcutta in Handbooks Arunima Bhattacharya

In 2011, a leading national newspaper, The Hindu, published an article on the chief minister of West Bengal’s plans for beautifying Calcutta’s environs and developing a robust urban infrastructure.1 The article was titled ‘Mamata Wants to Turn Kolkata into London’, which reported on Mamata Banerjee’s plans for ‘transforming Kolkata into London’ with the Hooghly River ‘as the theme on the lines of the Thames’ (Bose 2011). Though this stance of reviving Calcutta’s colonial past seems contradictory to the current general climate of revising heritage and statuary in favour of a more critical history of imperialism in the UK, such a move, as the West Bengal government seems to hope, will reinvigorate Calcutta’s dwindling relevance as a global port of trade by emphasising its primary role in the making of the British imperial trade dominions in South Asia.2 Efforts towards conserving and promoting a ‘shared heritage’ with India, and specifically with Calcutta, have been initiated by British conservationists and architects as well. James Simpson and Sir Bernard Feilden, for example, have

A. Bhattacharya (*) Edinburgh Napier University, Edinburgh, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 A. Bhattacharya et al. (eds.), Literary Capitals in the Long Nineteenth Century, Literary Urban Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-13060-1_2

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instated funded training for Indian architects in UK institutions, and drawn up detailed conservation reports on specific buildings of British origin in Calcutta (Simpson 2017, Times of India 2017 and Asian Image 2015). The origins of Calcutta as a cosmopolitan imperial port city and the capital of British India from 1690 to 1911 have remained a thematic mainstay in visual and literary representations of the city, even in post-­ independence literature and cultural texts. The literary and critical evaluations of Bengal Renaissance3 and the historicisation of colonial modernity draw heavily on the architectural and spatial legacies of Calcutta’s colonial past, and on the conception of heritage derived therefrom.4 This chapter investigates the early construction of colonial imperial heritage in a particular subgenre of travel literature that I term the ‘Calcutta Handbook’. Through contextual and close-textual reading of excerpts from select Calcutta Handbooks, the chapter engages with the textual construction of a specific narrative of Calcutta’s genesis and growth as the imperial capital of British India. It argues that this branding of Calcutta as the ‘Second City of the Empire’ was tied into the colonial rationale of rule and its administrative strategies to counter burgeoning nationalist movements over the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It further shows how the Calcutta Handbook narratives naturalised the historical conception of British rule in India in order to fit the larger discourses of civilisational and progressivist arguments of empire. The long nineteenth century had witnessed the ‘Bengal Renaissance’ introducing English and European literature, science and philosophy to the state education institutions in Calcutta. However, in the colonial context the effects of modernity were felt in Calcutta through a series of crises and through growing discontent with colonial governmental measures to control and define its rule. The right to ‘self-determination’, deemed essential to the conception of a citizen-subject and their relationship with the state in European political economies, was impossible to grant to the colonial subject within the racial and political hierarchy of the colonial state. For the educated Indian middle-class intelligentsia who were also colonial subjects, technical and ideological modernisation did not amount to the freedom to determine individual and collective political identities, which led to the rise of insurgent anti-colonial organisation. Handbooks that specifically deal with Calcutta are the focus of this study: as Calcutta was the capital city of British India till 1911, it was also the centre for symbolic investment of imperial power.5 I use the term Calcutta Handbooks to denote a specific subgenre of guidebooks

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published in Calcutta during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by transnational publishing houses like Thacker, Spink and Co. and W. Newman & Company; the term ‘handbook’ refers to John Murray’s use of this term for the early ‘Handbooks’ published for English-speaking travellers to the European ‘continent’ since 1836.6 Though the effects of class-based and racial hierarchies inherent to British colonial rule were not unique to Calcutta, the city seems distinctive compared to other Indian cities which served as comparative constellations; this was mainly due to the socio-economic, cultural and political context of the Swadeshi movement that emerged in the wake of the Bengal partition of 1905, and the consequent shift of the capital to Delhi in 1911. The handbooks, as I argue here, were responsive to the major changes in the ideologies of rule that accompanied the British governance in Calcutta during this historical period, revealing the conflicted processes through which colonial modernity and urban cityscape emerged during the early years of the twentieth century. The early handbooks (1840–1880) address various geopolitical ‘anxieties’ about empire. These were written by public officials and administrators who were usually part of the Calcutta Historical Society and also served in administrative roles. They include features of early imperial vade-­ mecums, in that they aimed at a holistic view of Calcutta, contextualising it in greater Bengal and Indian climate, culture and history. Some examples include: T. Black & Co.’s Handbook of Calcutta (1864); W. Newman & Co.’s Handbook to Calcutta, Historical and Descriptive: with a Plan of the City (1875; 1882; 1892); E.B. Eastwick’s Handbook of the Bengal Presidency, with an Account of Calcutta City; or Strangers Self-interpreter and Guide to Colloquial and General Intercourse with the Natives of India, with a Map of India and Five Illustrations (1882) and Edmund Mitchell’s Thacker’s Guide to Calcutta: its High-ways and By-paths with a Chapter on the Government of India (1890). They typically included sections titled ‘Season for Visiting Bengal’; ‘Outfits’; ‘Hints to Dress, Diet, Health and Comfort’; ‘Chronological Tables’; ‘Tables of Money’; ‘Castes and Tribes in the Bengal Presidency’; ‘Languages of the Bengal Presidency’; and ‘Vocabulary and Dialogues’, with a detailed section on Calcutta life. T. Black, Newman and Mitchell include extensive sections on Old Calcutta and the early life of British settlers in the region, carefully constructing a narrative that grounded individuals, buildings and spaces in an enclosed and coherent narrative of ‘progress’, emphasising historical continuity of the British rule, and projecting a sense of belonging. These handbooks

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were also mindful of Calcutta’s strategic position to influence British politics in the subcontinent, both socioculturally and economically. The turn of the twentieth century introduced a more controlled version of the handbooks’ engagement with the colonial conundrum of adjusting travellers’ expectations to the actual lived experience of the colonial space. These handbooks were being published when Bengal was rife with anti-colonial insurgencies against the government’s decision to partition the Bengal presidency. W.K. Firminger’s Thacker’s Guide to Calcutta (1906) and H.E.A. Cotton’s Calcutta Old and New. A Historical and Descriptive Handbook to the City (1907) belong to this period of strife. They include extensive referencing of academic and literary sources to describe the significance of buildings, sites and people. Such devices include demographic composition charts, tables of exchange rates and rate charts for servants, but they do not include translation tables or dialogues. Neither do they include ‘hints to dress, diet, health and comfort’ found in the earlier handbooks. Generally, they convey a stricter objective tone that distances itself from admissions of incongruities or the essentially intimate and intersectional nature of colonial interracial exchanges. They were also conspicuous in avoiding commentary on the political culture of the times that threatened the projection of a well-governed and disciplined capital city. The handbooks that were published after the shift of the imperial capital from Calcutta to Delhi in 1911 had transitioned further into a more standardised format of imagining travel and life in Calcutta. These handbooks include H.A. Newell’s Calcutta, the First Capital of British India (1922); W. Newman & Co., The Visitor’s Guide to Calcutta (1927); Glen Hicken’s Mid Pleasures and Palaces: An Indispensable Pocket Guide to Calcutta (1931); G.W. Tyson’s Calcutta: The City of Palaces (1932); and John Barry’s Calcutta 1940 (1940)  and Calcutta Illustrated (1953). These later handbooks concentrate on the map and tour format; following a brief introduction to the city, they display no significant attempt to narrativise Calcutta’s history. The maps are increasingly standardised in line with the focused tour narrative. Moreover, advertisements for places and things establish brand loyalties and standardised services, effectively obliterating all remnants of a subjective, improvisatory approach to private and health-related needs provided under informal titles like ‘Hints’ in earlier handbooks. However, these handbooks retain the sections on local ‘races’ and ‘types’, providing a demographic analysis that championed racial and regional stereotypes and preserved racial and class-based hierarchies that

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consolidated the ‘rationale’ of empire. The readership of the handbooks can be ascertained to a degree from the prefaces to subsequent editions and vernacular versions of the handbook format. As there is so little study on this genre’s role and circulation in Calcutta and hardly any secondary comments about these handbooks in contemporary texts, the readership of handbooks has to be assumed from their content and intention. I argue that the formal and stylistic elements of the subgenre of the Calcutta Handbooks are synchronous with the changing ideologies of imperial rule. I investigate how being the ‘capital’ of British India figured within that nexus of power and subjugation that the Calcutta Handbooks were reflecting through their style and content. The turn of the twentieth century (1880–1910) witnessed Lord Curzon’s administrative drive to historicise Calcutta as the British Indian capital and bolster the diplomatic narrative in support of continuing British colonial administration in India in the face of robust anticolonial demonstrations.7 The handbooks responded to this need by mapping the dramatic urbanisation and development of Calcutta as synchronous with the rise of British rule in India. However, after the shift of the British capital to Delhi in 1911, depictions of Calcutta had to adapt to change in the erstwhile ‘capital’ city’s political significance. The Calcutta Handbooks written after 1911 gradually changed focus from narrating the city’s historic significance in consolidating the British rule in India to Calcutta’s continued relevance in international trade and global material cultures, highlighting the cosmopolitan experience that the city could offer. In reading the Calcutta Handbooks with reference to their prefaces and the heritage policies of the British government in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, I posit that these texts were part of the literary and cultural investment in pro-imperial heritage construction that emerged as a distinct political tool to counter the nationalist claims of popular anti-­ colonial insurrections, which viewed the colonial rulers as outsiders. I further trace the workings of territorial anxiety through the constructions of heritage and explore its relationship with nostalgia. The Calcutta Handbooks in this reading emerge as a safety valve to quell territorial anxiety of the city’s white residents and travellers. Their narratives work through familiar tropes of European travel narratives, with ordering devices like lists and tables, supported by the genial tone of an insider’s know-how that provided a reassuring semblance of familiarity to the alien colonial environs and cultural modes. In their constant struggle to translate the other in terms of the familiar, the Calcutta Handbooks generate a

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curious affective charge that constantly references nostalgia for ‘Home’, that is, Britain, while omitting the uncomfortable impositions of the unfamiliar colonial terrain that breach the handbooks’ ordered and constructed authority. By contextualising this genre within the time frame of the turbulent political shifts within which it evolved, this chapter aims to reveal how the handbook depended on omissions of political context and imposed silences to build a curated and controlled version of the imperial capital that was in line with the dominant political ideologies of its time. To this end, the Calcutta Handbooks deploy formal and aesthetic experiments that are often at odds with each other and reveal the conflict at the heart of an increasingly threatened empire.



Calcutta Handbooks: Background and Purpose

The early heft of imperial vade-mecums (1840–1860) was a consequence of the compulsive need to provide for all eventualities that might arise during a voyage to the East of India and the unfamiliarity of the colonial capital. These included a topographical history of the lay of the land, geological accounts of soil composition (Ray 1902), the type and uses of local vegetation and animal life, tribes and communities that peopled the land, and their origins, peculiarities, religious beliefs and sociocultural habits, borrowing from the ethnographic accounts penned by administrators and travellers to Bengal (Hunter 1868). These early tomes dealt with Bengal as a region and had a dedicated chapter on Calcutta. They also included extensive translation tables of phrases and expressions, sometimes with a compilation of dialogues with servants that were assumed plausible in particular contexts (The Anglo-Hindustani Hand Book 1850).8 They adhered to the cartographic assumption of a clearly demarcated ‘white-town’ and ‘black-town’ and catered to the European sections of the city treating its Indian quarters as opaque spaces of filth, crime and darkness.9 The nature of the handbook changed abruptly after the shift of the capital to Delhi in 1911. The early handbooks (1840–1900s) had curated a detailed historical narrative that connected Calcutta’s administrative and business houses, monuments and churches with the glory, sacrifice and ambition of the British Empire in India. Calcutta’s colonial heritage was not narrated as a history of oppression and exploitation, but rather as a story of industrious governance and perseverance in the face of an adverse climate, diseases and ‘crafty natives’. A section titled ‘Hints for Visitors to Calcutta’ in T. Black’s Handbook of Calcutta (1864) begins an extensive list of hygiene and

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dietary advice with the caveat: ‘As all Europeans are more or less subject to be attacked with sickness in such a climate as India […]’ and extends the distrust of local food and environment to the local Indian people, instructing the European reader to always be punctual and keep his staff on the qui vive, as: those individuals [staff], in common with all Natives, pay no regard to time, so that by availing himself [the European reader] of its value, he may not only attain to eminence and distinction in whatever station he may be placed but also outwit the crafty and designing Native, with all his tergiversation and tact in the torturing of words, actions, and expressions, so as to best suit his own immediate views, at the sacrifice of the position of his European friend or acquaintance. (1864, 4)

The assumed character of the reader, the composite and generic presence around which this scaffolding of instruction and observations was constructed, was definitely male and white until the early to mid-twentieth century. There is a whole subgenre of domestic manuals, cookbooks and etiquette books that were meant for women who travelled to the city as companions. Of course, by this time prominent women of social standing and economic means had taken to writing travelogues, but these had little bearing on the practicality of a handbook designed for the mobile administrator/visitor’s need for information that could support conversation and tips, and for tricks that would keep him out of harm’s way and equipped to enjoy the perks of the metropolitan culture. The later handbooks (1911–1940s), tasked with a reinvention of the city’s character for a more diverse population, acknowledged that their readership was not limited to the European tourists and that it included residents in the city who needed a guide tailored to the demands of everyday life across all social spectrums: new residents and visitors appeared following infrastructural factors like the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, which made trips to and from London and other parts of Europe less time-consuming and more affordable, thus increasing the flow of goods and people. Writing in 1932, Glen Hicken in Mid Pleasures and Palaces prefaces his handbook with an acknowledgement of a broader readership: ‘it can prove of practical help to strangers—irrespective of their social position, caste, colour, or creed—who visit Calcutta’ (1931, 89). The first decade of the twentieth century marked what I propose to call the historic turn in Calcutta  Handbooks. By historic turn, I aim to

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delineate the trend of publishing handbooks on Calcutta specifically, where a significant portion of the introductory chapters focused on the history of Calcutta’s genesis as the capital city of the British Empire in India. In order to historicise the city space of Calcutta, these handbooks inserted a discernible break in the temporal continuity of the city space, dividing the narrative timeline into ‘Old Calcutta’ and ‘New Calcutta’ (Cotton 1907).10 This memorialisation of the city space linked the everyday administrative and commercial machinations of empire run in ‘neo-­ classical, art deco, brick and lime plaster, Minton tiles and cast-iron buildings’ (Simpson 2017, n.p.) to the descriptions of rural ruins of older settlements transformed through the struggle, enterprise, disease and death of early European settlers on this malarial land. Writing in 1890, Edmund Mitchell describes the location of the ‘Government House’ as a ‘fine position at the northern end of the great park or maidan’ (Mitchell 1890, 32). It is described as being located in the vicinity of the Writers’ Building that housed the Bengal government, the Royal Mint and Fort William—all located in central Calcutta—creating an imposing impression of the British Empire. Mitchell describes the ‘Government House’, the official residence of the governor general of India, constructed between 1797 and 1804, as having being erected at the instance of Lord Wellesley (Governor General from 1821 to 1828), who pronounced the dictum that ‘India should be governed from a palace, not from a counting house; with ideas of a prince, and not with those of a retail dealer in muslins and indigo’. […] the design (of the building) was adapted from Kedleston Hall, Derbyshire.

He further adds that the ‘Viceroy’s throne seated on which he receives Native chiefs and other dignitaries in State’ was a spoil of war which had belonged to Tipu Sultan, the biggest adversary of British expansionism in the south of India (Mitchell 1890, 34). Mitchell’s description emphasises the intentions of the East India Company (EIC) to establish grandiose architectural projections of power in line with the princely states of India. His narrative also considers the visual symbolism of the EIC’s claim to rule by defeating Indian rulers. After 1857, the company’s possessions were taken over by the Crown, ‘establishing British rule in India’, and the Government House was transformed into the residence of the Viceroy of India. The legacy of power associated with this architectural heritage evolved to manifest the symbolic importance of the imperial capital.

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Post-independence this symbolism of authority persists, since the Government House now serves as the residence of the governor for the state of West Bengal. The heritage sites contextualised in the handbook in reference to the narrative of progress and civilisation in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries served to naturalise the British presence in Calcutta and eastern India and to project a seamless continuity that would help quell the challenges of the burgeoning national movement. However, this attempt at identification and naturalisation was fraught with contradictions posed by assumptions of racial hierarchy essential to the imperial project. The logic of colonial domination had weaponised difference and claimed racial superiority to justify the imposition of British colonial rule on the people of India. Therefore, such attempts at weaving a seamless narrative of the British rule in India were always fraught with ambivalence posed by racial difference.11 This ambivalence is embedded in the material heritage of Calcutta and conceptions of its postcolonial legacy.



Heritage and Historiography as Governmental Policy

In a rousing speech delivered on 19 December 1902, on unveiling a copy of the original Holwell Monument (which had been removed under public protest), to honour the memory of the British settlers who perished in the infamous Black Hole tragedy in 1756, the viceroy Lord Curzon articulated his policy on history as follows: In carrying out this scheme [the excavation and reinstating of the original site of the Black Hole prison and the Holwell Monument removed in 1821] I have been pursuing one branch of a policy to which I have deliberately set myself in India, namely, that of preserving, in a breathless and often thoughtless age, the relics and memorials of the past. To me the past is sacred. (Curzon 1906, 447)

What is significant here is the way Calcutta is narrativised, even in the official rhetoric, as ‘one great graveyard of memories’. Curzon explicitly casts a nostalgic narrative of loss over specific sites that connects Calcutta’s city space with a glorified history of empire-making (1906, 448). Here, historiography operates in tandem with a colonial policy. In this particular speech, the Ancient Monuments Bill signals the use of

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historiography to structure public space around the different objects, sites and spaces that were visual and tangible reminders of colonial power. Calcutta’s historiography was wielded as a tool to align public opinion in favour of recognising British contribution to Bengal’s (also implying India’s) economy and administration through the lens of ‘progress’ and ‘development’. However, as this period also witnessed a growing nationalist consciousness among the elite and educated middle-class sections of Indians, Curzon was concerned about inciting discontent among the native population by reiterating violent episodes in history. For example, in a speech delivered on 19 April 1902, when the Mutiny Memorial (to commemorate the services and sacrifice of the Delhi Telegraph Office Staff during the Mutiny) was unveiled in Delhi, he remarked that he was against blotting out the instances when the ‘British and Native races of India have been in conflict’. Such instances are not to be forgotten, as he further insists in the speech: ‘do not pretend that they did not take place, and do not, for the sake of a false and mawkish sentiment, forfeit your chance of honouring that which is worthy of honour’ (Curzon 1906, 440). The Calcutta Handbooks need to be read within this conflicted context, where the restorative aspect of nostalgia forefronts colonial ambivalence by integrating conflict within the ‘guilt-free’ construct of heritage. Svetlana Boym, in her essay ‘Nostalgia and its Discontents’, divides nostalgia into two categories: ‘restorative nostalgia’ and ‘reflective nostalgia’. Restorative nostalgia ‘stresses nostos [home] and attempts a transhistorical reconstruction of the lost home’ (2007). In the case of the handbooks, this amounts to a transgeographical reconstruction of ‘home’ in both architectural motifs and social rituals. Reflective nostalgia, on the other hand, ‘thrives on algia [the longing itself] and delays the homecoming—wistfully, ironically, desperately’ (2007, 13). Restorative nostalgia gravitates towards collective pictorial symbols and oral cultures and ends up reconstructing emblems and rituals of home and homeland in an attempt to conquer and spatialise time. Reflective nostalgia, for its part, ‘cherishes shattered fragments of memory and temporalizes space. Nostalgia is seen as an abdication of responsibility, a guilt-free homecoming’ (2007, 9). Curzon’s policy of inscribing the physical space of Calcutta with the legacy of British rule was actively challenged by various sabhas and samities (‘societies’ and ‘associations’, respectively; Chatterjee 2006, 168) that came to impose their own authenticating narratives onto the city’s public space. These sabhas and samities were distinctive features of a new urbanity

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emerging in Calcutta in the early to mid-nineteenth century. They drew on ‘western’ models of organised agitation,12 where the social hierarchy was dictated by class and not as much by traditional caste hierarchies, thus allowing for social mobility (Mukherjee 1977, 3–4; Chatterjee 2006, 169). Deana Heath argues that this tendency to interpret colonial governmental projects in indigenous societal terms gave the Indians a point of entry into political critique that would ultimately transform governmentalising discourses and practices (Heath 2010, 15–18).13 Vernacular books on the process of adjusting to the modern city emerged as part of the impulse to engage and interpret the metropolitan spatiality and sociocultural novelty into popular vernacular literary imagination: Kalikata Kamalaya (Kolkata, the Abode of Lakshmi; Bandopadhyay 1823); Naba babu Bilas (A Pleasant Tale of the New Babus, under the pseudonym Pramathanath Sharma; Bandopadhyay 1825); Naba bibi bilash (A Pleasant Tale of the New Bibi; Bandopadhyay 1831); Hutum Pyanchar Naksha (The Owl’s Gaze—Everyday Life in Early Calcutta; Sihna 1862).14 These books were modifying traditional moral codes based on caste and rural community life to negotiate the novelties of city life, and were based on assumptions of moral depravity that the city culture had supposedly induced. In doing so, these texts depicted the spatial and topographical features of the city as foils to their narratives on moral bankruptcy. The handbook narrative that arranged sites and places as tour itineraries in their content lists introduced the idea of walking in the city to follow the narrative of empire that the text mapped onto the architecture. This same narrative logic can be cited as a loose parallel to Durgacharan Ray’s Debganer Marte Agaman (The Arrival of Gods on Earth, 1880),15 where gods from the Hindu pantheon take to walking around the city marvelling at the infrastructural engineering, such as the steam engine, and other aspects of modernisation. The vernacular versions and English versions penned by Indian authors interpreted ‘western’ urban modernity in the colonial cultural and literary context by drawing comparisons between devices of modernisation and Indian mythic objects and beings. For example, Ray’s book creates a comic premise by showing the wonder of the Hindu god of water at the British use of motors to channel water into varied industrial and domestic uses. Though historical accounts of the city like Raja Binaya Krishna Deb’s The Early History and Growth of Calcutta (1905) followed the handbook narrative of spatial histories of the time, they also insisted on cross-cultural recognition and exchange in early British Bengal, staggering the continuous, one-dimensional narrative of history that W.K.  Firminger (1906) and other like-minded handbook

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writers manufactured. Firminger dismissed Deb’s account as: ‘Yarns of this kind are very easily spun and very easily credited by those who are […] against the Government’ (1906, 209).

Intertextuality and Calcutta Handbooks The advent of the handbooks on the literary scene was synchronous with early historical accounts of Calcutta’s rise as the imperial capital of India, and this simultaneously led to the production of an archive through cross references and citation. The writers of historical tomes and developers of government projects for historical sites doubled up as handbook writers for popular presses. This direct validation and government sponsorship is most noticeable in Curzon, who was the patron of the Calcutta Historical Society, founded in 1907 with H.E.A. Cotton as president and W.K. Firminger as editor of its dedicated journal, Bengal Past and Present (Chatterjee 2012, 266). Cotton was also the author of Calcutta Old and New (1907). W.K. Firminger, the author of Handbook of Calcutta (1906), had the then viceroy of India, Lord Curzon, proofread his work and suggest suitable omissions, as his preface suggests: I am indebted to Lord Curzon of Kedleston for the kindly [sic] interest he has taken in my work. In the midst of his most overwhelming duties, he found time to read through the bulk of my proofs, and he has both saved me from repeating many of those time-honoured blunders so dear in local tradition […]. (Firminger 1906, vi)16

A selection of travellers’ tales and events sourced from government records is repeatedly referenced in nineteenth-century historical accounts and handbooks alike. This resulted in a standardisation of certain narratives as the received version of history. In the same vein, selected historical narratives that emerged at the turn of the twentieth century came to determine what constituted Calcutta’s colonial archive. These archival sources, as Ann Laura Stoler argues, should be recognised not as ‘sites of knowledge retrieval’, but as ‘sites of knowledge production’ (2002, 87). To take one conspicuous example, H.E. Busteed’s book Echoes from Old Calcutta (1888) is acknowledged time and again in the prefaces to the Calcutta Handbooks as a primary source of archival material, although it was no more than a loose collection of reported anecdotes, court proceedings, letters and government records on significant events in Calcutta’s

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cultural history—a hitherto undocumented aspect of British life in Calcutta found only in memoirs and travelogues.17 In his second edition, Busteed mentions that the book was ‘originally written for Calcutta readers specifically’ and was ‘mainly a mere gossiping volume of light reading’ (1888, vi). It is interesting to note how early publications like Busteed’s standardised oral history in writing, which later handbooks were to cite as ‘objective history’. Busteed suggested that his sources were ‘sketches [...] gathered in many instances from perishable sources not easily accessible, such as old graveyards, decaying newspapers and records, and similar chronicles’ (vi). In a similar manner, the Calcutta Handbooks as a subgenre would contribute in their different ways towards standardising an accepted list of archival resources. W.K. Firminger, in the later Thacker’s Guide to Calcutta (1906), goes on to mention some of the works of his friends and contemporaries––‘Sterndale, Hyde, Hunter, Wilson, Hill, Long and the Sketches from the Calcutta Gazettes have been of the greatest use to me’ (vi)––also citing newspapers and periodicals from earlier decades as his principal sources, for instance ‘Calcutta Review, the Bengal Harakaru, and Hickey’s ill-famed newspaper’ (vii).18 The handbooks were thus evolving in relation to official historiography on Calcutta and were well supported to narrativise Calcutta in a way that served the immediate purposes of colonial governance. The handbooks published during the turn of the twentieth century (Mitchell 1890; Newman 1892; Firminger 1906; Cotton 1907) adhered to a set of archival resources, oral histories, and cultural and architectural sites that helped align the historiography of the city to the colonial ideologies of rule representing the capital city as a model exemplar of civilisational and administrative progress. The narrative of these handbooks focused on the British architectural influence that imbued Calcutta with visual echoes of Britain, adding to the resonance of the epithet ‘Second City of Empire’, which was often used as a popular introduction for the city. These buildings remain to this day, often functioning as part of the postcolonial state’s administrative machinery, for example the Calcutta High Court, designed in the gothic style by Walter Granville and inspired by the Hamburg Rathaus (1854–1856), itself based on the Cloth Hall in Ypres. It stood out among the more popular neoclassical styles adopted for the other grand municipality and administrative buildings like the grandly domed General Post Office building in Dalhousie Square. Both these buildings, along with the Writers’ Building, which was until recently home

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to the Bengal Secretariat, occupy central commanding vistas of the city and are constant reminders of the city’s colonial origins. The postcolonial topography of Calcutta is still dominated by the impression of London that the early British architects had sought to create and establish (see Fig. 2.1). The texts created complex memory maps that perpetuated the official historical discourse of British rule in Calcutta, eliding native and local histories in favour of clean linear roads of association that connected the imposing buildings of British Calcutta to each other in the tour plans provided in handbooks, as well as in the visual and emotional geographies of the mind.

Fig. 2.1  Central Telegraph Office, Kolkata. Nicknamed the ‘Dead letter office’, BBD Bagh (Dalhousie Square)

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Nostalgia, City Space and Power: The Form and Layout of Calcutta Handbooks Calcutta Handbooks brought together nostalgia, heritage formation and ‘Home’ as critical concepts that worked to stabilise the everyday experience of empire in the city of Calcutta towards the end of the nineteenth century. John Murray’s first handbook on the Bengal Province was written by E.B. Eastwick. Murray’s is the representative prototype of the Calcutta Handbook.19 The Handbook of the Bengal Presidency is divided into two sections. ‘Section I’ provides practical information, from ‘Seasons Most Suitable for Visiting Bengal’ to ‘Outfits and Hints to Dress, Diet, Health and Comfort’. ‘Routes to Calcutta’ are supplied, as well as historical timelines that begin with the British Governor-generals and Viceroys who served in Calcutta, going back to the Surya-vansha (solar) and Chandra-­ vansha (lunar) dynasties who ruled ancient India, and concluding with Muslim rule before the advent of the Europeans. The ancient Indian history section is brief and tabular in format (see Fig. 2.2), with events being arranged against the year in which they took place. Further information includes that of ‘Tables of Money, Weights and Measures’, ‘Castes and Tribes in the Bengal Presidency’, ‘Languages of the Bengal Presidency’ and ‘Vocabulary and Dialogues’. These were common features in the ‘Preliminary Information’ section of all Murray Handbooks, including the ones produced for Europe.20 The second section is entitled ‘Calcutta City’ and comprises the bulk of the book. The section on Calcutta is planned as a travel itinerary spanning four days, and significant sites and buildings in a particular vicinity of the city are grouped together, so that they can be visited in one day. The tour begins on the ‘First Day’ with the ‘Hughli River’ and the ‘Landing Place at Calcutta’ and covers Central Calcutta; the ‘Second Day’ engages with places along the river down to Garden Reach and Metiaburz (where the King of Audh resided), covering the ‘western’ section of the city. The ‘Third’ and the ‘Fourth’ days explore the cosmopolitan history of the city, travelling from the ‘Remains of the Old Fort’ and the ‘Memorial of the Black Hole Massacre’ to the ‘Armenian Church’ and the ‘Bramho Samaj’ building, located well inside the so-called ‘black town’. The narrative of the handbook thus interprets the geography of the city, not so much in terms of its physical coordinates, as according to its political and social significance in the making of the British Empire. This overriding logic of hierarchisation prioritises certain sites over others, resulting in some being

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Fig. 2.2  Content pages taken from E.B. Eastwick’s Handbook of the Bengal Presidency

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made conspicuous while others are consigned to erasure. There was very little visibility of the way of life in the Indian quarters of the city in the handbook narrative. The dominant trope of describing the Indian section in the north is through descriptions of opium dens, prostitute quarters and crime. For example, Mitchell’s book describes the Indian quarter through chapter titles like ‘Jail Birds’, ‘Around Bow Bazar’, ‘The Lepers and the Poor’ and ‘A Hindu Shrine’, which exorcise the Indian presence in the city. Though they were the demographic majority, the native population was defamiliarised in the context of the urban modern, and made to seem like a problem that needed British intervention and control. The ‘objective’ logic of the contents list arranged in an alphabetical order or according to a tour itinerary that can be completed in a week (Eastwick 1882)—seemingly impartial criteria—ends up concealing the ideologies of colonial representative politics that constructed a selective list of sites based on the narratives and topics listed above. The city in the handbooks is read like a text, assembled and mapped in accordance with certain thematic mainstays. The European part of the city (‘white town’) is meticulously documented with each topographical feature accompanied by a brief historical introduction. By contrast, the native town (‘black town’) is described as an undistinguishable area of darkness and dilapidation that has yet to see the civilising order and symmetry of modern urbanism. This binary perception is a work of civic imagination that alienates the local features of the ‘city’, that is, the elements that disturb the contrived order of a planned grid of controlled exchanges.21 Disease, death, climate, smell, floods and riots contend with such compartmentalisation. The continuity of space is fractured by the linear succession of time, where the modernised white town is ‘advanced’ and the colonial space of the Indian suburbs is a belated entry, always backward and therefore never ‘worthy/capable’ of rule and self-administration.22 The British government’s rationale of rule was that urbanism was introduced by the colonising country, and since it was not an organic growth from the local context, it could only be managed by the people who introduced it. In this case, an important clause was that there should be one version of urban modernity existing, the correct one, the ‘western’ one, hence the threat from all alternatives, all hybrids and all adaptations.23 This singular modernity has been challenged by later historians and literary critics in favour of an indigenous, hybrid form of colonial modernity and the possibility of alternative modernities (Chatterjee 1997; Chakrabarty 1997). The Calcutta Handbooks however, as I have argued so far, came

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into existence to serve this need of aligning the bodies of both white and native subjects with the administrative conceptions of colonial space. Eastwick’s narrative opens with a poignant contrast in which the decaying civilisations of India—its superstition-ridden wilderness—are set against the forests of masts, the vast plain of the Esplanade, the fort and the fine buildings in their background which give the idea of a great commercial capital, the seat of a powerful government (85).24 History in Eastwick’s narrative is primarily encountered in inscriptions on plaques or tablets commemorating the personal trials and contributions of European men and women to the making of British Calcutta. Funerary architecture in cathedrals and graveyards combines here with the subjective tales of loss and death, investing the personal with historical significance and social purpose. For example, describing St Paul’s Cathedral in Calcutta, Eastwick provides a meticulous documentation of funerary tablets, the historic references coalescing into a mosaic-like narrative of the past, where the public assassination of John Paxton Norman, the officiating chief justice of Bengal, in September 1871, is encountered beside the memory of individual accounts of soldiers who lost their lives during the Mutiny of 1857 (86–94). The following quotation exemplifies Eastwick’s synthetic narrative style: […] Next is a tablet to 7 officers of the 68th Regiment N.I., ‘who died during the Mutiny of the Native Troops, and subsequent operations, from 1857 to 1859; some on the field of battle, some by the hands of their own followers, others from disease; all doing their duty’.25

Here, it is the memory of the ordinary, unnamed Briton that has been evoked and consecrated in the history writing of Calcutta. ‘The work of the dead’, following Thomas Laqueur’s book (2015) by the same name, is palpable in the material texture of Calcutta. Laqueur states: [t]here is a recognition, even if unspoken, of the power of the dead in deep time to make communities, to do the work of culture, to announce their presence and meaning by occupying space. [...] Bodies create a community of memory; visitors to these bodies confirm it; together they make a claim on space and on the attention of the living. (21)

The early handbooks consolidated their claims on the physical space of the city by subscribing to the ‘community of memory’ that the dead and

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their physical remains had invested in the topography of the city. Eastwick’s technique of reproducing inscriptions on memorial tablets and statues in exact detail, that is, without qualifying such description from an authorial perspective, emphasises the visual ‘tour’-oriented objective of the narrative.26 It also creates an element of geographical and temporal immediacy in the narrative’s representation of the city’s past. It is worth noting that the memorial tablets cited in Eastwick’s narrative were generally either a part of church architecture or were placed underneath statues that dominated key public spaces in the city. The narrative transcribes inscriptions from architecture in such a way that they function as central images in the book, with the inscriptions printed maintaining the stylistic pattern and line breaks in the original inscription on the monument. Tellingly, most of the edifices and statues are claimed to have been erected by ‘the inhabitants of British India, of various races and creeds’, eliding the significance of racial barriers. An example of this is the inscription that Eastwick copies from the equestrian statue of the Earl of Mayo, viceroy and governor general of India, who was assassinated in 1872 by nationalist extremists. It proclaims: ‘The people of India mourning and indignant raised this statue’ (92). Thus, while Eastwick’s narrative in its selective reporting and representation of the inscriptions on the statues emphasises the glory attached to honour and sacrifice in the service of empire, it also implicitly validates imperial intervention in India and the complicity of the Indian people in this manifestly unequal form of authoritarian rule. In retrospect, such a narrative inspires networks of references between instances of conflict in the late nineteenth century and early narratives of torture and violence like the Black Hole tragedy and the military incursion by the Nawab of Bengal, Siraj-ud-dowlah, on the first English settlement in 1756.27 Eastwick makes substantial allusions to the strife and intrigue that characterised the beginning of British dominion in Bengal in sections titled ‘The Remains of the Old Fort’ and ‘The Memorial of the Black Hole Massacre’.28 The Old Fort was destroyed when Siraj-ud-Dowlah captured Calcutta from the English in 1756, and what remained of its architecture was incorporated into later buildings constructed on the same site, producing a sense of continuity in the telling of history. Eastwick describes the remains as follows: What remains of the S. curtain of the fort, which is in the shape of a St. Andrew’s Cross. […] The place is now used as a workshop, with stables at

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the W. end. Here were the barracks, which, according to Holwell, were open to the W. by arches corresponding to the arches of the verandah [sic] without. According to some authorities the Black Hole was at the 2nd arch where you enter. (102)

Though handbooks published by John Murray strictly adhere to the policy of refraining from political and analytic commentary by the author, Eastwick helps the reader discern the changing colonial political rationality that informs historical narratives during the latter half of the nineteenth century.29 He does so by tracing the descriptions of the Old Fort and the history of the ‘memorial of the Black Hole’ to its first establishment by J.Z. Holwell in memory of his fellow companions who perished on the fateful night of June 1756, when (according to Holwell) a hundred and twenty-three European persons were stifled to death in a small dungeon, with only twenty-three surviving until the next morning. He criticises the Marquis of Hastings’s decision to remove the monument as an act of political vulnerability, ‘owing to some weak scruples’, then goes on to state that the monument is ‘now to be restored near the lamp in front of the Post Office, which is supposed by some to be the place where the Black Hole was’ (102). The inscription on the Black Hole monument, like those on the tablets and gravestones described elsewhere in this handbook, is recorded in the text for the reader’s benefit. In examples such as this, statues are not only memorials to the ideals of empire, but their physical presence also inscribes onto present topography a nostalgic version of the imperial past. At the time of their erection, both statues mentioned above were placed in the vicinity of major government buildings like the Writers’ Building, from where the civic administration of the city was controlled. In discussing the political significance of such a visual network of power, Xavier Guégan draws parallels between the use of architecture in French Algiers and colonial Calcutta as instruments of dominance. Guégan cites the statue of Lord Hardinge in Calcutta as an example where the statue and its location highlight visual networks of power that stretch across the cityscape: ‘The relationship between those statues and the buildings where political and administrative decisions were made is clear: the conqueror is exhibited, magnified, and visually directly connected to the colonial powerhouse’ (2015, 31). These public spaces also derive character and a sense of the historical from references to personal narratives; in exchange, they lend those individual histories grandeur and permanence through their architecture.

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This narrative of grandeur is in stark contrast to later handbooks that portray Calcutta as a complex repository of urban poverty, crime and missionary reform underpinning the trade networks that this port city sustained. Hicken’s handbook (1931) includes a section entitled ‘A Tip for Those with Little or No Money’, where he states: ‘According to a report issued by the District Charitable Society, there were over ten-thousand unemployed Anglo-Indians and Domiciled Europeans in Calcutta during the early part of 1931 seeking relief, and a good few of these unfortunates were new-comers’ (60). Hicken is mindful of the racial hierarchy of charity that catered to a specific clientele based on the accepted categories of whiteness ranging from British-born ‘pure’ subjects to Anglo-Indians who were of a mixed racial descent and often relegated to the fringes of the urban community abandoned to poverty: Should a person suddenly find himself without means, friendless and homeless, the best course to adopt immediately is to see the Secretary of the European Unemployed Relief Committee at No. 5 Government Place, or the Secretary of the District Charitable Society at No. 6 Wellington Square. The former relief Committee is intended only for British-born subjects, while the latter society is meant to assist and help Anglo-Indians in distress. There is also a ‘refuge’ at 125 Bowbazzar Street, a home for the homeless and helpless irrespective of caste, colour or creed (60).

Conclusion: Heritage and the Politics of Nostalgia It would be going too far to say that Eastwick’s narrative creates a net of associations around historical events in such clear terms that it might provide a comprehensive understanding of the documentation and representation of the city in the public psyche and popular culture. However, it does serve to identify specific events as key turning points in the city’s history, even though these are assimilated in the ‘service’ narrative of the British Raj and are not assessed in light of developing nationalist consciousness in India. We might therefore say in general of historiography in Calcutta Handbooks that it identified potentially turning events but then strategically omitted to contextualise them in the competing narratives of native sociopolitical discourses.30 In this context, history became privy to a larger colonial agenda of surveillance and control. Empire’s constant preoccupation with disease, death and violence provides a substantial substructure to the memorialisation in handbooks. As already mentioned, the

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Calcutta Handbooks were symptomatic of a fundamental contradiction that existed at the heart of the colonial scene, whereby liberal civilisational ideals were forced to coexist with the necessity of subjugation, dominance and autocracy.31 They were explicitly devised to address this unequal situation, creating an ‘objective’ context in which information, in the form of historical narrative and practical advice, would enable the easy assimilation of the British subject into colonial life. However, the form of the handbook pitted ‘Old Calcutta’ against ‘Modern Calcutta’, emphasising a logical linear progression of history and combining this with an arbitrary selection of ‘practical’ knowledge. In this sense, what the handbooks supplied was a congested and open-ended narrative that was not a real-time description of the city but always belated by virtue of the publication process, unlike digital maps accessible on our computers and mobile phones now. It was because of the inconsistencies inherent in their form that they signally failed to act as a bridge between the expectations and the reality of colonial existence, thereby supplying proof of the very anxieties they sought to redress. Thus, to repeat, the subgenre of the Calcutta Handbooks can be seen to reveal an essential opposition between its form and its content; and though it proposed a ‘solution’ to the conflict between the expectations and realities of colonial Calcutta, its inherent contradictions and selective omissions reduced it to another symptom of the very colonial territorial anxieties it was designed to allay. H.E.A. Cotton in Calcutta Old and New (1907) imagines his reader in the context of the handbook’s narrative: ‘Here, standing in his father’s shoes, the modern enquirer may begin at last to find himself more at home’ (191). This creates a nostalgic picture of ‘Old Calcutta’ that maintains continuity in British officials’ identification with the places they inhabit, by linking those spaces to their ‘ancestors’ (17). In Renato Rosaldo’s words, ‘the relatively benign character of most nostalgia facilitates imperialist nostalgia’s capacity to transform the responsible colonial agent into an innocent bystander’ (1989, 108). The carefully modulated narrative voice that accompanies the reader as a travelling companion speaks from the past, creating a sense of longing for the lost glory and opulence of empire. It produces an anachronistic space within the scope of the narrative that allows the twentieth-century reader to traverse the misty realm of the imperial past while remaining in contact with—and surrounded by—the architecture of the modern century, which represents ‘progress’ and ‘development’, the achievements of civilisation. However, it is a deliberately selective account and, as Svetlana Boym insists, ‘the

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stronger the rhetoric of continuity with the historical past and emphasis on traditional values, the more selectively the past is usually presented’ (2007, 14). Imperial nostalgia emerges as an evolving category, from the topical narrative of Murray’s (1882) to the extensively detailed narratives of Cotton (1907) and Firminger (1906). The handbooks from this later period highlight the restorative inclinations of a nostalgia that ‘returns and rebuilds one homeland with paranoiac determination’, projecting Calcutta as a British city and the ‘second city’ of the empire (Boym 2007, 15). However, these accounts of nostalgic entitlement of the British history of Calcutta are interspersed with disturbing discrepancies. The historic narrative here serves as a critical commentary on immediate official and social responses to the 1857 Mutiny and also rewrites an evidently anti-colonial resistance from the perspective of empire, as a threat to and disruption of British lives.32 The later handbooks are examples of the contradictory affect of heritage as a legacy of empire. Following the shift of the capital to Delhi, the handbooks were tasked with writing a different interpretation of ‘capital’, as they still had to narrativise the infrastructures of a capital city that remained, though its political significance was diminished. The focus of representing urban life changed from architectural descriptions of the origins of the city to a forward-looking narrative that evidenced Calcutta’s significance in the transit of goods, people and ideas in this region of the British Empire through the difficult world war years and the successive strands of anti-colonial agitation. Though the handbook strategy was to avoid mentions of political and social unrest in the city, the effects of these catastrophic changes on education, commodity cultures and urban poverty were evident in the handbooks. The Calcutta Handbooks discussed here therefore exemplify the ways in which subgenres beyond the novel form support the accretion of political and social capital within the hierarchy of empire.

Notes 1. I will be using ‘Calcutta’, the colonial name of the city, instead of Kolkata, as it was renamed in 2001 to match the vernacular Bangla pronunciation. 2. Calcutta, the capital of British India and now the capital of the state of West Bengal in India, was the primary port of commerce for the entire Gangetic valley; it dealt in jute, coal and tea and was also the port of transit

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for the indentured labourers shipped out of India to other British dominions. 3. David Kopf introduces Bengal Renaissance as the ‘social, cultural, psychological, and intellectual changes that were brought about in the Indian region of Bengal as a result of the contact between British officials and missionaries on the one hand and the Hindu intelligentsia on the other’ (1969, 10). It is this period between the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century when the import of English education into the Indian upper-middle-­class educational institutions led to the stylistic rejuvenation of the regional language, Bangla, and contributed to a non-traditionalist stance on social reforms aligned with ‘western’ understandings of liberty, equality and utilitarianism. 4. For architecture, heritage and Bengal Renaissance, and conceptions of colonial modernity, see Chatterjee (1997), Chattopadhyay (2005), S. Banerjee (2008) and Ghosh (2019). 5. Given the limited scope of the chapter, I have limited my close textual analysis to E.B. Eastwick (1882) and excerpts from other texts. I have dealt with the individual texts at length and in succession in my thesis, titled ‘Representing Calcutta through Handbooks, 1840-1940: Narrativizing City Space’ (2019), which is in the process of being converted into a monograph. 6. For a comprehensive list of Murray’s publications including those on India, see W.B.C. Lister and John R. Gretton (1993). 7. See further references to Curzon’s speeches and participation in handbook publications later in this chapter. 8. The Anglo-Hindustani Hand-Book: Or, Stranger’s Self-Interpreter and Guide to Colloquial and General Intercourse with the Natives of India (1850) included conversations with servants titled ‘Of a Journey’ and ‘Of Hiring Servants’. 9. For further work on the ‘black’ and ‘white’ town divide as abstract projection, with its symbolic and political role, see Swati Chattopadhyay (2005), A.K. Ray (1982) and Pradip Sinha (1978). 10. H.E.A. Cotton’s book takes its name from this historic divide: Calcutta Old and New: A Historical and Descriptive Handbook to the City (1907). Debraj Bhattacharya comments on this as Cotton’s attempt to create a ‘modern’ city as distinct from its ‘old’ premodern and therefore precolonial history (2008, 242–270). 11. For more on colonial ambivalence and South Asia, see Chakrabarty (1997) and Bhabha (1997). 12. In this chapter, I have used the term ‘western’ to mean the various overlapping ideologies of modernity that were in circulation in Europe drawing

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on the modernisation of the imperial states and their colonial empires which informed British ideals of modernity, progress and ‘civilisation’. 13. A particular example of this would be the establishment of the Dharma Sabah, ‘which was formed in 1830 in the wake of great agitation against the abolition of sati. Lord Bentinck inadvertently gave the Bengalis a chance to learn the techniques of agitation which were to be used later for more worthy causes’, as discussed in S.N. Mukherjee’s Calcutta Myths and History (1977, 4). 14. Kalikata Kamalaya literally translates to ‘Kolkata, The Abode of Lakshmi’, Lakshmi is the goddess of wealth and prosperity in the Hindu pantheon. This book had been translated and published in English in 1990 with the title Kalikata Kamalalaya: Calcutta in the Early 19th Century by Firma KLM situating the satiric narrative criticising the changing moral codes of city life in the early nineteenth century. Naba Babu Bilas and Naba Bibi Bilas are satires targeting the ‘Young Bengal’ group and their affinity for European clothes, cuisine, consumption of alcohol, and socialising that were a challenge to traditional religious, and social ways of life. For more on Bhabanicharan Bandyopadhyay, see Anindita Ghosh’s, ‘Revisiting the “Bengal Renaissance”: Literary Bengali and Low-Life Print in Colonial Calcutta’ (2002) and Tapati Roy’s chapter ‘Disciplining the Printed Text: Colonial and Nationalist Surveillance’ in Texts of Power (1995, 30–62). 15. All translations from Bengali to English are mine unless otherwise indicated. 16. ‘Local’ here refers to the British and English-speaking communities of Calcutta and greater Bengal. 17. Lord Curzon cited Busteed’s book as the main source of his interest in the Black Hole incident in the speech he delivered on the day he ceremoniously unveiled the replica of the previously removed Holwell Monument on 19 December 1902. See Marquis George Nathaniel Curzon’s Lord Curzon in India: Being a Selection from his Speeches as Viceroy & GovernorGeneral of India 1898-1905 (1906, 442). Busteed is also mentioned as a source in Firminger (1906), Cotton (1907), Newell (1922) and G.W. Tyson (1932). 18. ‘Harakaru’: spelling as quoted in text. 19. John Murray III and the Murray publication house was the first publication to use the term ‘Handbook’ to designate a particular subgenre of guidebooks that was designed to improve on available formats and introduce a particular rigour in the genres of guidebook and travel manuals. The term ‘Handbook’ and Murray’s publications under this title achieved a cult status and developed a brand name for themselves. For further information on Murray Publication house, refer to John Murray IV (1919).

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20. For context, Baedeker, a rival publishing house based in Leipzig and specialising in travel handbooks, published on India in German only: Indien. Handbuch für Reisende. Ceylon, Vorderindien, Birma, die malayische Halbinsel, Siam, Java, 1st edn. (Karl Baedeker, 1914). In 2013, Michael Wild, the Baedeker historian, published his English translation of the 1914 edition titled Baedeker’s India, 1914 from Natland-based Red Scar Press. 21. For binaries, see Sinha (1978), Chattopadhyay (2005), Marshall (1990), Arnold (1986, 1988, 1993), Datta (2003) and Banerjee (1977, 2008). 22. On belatedness and colonialism, see Ali Behdad (1994). 23. Elements of modernisation were introduced in various parts of South Asia through all foreign contacts like the French and the Portuguese (first to arrive) but colonial modernity as an ideology was deployed as part of the rationale of rule by the British in the late colonial period. See Chatterjee (1997) and Chakrabarty (1997). 24. Eastwick’s text opens with the description of Sagar Island, ‘covered with dense jungle, swarming with tigers and wild beasts’ (83). 25. The inverted commas are part of the inscription Eastwick quotes from the tablet. 26. The visual bias encountered in travel narratives has been the continuous subject of criticism as it creates a ‘hegemony of vision’ that privileges the eye as the sole medium of experiencing and comprehending one’s surroundings. The visual ideology involves portraying a place/site as tourists might wish to view it. Swenson and Daugstad (2012) state that the ‘guides, with their simple, illustrative use of drawings or photographs, promised tourists the certainty of an authentic relationship between themselves and the site deemed important’ (5). 27. Such instances include scattered events of violence and sedition in the latter half of the century, like the assassination of Lord Mayo, the Governor General of India (Viceroy of India from 1869 to 1872) on 18 February 1872  in Port Blair, Andaman Islands. The early handbooks treated the incident as an isolated instance of crime, whereas later historians have interpreted this as a political murder and a part of the rise of revolutionary nationalism in India during the turn of the twentieth century. 28. Siraj-ud-Dowlah, the Nawab of Bengal, had granted lease and trade licences to the British but was against the British building fortifications in Bengal. The attack of 1756 was targeted to dismantle the first Fort William and stall all attempts to build armed fortifications in Calcutta. The Black Hole tragedy happened in the aftermath of the attack and was recorded by J.Z. Holwell (1758), a self-proclaimed survivor. The accuracy of Holwell’s narrative has been repeatedly questioned, and its strategic importance in rallying English forces from Madras to take over Calcutta and demolish the Nawab’s rule has often been pointed out.

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29. For Murray’s strict adherence to refraining from commenting on the political aspect of places and people his handbooks represent, see Lister and Gretton (1993, xxiii). 30. In the case of the handbooks, this amounts to a practice of narration that creates silences where the text speaks most powerfully. 31. See Ranajit Guha’s ‘Not at Home in Empire’ (1997) where he discusses ‘the unhomely opposite of the world of known limits’ of the colonised territory in terms of ‘colonial anxiety’ and the ‘uncanny’ (p. 484). 32. I have mentioned earlier in this chapter the critical disagreements on using the term ‘Mutiny’ or the ‘First War of Indian Independence’ for the uprising of 1857. Cotton and Firminger, however, categorize the uprising as anti-authoritarian and as an illegal expression of native agency.

Works Cited Anon. 1850. The Anglo-Hindustani Hand Book: Or, Stranger’s Self-Interpreter and Guide to Colloquial and General Intercourse with the Natives of India. Calcutta: W. Thacker and Co.; London: Smith, Elder & Co. Anon. 1864. T. Black & Co.’s Handbook of Calcutta. Calcutta: T. Black & Co. Anon. 1927. The Visitor’s Guide to Calcutta, Including Brief History, Up to Date Map, Illustrated. Calcutta: W. Newman & Co. Anon. 2017. Heritage Quotient Makes Kolkata Strong Contender for UNESCO. Times of India. https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/kolkata/heritage-­quotient-­makes-­kolkata-­strong-­contender-­for-­unesco-­tag/articleshow/60137491.cms. Arnold, David. 1986. Cholera and Colonialism in British India. Past and Present 113 (1): 118-15. Arnold, David. 1988. Imperial Medicine and Indigenous Societies. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Arnold, David. 1993. Colonizing the Body, State Medicine and Epidemic Disease in Nineteenth Century India. Berkeley: University of California Press. Asian Image. 2015. Priti Patel Speaks of Growing Influence of West Bengal at Business Reception. Asian Image: The Voice of the Asian Community. https://www.asianimage.co.uk/news/13503245.priti-­p atel-­s peaks-­o f-­ growing-­influence-­of-­west-­bengal-­at-­business-­reception/. Baedeker, Karl. 1914. Indien. Handbuch für Reisende. Ceylon, Vorderindien, Birma, die malayische Halbinsel, Siam, Java, 1st edn. Leipzig: Verlag von Karl Baedeker. Bandopadhyay, Bhabanicharan. 1936 [1823]. Kalikata Kamalaya. Calcutta: Ranjan Publishing House. Bandopadhyay, Bhabanicharan. 1825. Naba Babu Bilas. Calcutta: Samachar Chandrika Press.

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Bandopadhyay, Bhabanicharan. 1831. Naba Bibi Blias. Calcutta: Samachar Chandrika Press. Banerjee, S.N. 1977. Calcutta: Myths and History. Calcutta: Subarnarekha. Banerjee, Sumanta. 2008. The Parlour and the Streets: Elite and Popular Culture in Nineteenth-Century Calcutta. Calcutta: Seagull Books. Barry, John. 1940. Calcutta 1940. Calcutta: The Central Press. Barry, John. 1953. Calcutta Illustrated. Calcutta: The Central Press. Behdad, Ali. 1994. Belated Travelers: Orientalism in the Age of Colonial Dissolution. Durham: Duke University Press. Bhabha, Homi K. 1997. Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse. In Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World, ed. Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler, 152-160. Berkeley: University of California Press. Bhattacharya, Debraj. 2008. Three Narratives on Modernity in a Colonial Metropolis: Calcutta during the Early Twentieth Century. In Of Matters Modern: The Experience of Modernity in Colonial and Post-Colonial South Asia, ed. Debraj Bhattacharya, 242-270. London: Seagull Books. Bose, Raktima. 2011. Mamata Wants to Turn Kolkata into London. The Hindu. https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/mamata-­wants-­to-­turn-­kolkata-­ intolondon/article2317137.ece. Boym, Svetlana. 2007. Nostalgia and its Discontents. The Hedgehog Review 9 (2): 7-18. Busteed, H.E. 1888. Echoes from Old Calcutta Being Chiefly Reminiscences of the Days of Warren Hastings and Impey. Calcutta: Thacker, Spink & Co.; London: W. Thacker and Co. Chakrabarty, Dipesh. 1997. The Difference-Deferral of a Colonial Modernity. In Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World, ed. Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler, 373-405. Berkeley: University of California Press. Chatterjee, Partha. 1997. Our Modernity. Lecture for Rotterdam: South-South Exchange Programme for Research on the History of Development (SEPHIS) and the Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa (CODESRIA). http://ccs.ukzn.ac.za/files/partha1.pdf. Chatterjee, Partha. 2006. An Equal Right to the City Contests over Cultural Space in Calcutta. Current Writing: Text and Reception in Southern Africa 18 (2): 166-184. Chatterjee, Partha. 2012. The Black Hole of Empire: History of a Global Practice of Power. Oxford: Princeton University Press. Chattopadhyay, Swati. 2005. Representing Calcutta: Modernity, Nationalism and the Colonial Uncanny. London: Routledge. Cotton, H.E.A. 1907. Calcutta Old and New: A Historical and Descriptive Handbook to the City. Calcutta: W. Newman & Co.

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Curzon, Marquis George Nathaniel. 1906. Lord Curzon in India: Being a Selection from his Speeches as Viceroy & Governor-General of India 1898-1905 (1906) / With a Portrait, Explanatory Notes and an Index, and with an Introduction, by Sir Thomas Raleigh. London: Macmillan and Co., Ltd. Datta, Krishna. 2003. Cities of Imagination: Calcutta. Oxford: Signal Books. Deb, Binaya Krishna. 1905. The Early History and Growth of Calcutta. Calcutta: Romesh Chandra Ghosh. Eastwick, Edward B. 1882. Handbook of the Bengal Presidency, with an Account of Calcutta City; or Strangers Self-interpreter and Guide to Colloquial and General Intercourse with the Natives of India, with a Map of India and Five Illustrations. London: John Murray. Firminger, W.K. 1906. Thacker’s Guide to Calcutta. Calcutta: Thacker, Spink & Co. Ghosh, A. 2002. Revisiting the “Bengal Renaissance”: Literary Bengali and Low-­ Life Print in Colonial Calcutta. Economic and Political Weekly 37 (42): 4329-4338. Ghosh, A. 2019. A City for All: Perspectives from Colonial Calcutta. In Ideas of the City in Asian Settings, ed. H.  Bekkering, A.  Esposito and C.  Goldblum, 175-208. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Gretton, John R. and W.B.C.  Lister. 1993. Introduction. In A Bibliography of Murray's Handbooks for Travellers and Biographies of Authors, Editors, Revisers and Principal Contributors, vii-xiviii. Dereham: Dereham Books. Guegan, Xavier. 2015. Transmissible Sites: Monuments, Memorials and their Visibility on the Metropole and Periphery. In Sites of Imperial Memory, Commemorating Colonial Rule in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, ed. Dominik Geppert and Frank Müller, 21-38. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Guha, Ranajit. 1997. Not at Home in Empire. Critical Inquiry 23 (3): 482-493. Heath, Deana. 2010. Purifying Empire: Obscenity and the Politics of Moral Regulation in Britain, India and Australia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hicken, Glen. 1931. Mid Pleasures and Palaces: An Indispensable Pocket Guide to Calcutta. Calcutta: Catholic Orphan Press. Holwell, John Zephaniah. 1758. A Genuine Narrative of the Deplorable Deaths of the English Gentlemen, and Others, Who Were Suffocated in the Black-Hole in Fort William, in Calcutta, in the Kingdom of Bengal; in the Night Succeeding the 20th Day of June, 1756. London: Printed for A. Millar. Hunter, W.W. 1868. The Annals of Rural Bengal. New York: Leypoldt and Holt. Knight, James Blackburn (ed.). 1875. W. Newman & Co.’s Handbook to Calcutta, Historical and Descriptive: With a Plan of the City, 1st edn. Calcutta: W. Newman. Knight, James Blackburn. 1882. W.  Newman & Co.’s Handbook to Calcutta, Historical and Descriptive: With a Plan of the City, 2nd edn. Calcutta: W. Newman.

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Knight, James Blackburn. 1892. W.  Newman & Co.’s Handbook to Calcutta, Historical and Descriptive: With a Plan of the City, 3rd edn. Calcutta: W. Newman. Kopf, David. 1969. British Orientalism and the Bengal Renaissance: The Dynamics of Indian Modernization, 1773-1835. Berkeley: University of California Press. Laqueur, Thomas W. 2015. The Work of the Dead. A Cultural History of Mortal Remains. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Marshall, P.J. 1990. The Whites of British India, 1780-1830: A Failed Colonial Society? The International History Review 12 (1): 26-44. Mitchell, Edmund. 1890. Thacker's Guide Book to Calcutta: its High-ways and By-paths, with a Chapter on the Government of India. Calcutta: Thacker, Spink & Co. Murray, John. 1836. A Hand-Book for Travellers on the Continent, 2nd edn. London: Murray. Murray, John. 1882. Handbook of the Bengal Presidency, with an Account of Calcutta City, with Maps and Plans. London: John Murray. Murray, IV John. 1919. John Murray III, 1808-1892: A Brief Memoir. London: J. Murray. Newell, H.A. 1922. Calcutta, the First Capital of British India: An Illustrated Guide to Places of Interest with Map. Calcutta: Caledonian Printing Company. Ray, Durgacharan. 1880. Debganer Martye Agaman. Reprint. Calcutta: Dey’s Publication. Ray, A.K. 1902. A Short History of Calcutta Part 1. In Census of India, vol. VII, Calcutta Town and Suburbs. Calcutta: Bengal Secretariat Press. Rosaldo, Renato. 1989. Imperialist Nostalgia. Representations 26: 107-122. Roy, Tapati. 1995. Disciplining the Printed Text: Colonial and Nationalist Surveillance. In Texts of Power: Emerging Disciplines in Colonial Bengal, ed. Partha Chatterjee, 30-62. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Simpson, James. 2017. The Conservation of Britain's Heritage in India. www. buildingconservations.com. https://www.buildingconservation.com/articles/conservation-­heritage-­india/conservation-­heritage-­india.htm. Sinha, Pradip. 1978. Calcutta in Urban History. Calcutta: Firma KLM. Sinha, Kaliprasanna. 1862. Hutom Pyanchar Naksha. www.boierboi.net. Sinha, Kaliprasanna. 2011. The Observant Owl Hootum’s Vignettes of Nineteenth-­ century Calcutta, trans. Swarup Roy. New Delhi: Permanent Black. Stoler, Ann Laura. 2002. Colonial Archives and the Arts of Governance. Archival Science 2: 87-109. Swensen, Grete, and Karoline Daugstad. 2012. Travels in Imaginary Landscapes: An Analysis of Four Cultural Historic Guidebooks. Géographie des guides et récits de voyage 3: 2-22. Tyson, G.W. 1932. Calcutta: The City of Palaces. Calcutta: Times of India Press.

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) Michael Tsang

The point of colonisation marks a moment when either a colony’s existing economic, material and sociocultural transactions with the world are destroyed and coerced into the colonial empire’s systems, or, if the Unless otherwise specified, all translations in this chapter from the Chinese are mine, including the main texts of articles in Gems from Near and Afar. As will be made clear below, however, from the second issue of Gems onwards each issue came with an English index of contents, so the majority of the article titles are taken from these indices, unless specified. Words in Mandarin are rendered in standard pinyin system, while words in Cantonese are Romanised in the Jyutping system. I thank the editors for their insightful comments on earlier drafts of the chapter. I also thank Pikki Leung for drawing my attention to the quotes on weaving. M. Tsang (*) Department of Languages, Cultures and Applied Linguistics, Birkbeck College, University of London, London, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 A. Bhattacharya et al. (eds.), Literary Capitals in the Long Nineteenth Century, Literary Urban Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-13060-1_3

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colony did not previously exist, such relations with the world are completely concocted altogether according to the empire’s interests. In the latter case, what sort of processes are involved in implicating a colony into a colonial world system? The current chapter attempts to answer this by examining the case of Hong Kong and its first newspaper in Chinese, a short-lived monthly periodical called Gems from Near and Afar (hereafter Gems),1 published between 1853 and 1856. The entity of Hong Kong, a British colony that would go on to become a selfproclaimed global financial metropolis, was created in a three-step process under three unequal trade treaties the British signed with the Chinese in 1842, 1860 and 1898, respectively.2 The publication of Gems took place in the first stage of colonisation, when the name ‘Hong Kong’ referred only to what is now known as Hong Kong Island, one of the three geographical components of Hong Kong today. Before the arrival of the British, villagers living on this island had no consciousness that their island was to be separated from the imperial Qing court of China ruling the area at the time. Hong Kong was thus a purely colonial invention, and in the early colonial period, Gems played a key part in establishing Hong Kong’s role in the British Empire, namely, to become an entrepôt between China and Britain (and Europe in general). Hong Kong’s role was unlike that of some other colonies involved in primary and secondary production of commodities for consumption at the imperial centre; its involvement in entrepôt trade was tertiary by nature, but it was implicated in the network of colonial capitalism all the same, as I will set out to prove in the following. At the same time, print media and journalism in the context of Hong Kong functioned in a way that broadened the definition of capital: specifically, the actual objects of commodities were turned into linguistic and numeric signs on newspaper pages denoting their value in capitalist trade. Yet, if trade by definition involves two or more parties (peoples, locales, nations), then journalism can do more to facilitate trade than simply reporting on commodity prices: it also provides information about both parties, including social, cultural and political knowledge. These two ways were how Gems helped establish Hong Kong’s role in Britain’s trade network in East Asia. Simply put, as commodity capital became knowledge and knowledge became cultural capital, Hong Kong, thanks to Gems, was no longer an entrepôt only in the sense of commodity trade, but also in

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the sense of knowledge exchange between Britain (and the West) and China (and East Asia): it brought knowledge about the world to East Asia (and Hong Kong) and knowledge about East Asia to the world. The interplay between the local (Hong Kong), the regional (China and East Asia) and the global (Britain and other empires) is crucial to how I analyse and position Gems below. I argue that a holistic discussion of Gems’ historical significance must consider all three aspects. While a secondary aim of this chapter is to introduce this landmark publication to a wider Anglophone readership because almost all existing research on the periodical is either in Chinese or Japanese, here I also want to briefly consider the focuses of such existing research. The earliest use of the periodical as an archival source was said to be made by the Chinese bibliographer Wang Zhongmin (1903–1975), who copied its coverage of the Taiping Rebellion3 from the British Library’s Oriental manuscripts in the 1930s and published them as part of Jin Yufu and Tian Yuqing’s book (1950) on the rebellion. Japanese historians were also interested in the periodical due to its coverage of the Perry Expedition of 1853–1854.4 In 2004, Japanese scholars Matsuura Akira and Uchida Keiichi, together with Chinese scholar Shen Guowei, published a complete copy of Gems from Near and Afar for the first time, first in Japan and then in a Chinese edition the following year (Matsuura et  al. 2005). In his book on Hong Kong’s newspapers, Zhao Xifang (2019) briefly discussed the pioneering role Gems played in the history of journalism in Hong Kong. More recently, historian Wong Tin (2021) has published a critical edition that reorganised selected content of the periodical into classified sections and evaluated the periodical’s role in Hong Kong’s history. There are only a handful of academic works in English discussing the periodical at some length. One is Hong Kong historian Elizabeth Sinn’s article (2004), where she spent about two pages discussing the portrayal of Chinese emigration in Gems as a foil to her more detailed examination of the same topic in the newspaper under her focus, the Zhongwai Xinwen Qiribao (lit. Chinese and Foreign Weekly Gazette, 1871–1872). Another example was Tao De-min’s article (2005) examining the account of a Chinese person called Luo Sen, who was a member of Perry’s voyage to Japan; the account was published in Chinese in Gems. Besides the fact that not all of these academic studies put Gems as their main focus of study, they also approached Gems with only one locale or theme in mind—either nineteenth-century Chinese history, nineteenth-­ century Japanese history, Hong Kong’s newspaper history or Chinese migration history. On the one hand, these research efforts exemplify the

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very title of the periodical: the periodical indeed contained gems from near and afar (i.e. not just Hong Kong but also beyond) so that future scholars in many disciplines and research areas would find the publication a useful archival source. On the other hand, no research has considered the regional role Gems achieved in linking up East Asia and the West. My chapter places Gems at the centre and aims to fill this research gap by framing the periodical not just in any local history, but also in its regional significance and the colonial network in which it was implicated. I conceptualise Gems as fulfilling a function of ‘world-weaving’: its form and content as a whole weave Hong Kong into a world of circulation of capitals, serving not only the people of Hong Kong, but more broadly in China and East Asia. ‘World-weaving’ is a variation of Pheng Cheah’s theoretical term of ‘world-making’ (2016). Writing against a sociological understanding of literature as merely reflective of sociopolitical realities of the world, Cheah defines ‘world literature’ as works that insist on literature’s cosmopolitan volition and exemplify its ‘world-making’ and ‘world-­ forming’ power against capitalist globalisation by portraying a world for, and according subjectivity to, colonised and dispossessed people. Cheah in particular proposes the word ‘worlding’ to denote the temporal dimension of ‘world’ as a forever process of taking shape or being formed into shape. In postcolonial literature, Cheah finds a potential for ‘reworlding the world’, for celebrating ‘alternative temporalities’ that contest the dominant temporality of Western modernity imposed by colonialism and capitalist globalisation (2016, 12). Cheah’s study concerns narrative fictions. His textual examples (the works of V.S. Naipaul, Amitav Ghosh, Nuruddin Farah and Timothy Mo, among others) are all postcolonial novels; he speaks of the ‘radical indeterminacy of literature’s meaning’ beyond subjective interpretation; and the book was inspired by one of his seminars on postcolonial world literature at University of California, Berkeley (2016, 10, 12, 15). There is little exploration of how his definitions of ‘worlding’ and ‘world-making’ can be applied to forms of writing other than creative expression, such as print culture and journalistic texts, except for a brief discussion of media narratives of Somalia in the context of Farah’s 1993 novel Gifts (Cheah 2016, chap. 10). Ironically, commenting on Hannah Arendt’s remark on stories and narratives, Cheah notes: literature’s world-making power is not the power of imaginative aesthetic forms (literature in the strict sense) to construct a world. Rather, the world

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has what can be called a ‘literary structure’. ‘Literature’ in this general sense is not derived from or subsidiary to a material reality that it represents. Instead, it is infrastructural to reality, and its workings help us to understand worldly processes. (2016, 153)

Despite this provocative attempt to understand ‘literature’ beyond its ‘strict sense’ and in terms of the fundamental role it plays in reality, Cheah goes on to only privilege fictional stories in his textual analysis chapters. Part of the aim of this chapter is then to examine how his ideas on ‘literature’s world-making power’ can be more inclusive of other genres of writing and to interrogate what these ideas mean in light of Hong Kong’s colonial history. For if, as Cheah argues, ‘capitalist globalization incorporates peoples outside the European world-system by violently destroying their worlds’ (2016, 12)—a statement that rings true for the violence and oppression experienced in the sheer majority of European colonies—how could the British have destroyed the worlds of Hong Kong people when the entity of Hong Kong did not even exist before 1841? And if an anti-­ capitalist stance is necessary for any writing to be called ‘world literature’, then surely Hong Kong—whose people have to various extent benefitted from Britain’s capitalist policies that transformed this fishing village to first an entrepôt in Sino-British trade, then an industrial and manufacturing hub, and finally to a ‘global metropolis’—must have produced no ‘world literature’ in the Cheahian sense at all. Indeed, from an anti-colonial perspective, Gems could only be considered as an embodiment of colonial vice, propagating European influence on East Asian powers through commercial, religious and cultural exchange.5 The ‘world’ that Gems helped ‘make’ Hong Kong into was precisely the colonial capitalist system that Cheah writes against, but what the current chapter aims to achieve as a historical study is to first delineate the ways in which a colony came to be implicated into that capitalist world. If any colony including Hong Kong is to produce the Cheahian ‘world literature’ that counters the effects of capitalist globalisation, then there is a need to build a clear understanding of the mechanisms that ‘yoked’ a colony into the capitalist system in the first place. In other words, while I do take inspiration from Cheah’s idea of ‘worlding’, I contend that it was not only the anti-capitalist subjectivity of the colonised people depicted in postcolonial literature that took time to form, but also the capitalist, globalised world itself that needs ‘worlding’, and a careful and differential understanding of this process is an important

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prerequisite to the formation of anti-capitalist agency. For this reason, I find Cheah’s nomenclature of ‘world-making’ a little abstract and hasty, since making and opening is, as Cheah himself says, always a process that involves multiple temporalities and spatialities. Put simply, it takes time to make a world, but the morpheme ‘make’ does not reflect enough the nuanced efforts involved. To fine-tune Cheah’s concepts, I turn to the following two guiding quotes that shed light on the distinctions between making and weaving. The first is by the German-American textile artist Anni Albers: Weaving in any form is a constructive process; it is also a combinative process demanding aesthetic judgment as to surface, form and color qualities of the materials. Other problems enter, such as functional and social demands. All of these factors engage intellect and imagination if the craft is looked upon as still in formation. (Albers 1941, 3)

I borrow this quote conceptually to imagine Gems beginning a formative process of weaving (not ‘making’ with a snap of fingers) a world for its Hong Kong and Chinese readers, and weaving Hong Kong into the world of capitalist trade. Albers’ quote is useful for highlighting the fact that in the lengthy process of weaving, many factors—not only technical ones, but also aesthetic, functional and philosophical ones (‘intellect’ as Albers calls it)—intersect each other. As a corollary, then, understanding a piece of text(ile) necessitates the careful study of all these factors and problems and the way they interweave. The second quote is by the British anthropologist Tim Ingold: Making is a practice of weaving, in which practitioners bind their own pathways or lines of becoming into the texture of material flows comprising the lifeworld. (2010, 91)

Applying Ingold’s logic, ‘world-making’ is, in practice, ‘world-­weaving’, in which individuals in nineteenth-century Hong Kong and coastal China had to weave their own paths of becoming in a globalised world by engaging with the flows of different capitals (commodity, financial, cultural). I must clarify that my engagement with Cheah’s ideas here does not seek to contradict his overall tenor about capitalism’s oppressive and devastating effects, but merely to morph it in a way that can better dialogue with the situation of Hong Kong. As Ingold reminds us, the Sanskrit root

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taksati, meaning a shaper or maker, also provides the root for the Latin verb for ‘to weave’, or texere (2010, 92). The preference for ‘world-­ weaving’ to ‘world-making’ is therefore primarily a matter of nuance. In the following, I will analyse both the periodical’s form/format (e.g. how an issue was structured or organised) and content (e.g. the rhetoric promoted by its articles) to delineate two interrelated senses of ‘world-­ weaving’: first, to weave its Chinese readers into the world by providing knowledge about the world as cultural capital necessary for imagining a life beyond the Chinese context they lived in; and second, to weave Hong Kong into the world by showing that the ‘world-weaving imagination’ in the first sense was enabled by an understanding of the colony as a curiously different place from the rest of China.

Cultural Capital and the Form(at) of Gems from Near and Afar Gems from Near and Afar was founded by the London Missionary Society (LMS) missionary Walter Henry Medhurst (1796–1857) in August 1853.6 Published once every month in 12 pages (later expanding to 24 pages), it ran for a total of 33 issues until May 1856 in a little under three years.7 After Medhurst moved to Shanghai in 1854, his editorship was replaced by his brother-in-law and chief magistrate of Hong Kong, Rev. Charles Batten Hillier (1820–1856), and then in 1856 by Rev. James Legge when Hillier was reposted as the British Consul to Siam. Apart from the semi-official Jingbao (Peking Gazette or literally ‘announcements from the capital’) that communicated decrees from the imperial court, China had no newspapers published by its citizens. Newspaper was therefore an imported concept, and Gems was iconic in being the first Chinese newspaper in Hong Kong and, in fact, the second newspaper published in China after Eastern Western Monthly Magazine (1833–1838).8 In addition, Gems pioneered a few remarkable journalistic features. It was printed by Hong Kong’s oldest secondary school, Ying Wa College, first established by the LMS in 1818  in Malacca (part of then British Malaya) but moved to Hong Kong in 1843. Although its chief editors were British missionaries who would have studied Chinese, Gems had a Chinese editorial assistant called Huang Sheng, who studied English in New  York in 1847 and then worked at the printing office at Ying Wa College. It was also the first newspaper in China to publish illustrations

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alongside its news reportage, including maps that explained the battles in the aforementioned Taiping Rebellion. Each issue of Gems had a print run of 3000 copies, a modest number but nonetheless an improvement from earlier newspapers aiming at Chinese readers, such as the Chinese Monthly Magazine, which had a circulation of 2000 at its peak. Each copy was sold at 15 wen per issue to cover printing costs, as the periodical was non-profit and was sometimes even given out for free (LMS 1854b).9 Although the periodical began publication in the entrepôt of Hong Kong, from the beginning it was not only intended for a Hong Kong audience.10 Copies were distributed to the ethnic Chinese population in Hong Kong and other coastal ports of China including Canton (modern-­ day Guangzhou), Amoy (modern-day Xiamen), Ningbo, Foochow (i.e. Fuzhou) and Shanghai, but even reached inland China, Japan and back in Europe. From Issue 2 (September 1853) onwards, an English index of contents was included, although its function was unknown apart from demonstrating that British or European subjects were among its subscribers. The articles, too, demonstrated this regional outlook, with the majority of them serving two purposes: introducing general knowledge about the West and reporting news on Hong Kong locally or on East Asia regionally. A breakdown of the composition of the first issue illustrates this weaving of the local, the regional and the global together with its seven components:11 1. A Catchy Chant on Counting Dates in the Common Era12 2. Preface 3. A General Discussion on the Rise of the Taiping Rebellion 4. A Brief Introduction to Hong Kong 5. A Fable [specifically ‘The Wolf and the Lamb’ from Aesop’s Fables] 6. Gold Mining Regulations in San Francisco13 7. Miscellaneous News 7a. A Russian battleship arriving in Hong Kong 7b. Gangs in Amoy fought with each other 7c.  The number of Chinese people returning from San Francisco, Singapore, and Bangladesh in May 1853 7d. Rampant pirates on the sea east to Canton Province 7e. A ban issued by the Chief Superintendent of the Trade of British Subjects in China to forbid British subjects to be hired by Chinese officials or hired as soldiers for China

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7f. Foreign vessels docking at the port of Wusong [or Woosung] in Shanghai failed to retrieve money 7g. Nineteen lots of Hong Kong government land awarded to both British and Chinese citizens 7h. Pirates active at sea outside Fukien [i.e. Fujian] Province were arrested 7i. The US sent several steamships from Shanghai to Japan to establish trade links Looking at Component 7 alone, we already see how the items were meant to inform its readers of news not only about Hong Kong (Items 7c and 7g) but also about China (e.g. Items 7b, 7d, 7h), East Asia and beyond (e.g. Items 7a, 7f and 7i). These news items provided a triangulated record of broader political and historical events at the time, such as Item 7i, where we now know this must have been the first of the two Perry expeditions. The other components equally illustrated a ‘glocal’ outlook. Component 3, a reportage and analysis of the ongoing Taiping Rebellion, was one of the first examples of a ‘news feature’ in the history of Chinese journalism. Both components 1 and 6 contained practical information, the former crucial for Chinese businessmen when they traded with their Western counterparts, the latter essential for people who aspired to travel to San Francisco to join the Californian Gold Rush. Whether it was commercial or manual work, a world and a scope broader than China (as well as beyond job types available in China) were implicated through these news items. Other issues followed a similar structure. The majority of Gems’ 100-­ plus articles across all issues, then, were articles of general knowledge. Notably, despite its Christian background, the periodical was not overtly evangelical. Only a handful of articles contained explicitly Christian materials, such as ‘Convent of St. Bernard’ (September 1853; referring to the Great St Bernard Pass in Switzerland), ‘Some of the Reasons Why the Old and the New Testaments Are Believed to Be a Divine Revelation’ (February 1855) and ‘Christian Martyrdom’ (February 1856). However, a more subtle strategy of propagating (Christian-induced) moral values lies in features that introduced Western cultural and literary knowledge. Most issues until December 1854 printed a small fable from Aesop’s Fables in Chinese translation, such as ‘The Wolf and the Lamb’ in Component 5 above in the first issue. These would have been interesting for the Chinese readers

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at the time. Historically, a genre of supernatural writings (also with moralistic undertones) have existed in Chinese literature since the third century, a most notable collection being Pu Songling’s Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio (1740), but the influence was Buddhist and Taoist with a focus on retribution by ghosts or spirits.14 There is little evidence that the Chinese readers in Hong Kong or coastal China were well versed in these vernacular tales, but using anthropomorphised animals or natural beings as characters, as Aesop’s Fables did, would have provided an interesting contrast to the literary strategies between Chinese and ‘Western’ writing in promulgating a programme of social morality. But anthropomorphised characters were not the only vessels for disseminating Western moral values. A notable inclusion of ‘high literature’ appeared in the September 1854 issue with a Chinese translation of Milton’s famous sonnet, ‘When I Consider How My Light is Spent’ (also known as ‘On His Blindness’), appended with a short introduction on the poet. Today, the translation and introduction are regarded by scholars as one of the first, if not the first, Chinese translation(s) of an English poem and the first ever introduction to Milton written in Chinese.15 However, the poem was chosen for the obvious reason that the poem’s speaker, broadly resembling Milton himself, is trying to come to terms with his blindness and inability to serve God through writing. The short introduction confirms this view as it describes Milton as ‘having the misfortune of losing his eyesight at the age of 40 as the result of being devoted to writing books’ but ‘never complaining or bearing any grudge about it’ (LMS 1854a). Aside from Milton, there were also two brief biographies of St Joan of Arc and Marcus Tullius Cicero, the former honoured as a ‘Valiant Woman’ (lienü) in the Chinese article title due to her martyrdom, the latter chosen for his work De Natura Deorum (On the Nature of the Gods; LMS 1855b, 1855c).16 Together with the fables, then, it is clear that these cultural works and figures were not selected merely to introduce Western culture or literature to a Chinese audience, but more for the moral values they represented, such as justice (Joan of Arc) and perseverance (Milton). On the whole, however, the majority of articles in the periodical were secular, and focused on introducing scientific (especially biological) and engineering knowledge that the West assumed had been absent in China. Here is a selected list of article titles: • First Principles of the Steam Engine (September 1853) • The Late Comet (October 1853)

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• Notes on Geology (April 1854) • Chapters of Physiology (January 1855) • Chapters of Physiology. The Muscles (May 1855) • Chapters of Physiology. Vaccination (July 1855) • Chapters of Physiology. The Ear, the Hand, the Nose, the Mouth (August 1855) • Chapters of Physiology. The Viscera (October 1855) • Manufacture of Glass (February-March 1856) • Explanation of Woodcuts (Steam ship; Lighthouse) (May 1856) Some articles introduced knowledge about a foreign location (selected): • The British Constitution (October 1853) • Notice of the Sandwich Islands [i.e. Hawai‘i] (November 1853) • The Constitution of the United States (February 1854) • On the Countries Called in Chinese Tai-shih and Tai-tsin [the Roman and Arabic Empires] (October 1854) • Abstract of the History of England (September–October 1855) Not every article was written by the chief editor, for sure. Many of the articles in Gems did not bear the author’s name, with a few exceptions, but we know from its English index of contents that some of them were ‘communicated by a Chinese’. These were mainly travelogues, including two on travels to Japan, one to Britain and one to Port Philip (Melbourne). One of the articles on Japan, ‘Account of a Visit to Japan in the Suite of the American Embassy, in 1854’ (LMS 1854–1855), spanned across three issues and is now believed to be penned by Chinese merchant Luo Sen, who was on board the Perry expeditions of 1854; the article is regarded as one of the earliest first-hand records of Japan at the onset of (Western-­ imposed) modernity. The other sojourner’s tales were: (i) ‘Sketch of a Voyage Round the Cape and Several Months’ Residence in Great Britain’ (July–August 1854), now believed to be written by Yan Yugeng, who toured Britain with then British diplomat and later professor of Chinese at Cambridge, Thomas Francis Wade (1818–1895) (Zhao 2019, 13); and (ii) ‘Hongkong to Port Philip – Notes on the Voyage and Observations at the Gold Digging’ (March 1856). That these travelogues were written by a Chinese person is of immense importance. Ostensibly, these articles communicated first-hand accounts of other countries; hence, they already served an intellectual purpose in

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enriching readers’ knowledge. Although the authors’ names were not revealed, readers would have understood that these journeys were made by a Chinese person. Thus, these articles implicitly demonstrated the potential of an individual’s world-weaving power: how a Chinese person could open a new world beyond their current geographical confinement of China. As we will see below, this largely echoes what the periodical’s overall Preface (Component 2 above) proposed: that China and its people were in dire need of knowing more about the world. The hidden message was that if one was willing to learn about the world, they could gain an eye-opening experience. This is supported textually by the opening of ‘Sketch of a Voyage Round the Cape and Several Months’ Residence in Great Britain’: In the beginning of March 1852, a friend of mine boarded a ship in Hong Kong bound for the West. The vessel travelled southwest. Although in the first couple of days they could still see mountains afar and the sea water was in deep blue, about ten days later they were on a vast, endless ocean, without a single island or shore in sight. Birds were flying in cohorts to hunt for fish, and fish jumped out of water, sometimes into the vessel, becoming food for those on board. (LMS 1854c)

The gradual detachment from land and the experience of being in open waters foreshadows the sights that the narrator would go on to experience in Britain. Last but not least, Gems was the first newspaper in Hong Kong to adopt the practice of printing commercial advertisements, beginning with the January 1855 issue and ending with the December issue of the same year, ahead of the periodical’s discontinuation in May 1856. The December 1854 issue of the periodical ran an article entitled ‘A Short Introduction to Gems from Near and Afar’ (LMS 1854b),17 which first summarised the achievements of the periodical in the previous 17 months since its inaugural issue in August 1853, and ended with a short call for advertisements. In this call, it introduced advertisements as a common way used by merchants and traders to ‘maximise their profits by reaching a wider clientele’, and then appealing to Chinese merchants to capitalise on the periodical’s ability to reach other Chinese ports of ‘Canton, Amoy, Foochow, Ningbo, Shanghai, and even the hands of people and officials in the inland’. A more succinct version of this call reappeared in subsequent issues between January and May 1855. Following the call, a four-page attachment of

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advertisements was appended to the main periodical starting from the January 1855 issue, and each instalment notably included a list of current prices of local and overseas goods. The following table records the prices of selected goods in the January 1855 issue, which reflected prices in the previous month, December 1854 (see Table 3.1): Remarkably, the label of ‘overseas goods’ and the use of silver dollars underscore important facts about the nature of global trade routes that had come to be monopolised by European colonialism: none of the goods was produced in Britain or other European empires; and instead, they were all commodities from European colonies in South and Southeast Asia, but traded in the colonial currency of Spanish or Mexican coins. In other words, despite the pre-existing and pre-colonial Indian Ocean trade networks across the Middle East, South Asia, Southeast Asia, Austronesia and East Asia (e.g. the so-called maritime silk road), the interference of capitalist colonialism would see European empires dominating these Table 3.1  Current prices of selected goods in December 1854. This table is a selection from a bigger table of prices printed in Wong (2021), which was in turn extracted from LMS (1855a). The translation from Chinese to English is mine. Overseas goods Cotton from Bombay Cotton from Calcutta Rice from Bali Rice from Luzon Rice from Arakan [West Burma] or Singapore Salt Black pepper Local goods Black tea Tea from Amoy [possibly Oolong tea], in 10-catty boxes Green tea from Canton First-flush green tea, in 10-catty boxes Finest sugar Finest white rice, in 50-catty packs Camphor

9 silver dollars per picul [Picul is an East Asian weight measurement unit weighing about 133.33 pounds] 9 silver dollars or 9 dollars and 25 cents per picul 1 silver dollar and 95 cents per picul Not imported 1 silver dollar and 70–90 cents per picul 18 silver dollars per picul 7 silver dollars per picul 18–25 silver dollars per picul 2.5 silver dollars per box 26 silver dollars per picul 20 silver dollars per picul 5 silver dollars per picul 3 dollars 45 cents per pack 13 silver dollars per picul

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routes using raw materials from their colonies to trade for commodities from other colonies or regimes, under the trade dollar system invented by the European empires.18 In the process, colonial empires would gain multiple benefits: not only could they enjoy goods from a wide range of nations whether they controlled those nations or not, they could also dictate the development of currency systems underlying the trading of such goods. This means that the right and power of valuation and speculation—the determination of the values of goods—would rest ultimately in the imperial centres of Europe and North America.19 Two key features of European capitalist colonialism were therefore the appropriation of pre-­ colonial oceanic trade routes and the spread of European currency systems and standards all over the world to even non-colonies, all in the name of trade. In the process, East Asian countries like China and Japan were never on equal footing with the West on trade matters to begin with, because the system of valuation was a Western one. As the numerical values of commodities were printed every month, not only did Gems reinforce the capitalist system imposed on East Asia by European colonialism, but, more importantly, it demonstrated that these monthly charts of commodity prices were a necessary source of cultural capital for merchants in China and, perhaps to a lesser extent, for local residents in Hong Kong as well, since these wholesale prices might ultimately affect retail prices. In short, as we have already seen in this section, Gems—established by Western missionaries for a Chinese audience—functioned in a way that packaged knowledge deemed absent in China (e.g. biology or engineering) as wisdom from the West, or marketised current world events (especially movements of vessels transporting commodities across the colonial trade network) as desirable cultural capital available for the Chinese to absorb.

Extracting the Colonial Particularity of Hong Kong The above price chart, however, introduces a latent layer of subtlety to the label of ‘local’ worthy of further examination. ‘Local goods’ in Table 3.1 referred to commodities from China, as the tiny island of Hong Kong produced few raw goods. It was therefore a label relevant to any ethnic Chinese person reading the journal in Hong Kong or elsewhere in China. At the same time, the trade prices applied to trading activities in the port

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of Hong Kong. There was thus a curious split in the way ‘local’ could be interpreted. This, in fact, is also a paradox that underlies Gems from Near and Afar on the whole. Although the periodical was not only meant for a Hong Kong readership, a sizeable number of items in the Miscellaneous News section of various issues reported current happenings or situations in Hong Kong, such as legal trials, annual budgets and demographics, prompting Wong Tin to classify them into fourteen categories in his critical edition to Gems.20 The question, then, is: if Gems was supposed to serve readers in the coastal cities of China and even East Asia, what was the significance of communicating Hong Kong matters? I answer this question by examining Components 2 and 4 in the breakdown of the launch issue (August 1853) listed in the previous section. These are, respectively, the overall Preface to Gems (LMS 1853b), and ‘A Brief Introduction to Hong Kong’ (LMS 1853a). By juxtaposing these two articles, I will demonstrate that the above discussion of world-­weaving through acquiring knowledge as cultural capital could only be activated on a microscopic understanding of Hong Kong’s status as a colony which, curiously, was strongly linked to China but no longer a part of it. Written in the first person but with its author unnamed (presumed to be its first chief editor Walter Henry Medhurst), the Preface explained the rationale for starting Gems. It began by praising China for its rich natural resources and historical achievements, but then turned to its contemporary problems and blamed its lack of progress on China’s arrogance and unwillingness to learn from and exchange with other countries. The following passage highlights the rhetorical use of antithesis to depict contrastive situations between China and the West: When my country Great Britain was first founded, the Chinese were already using silk. When the Americans of the past were still making canoes from chopped wood and fishing in the sea, the Chinese had already invented the compass and were making giant ships for sea trade, but no such sights are seen today. […] Trade vessels from other countries are now fast and reach every port in the world, but Chinese trade boats are slow and function poorly, and can only reach Sydney and Jakarta the furthest. When other countries encounter a year of poor crop yields, they quickly send ships around to purchase food for their people; when China experiences a crop failure, it only relies on its own soil and as a result hundreds of thousands die starving. When rivers overflow in other countries, they immediately build dams to eliminate future risks, but the Yellow River in China bursts its banks

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every year and drowns many people. Other countries now have steamships that can travel in adverse weather and can go around 40km per hour, but China has yet to produce one. Countries in the rest of the world have rail networks that can transport goods and people at a speed of 180km an hour, and the quickest transport in China are horses that go about 10km an hour the quickest and normally at 5km an hour. (LMS 1853b)

The preface explained that Western powers had no intention to wage wars ‘because benefits gained from a war cannot last, unlike a trade relationship which benefits both sides’. It was under this rhetoric of ‘helping the Chinese’ to obtain ‘mutual benefit’ that the author claimed to ‘pursue the good deed of publishing an issue of Gems from Near and Afar once every month’, so that ‘the kindness of other countries can be spread in the mainland [China] and the good deeds of China can reach my country, leading to mutual learning’. It would be a personal ‘blessing’ for him, the Preface concluded, if ‘this humble publication can in its small way help the Chinese understand truths and absorb knowledge’. The other article, ‘A Brief Introduction to Hong Kong’, began by retelling how Hong Kong came to be ceded to Britain, in a tone that similarly put the blame on the Chinese, specifically Chinese officials in the imperial court of China. Chinese official Lin Wenzhong (aka Lin Zexu)— who confiscated millions of kilogrammes of opium in Canton in 1839, an event that directly led to the First Opium War—was explicitly criticised for unjustly killing British citizens not involved in the opium trade. Again, although ‘there is no shortage of insightful or accomplished people in the inland [i.e. mainland China]’, the imperial court and its officials like Lin ‘constantly looked down upon foreign countries and banned exchange and contact, and as a result China has not been able to gain any benefits in the way that foreign merchants and citizens have been doing in recent years’ (LMS 1853a). The article then stressed that initially Britain had no intention to obtain territory from China, but the Chinese government’s multiple instances of promise-breaking eventually led Britain to advance their army further inland and finally demand reimbursement of military expenses and cession of a small island for soldiers to station and trade ships to dock. Although the two pieces of writing accused the Chinese of being arrogant and self-indulgent, both arguably demonstrated another, more subtle kind of arrogance: an imperial arrogance of the West that assumed a Western capitalist, industrial modernity to be a universal model beneficial

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to all countries in the world. Rhetorically, this arrogance was couched in a language that apparently praised the ‘good ol’ days’ of China, but note that in the quoted passage from the Preface ancient China’s merits lay in crafts and invention (such as silk and boats), whereas the strengths of modern European countries had to do with efficiency in transportation and trade (such as steamships and railways, complemented with actual numbers of their maximum speeds). Until this point, the rhetoric was similar in both pieces, but the focus shifted to Hong Kong in the final part of ‘A Brief Introduction to Hong Kong’ as it described Hong Kong’s environment and the changes it had achieved under British administration. Portrayed as an uncultivated place whose natural scenery and soil were full of potential (insinuating a missed opportunity for China), the hills on the island provided ‘good source for granite rocks and boast flowing streams with aromatic sweetness, which certainly was where the name Hong Kong came from’.21 All Hong Kong needed was ‘proper cultivation and landscaping so that with effective irrigation the place could look pleasing to the eye and uplift the spirit of its residents’. Under British administration, the population of Hong Kong expanded from 2000 when the British first arrived in 1841 to at least 32,000 at the time of publication only a decade later; various buildings such as churches, barracks, hospitals, halls and others were constructed, with ‘residences for merchants being built according to the standards of Britain, and Chinese-run shops and restaurants being comparable to Canton’ (LMS 1853a). Considerable lines were spent on describing governmental systems such as infrastructures and tax revenues, and especially those that concerned public order, such as a legislative council that drafted ordinances, police stations and officers that ensured public safety, and law courts that processed criminal cases or magistrates that dealt with civil disputes. As we have seen from the two-pronged interpretation of the word ‘local’ in the beginning of this section, Hong Kong’s positioning as an entrepôt for trade meant that the British had little interest in eradicating the island of its Chinese connections or elements (for instance, its people and customs). Reading the two articles in tandem, however, the periodical’s Preface could be seen as establishing an overall problematic that, having fallen from its past glory, China now required assistance to brush up its knowledge and trade so that mutual benefits could be achieved—a mission that, as the short prologue on Hong Kong then insinuated, the Crown colony was well poised to serve with its effective systems.

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The editorial practice of placing the Preface first and the introduction to Hong Kong second, then, was a textual strategy that ultimately mirrored the strategy of colonialism. Simply put, the Preface presented the problem, and the introduction on Hong Kong proffered the solution. From postcolonial scholars such as Edward Said to decolonial scholars such as Walter Mignolo, much has been written on how a definition of modernity monopolised by the Europeans and understood as ‘the only present’ was imposed onto ‘backward [and] conservative’ colonies in a discourse of ‘salvation, progress, development’ (Mignolo 2018, 107, 110), thereby justifying Europe’s territorial invasions as ‘civilising missions’ that bestowed the ‘solution’ of industrialisation and modernisation. By the same token, China, which Gems recognised as a former great civilisation, was seen as plagued with problems, to which the British now brought the solution—and Hong Kong was the demonstration of that solution. The narrative of Hong Kong as described in the introduction could, in fact, be read allegorically as the story of China. Both had immense natural resources but were uncultivated—that is, before the British arrived. By showing Hong Kong’s infrastructural achievements and sociopolitical developments in a matter of a decade, the implication was that these too could all become China’s achievements, on the condition that it followed the British way. What this meant for Hong Kong, however, was that with the help of the British, Hong Kong was implicated into the colonial trade system, its entrepôt status acting as a middleman that could facilitate Britain’s ‘well-­ meaning’ assistance to China. Hong Kong was the ‘model unit’ and became part of the British solution. At this moment in history, Hong Kong was at once Chinese but not fully Chinese, British but never completely British. Here we see a clear example of Benedict Anderson’s remarks on how print capitalism advanced the formation of new imagined communities—in Europe, this laid the basis for national consciousness and the nation-state through vernacularising the linguistic landscape with the decline of Latin (Anderson 2016). Although it was the formal colonial processes that had created the entity of Hong Kong, what journalistic publications such as Gems helped vernacularise was instead the circulation of knowledge as cultural capital, moving away from the top-down announcement of imperial edicts of Jingbao to, for the first time in Chinese history, a dissemination of information about the world among the public. Placing these two passages in the very first issue of Gems, then, created insinuations beyond the political entities of ‘China’ or ‘Hong Kong’, but

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for the people living there as well. Whether it was businessmen and compradors who wanted to benefit from Sino-British trade, or labourers and opportunists who wanted to get rich from gold mining in America or Australia, or intellectuals who simply wanted to know more about Western knowledge—those Chinese who desired to ‘weave’ a new world for themselves had little means to obtain necessary information from China or its ‘arrogant’ government. Instead, it was through Western-style journalism such as Gems from Near and Afar, based in a region like Hong Kong controlled by the British, that they could equip themselves with the necessary cultural capital for engaging in their own practice of ‘world-weaving’. As this comprehensive periodical weaved Hong Kong into a network of trade and knowledge circulation with its informative articles about ‘Western knowledge’ and news items about manoeuvres of commodities and vessels, so too did it exercise enabling power for people in the region of China and East Asia to weave their own world. This is of course not to say that the Chinese had not been exploring the world prior to this, nor do I claim that reading Gems from Near and Afar was the only means for the Chinese to know about the world. Chinese journalism developed as a process alongside other educational instruments, and by the turn of the twentieth century, newspaper publications had blossomed throughout China. Gems from Near and Afar, as China’s second Chinese newspaper, was part of the initiation of this world-weaving phenomenon.

Conclusion Although Gems from Near and Afar had a circulation of 3000, was read by people along the Chinese coast and even in Japan, and spearheaded the introduction of journalism into China, it ceased publication in May 1856 after 33 issues. While its second editor, Rev. Charles Batten Hillier, and successor, Rev. James Legge, both lamented that the Chinese population and Chinese merchants in the region were not willing to buy copies of Gems, finance was not a main reason for the journal’s failure since both editors acknowledged financial assistance from European and American merchants (see LMS 1854b). The apparent reason given in its ‘Notice of the Discontinuance of the [Chinese] Serial’ in Issue 33 was that the chief editor (i.e. Legge) had too little time for editorial matters. Legge had already been the headmaster of Ying Wa College since 1840, and it was possible that he simply had little time to devote himself to the publication. During his editorship, Gems stopped printing advertisements and shrank

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back to its initial format of 12 pages. After the Second Opium War had broken out in 1856, Ying Wa College ceased operation in 1858 and Legge resigned from the College in 1864 to take up the chair of Chinese Studies at Oxford in 1875. Gems has left a few notable legacies and played a vital role in setting standards in the history of Chinese journalism. Its practice of publishing advertisements was emulated by subsequent newspapers in Hong Kong and China. In particular, the list of current commodity prices was such a popular practice that many other newspapers, such as the English newspaper The Hong Kong Daily Press, founded in October 1857, picked up the baton after Gems’ discontinuation and ran shipping gazettes that reported the latest commodity prices. The printing facilities at Ying Wa College used to print Gems were sold to the Chinese reformist thinker and translator Wang Tao (1828–1897) and the aforementioned editorial assistant of Gems, Huang Sheng, at 10,000 Mexican silver coins; in 1874, the duo began a newspaper of their own, the Universal Circulating Herald, which was Hong Kong’s first newspaper owned and edited by the Chinese. Because the concept of modern newspapers was imported into China through European colonisation and missionary work, from the beginning these newspapers were created to both serve the European colonial and Christian enterprise and benefit the local Chinese. Gems brought Western knowledge to a Chinese readership while also reporting on movements of goods and price fluctuations in transregional trade. All these forms of knowledge constituted cultural capitals that were necessary for any Chinese who wanted to weave their own world beyond the Chinese context in which they were based, be it as merchants, as goldminers, or simply as students and intellectuals. At the same time, in the broader aspect of Hong Kong’s position, Gems also began to weave Hong Kong into its own position in the colonial network—a position that was neither completely Chinese, nor ever fully British. On some levels, the periodical almost served propagandist purposes, but, as analysed, its approach leaned towards what is called today a soft power approach, adopting a carefully couched rhetoric that evoked a nostalgia for China’s former glory. In closing, I will offer a comment on the potential of ‘world-weaving’ as an academic concept. In his book on Hong Kong newspapers, Zhao argues that the master narrative of Gems—and indeed that of early writings by Western missionaries—was to ‘praise Britain and belittle China, to establish a colonial identity in Hong Kong’ (Zhao 2019, 13). This argument operates on a simple binary and places the publication strictly in the

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Britain–Hong Kong–China triangle. Given that Gems only ran for three years (and in the editors’ own words, to poor reception among the Chinese), such a project of ‘establishing a colonial identity’ (if it ever was the editors’ intention) proved to have had a limited effect on the few tens of thousands of Chinese living on Hong Kong Island. My chapter therefore wants to nuance this understanding by suggesting that (i) Gems was only beginning to sketch Hong Kong as a separate locale, implicitly highlighting Hong Kong as a place differential to China, and (ii) the effect of this sketch was aimed more broadly at a regional audience in China, rather than narrowly at the island of Hong Kong alone. This is also the reason I choose not to approach Gems from postcolonial concepts such as the subaltern or mimicry, but from the perspective of ‘world-weaving’, because short-lived publications such as Gems show us that their historical significance may not be so readily and neatly explained by existing concepts. For the Chinese in the nineteenth century, ‘world-weaving’ referred to a process of absorbing cultural capital via newspapers in order to engage with the colonial trade network. But for scholars doing historical research, ‘world-weaving’ is also a useful praxis committed to developing a deep engagement that considers how the temporal, geographical and sociocultural axes intersect with each other in history.

Notes 1. In this chapter, I refer to the publication as Gems from Near and Afar, which is a direct translation from its Chinese name, Haaji Gwunzan in Cantonese and Xia’er Guanzhen in Mandarin. Its official English title is the utterly unimaginative Chinese Serial, but I have opted for Gems from Near and Afar because I want to highlight the newspaper’s emphasis (beginning with its title) on both local (Hong Kong, hence ‘near’) and regional/international (Asia and beyond, hence ‘afar’) matters, bringing home my point about its ‘world-weaving’ properties. 2. The three main parts of Hong Kong today were colonised at different times: the Hong Kong Island was ceded to Britain under the Treaty of Nanking (1842) as the direct aftermath of the First Opium War (1839–1842); the Kowloon peninsula was ceded under the Convention of Peking (1860) as a result of the Second Opium War (1856–1860); and the New Territories was leased to Britain for free for a period of 99 years under the Convention for the Extension of Hong Kong Territory (1898). All three parts were handed over to China on 1 July 1997.

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3. The Taiping Rebellion refers to the rise of a rebellion group called the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom (Taiping Tianguo), founded by a self-­ proclaimed Christian called Hong Xiuquan in Guangxi Province in southern China in 1850–1864. The 14-year civil war spread all across China with an estimated death toll of at least 30 million. 4. The Perry expeditions (also called the ‘Advent of Black Ships’ in Japan) refer to two expeditions led by Commodore Matthew Perry of the American navy to force Japan to open trade links. The first of these expeditions left Shanghai on 17 May 1853 (with a previous stop in Hong Kong in April) and arrived near Tokyo (then called Edo) in July. Apart from the reportage on the Perry expeditions, Ishida Yasuo (1967), for example, has studied the Chinese translation of Milton’s ‘On His Blindness’ sonnet published in the September 1854 issue of Gems. Little is known about Ishida, as this seems to be his only contribution to Japanese academia based on a search at Japan’s CiNii (Scholarly and Academic Information Navigator) database. More will be said about Milton’s sonnet below. 5. Even though I use the term ‘colonial network’, the nature of European colonisation in East Asia was different from that in other parts of the world such as Africa, the Caribbean and even the neighbouring region of Southeast Asia. Whereas European powers had colonised large areas of Southeast Asia such as Indonesia (by the Dutch), Vietnam (by the French) and the Philippines (by the Spanish), Europe never managed to gain complete territorial control of much of East Asia except Macau (by the Portuguese between 1557 and 1999), parts of current-day Taiwan (by the Dutch in the seventeenth century), Hong Kong, and various settlement areas in China and Japan. At the same time, these two countries were very much involved in their own colonial practice, such as Japan’s annexation of Korea in 1910. Accordingly, Europe’s policy in East Asia was not focused on gaining complete territorial control, but on forcing East Asian countries into unequal trade relationships, and it was in this sense that the methods used by European powers were still ‘colonial’. This can be seen by several key events in the nineteenth century, such as the First Opium War of 1839, which was partly caused by the trade imbalance between Europe’s export of opium to China and import of Chinese silver and tea leaves in return, or the 1853 Perry expeditions in which the US navy, demonstrating its military prowess, intimidated Japan into opening its ports to American trade. The exceptional circumstances of East Asia have led scholars like Tani E. Barlow (2005) to claim that East Asia stood awkwardly in postcolonial studies. 6. With the exception of the May 1954 issue (vol. 2, no. 5), the Hong Kong Public Library has made digital scans of all existing issues of Gems available for free on their Multimedia Information System (https://mmis.hkpl.gov.

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hk). The scans however do not include the attachment of advertisements which started appearing from the January 1855 issue (more on the attachment below). The Hong Kong Public Library database entry for Gems is in Chinese, meaning that a search string in English would yield no result, and knowledge of Chinese input methods is necessary for entering the Chinese title of Gems for a proper return. Interested readers could consult this tailored search link on the system: https://bit.ly/3D5Sls6. 7. There is some confusion concerning the number of 33. This was the number of issues claimed to have been published in the ‘Notice of the Discontinuance of the Serial’ in the final issue, but there is no existing original copy for the April 1856 issue (vol. 4, no. 4), and that issue is therefore believed to have been skipped. Today, copies of only 32 issues can be found. 8. The Eastern Western Monthly Magazine (Dongxiyangkao Meiyue Tongjizhuan) was the first Chinese newspaper (also in the form of a monthly periodical like Gems) published in the territory of China. It was also a missionary publication, started by the Prussian Protestant missionary Karl Friedrich August Gützlaff (1803–1851) in Canton (Guangzhou) in 1833, but moved to Singapore at the outbreak of the First Opium War in 1837. Before this publication, the first ever newspaper printed in Chinese for an ethnic Chinese readership was, in fact, the Chinese Monthly Magazine (Chashisu Meiyue Tongjizhuan, 1815–1821), founded in Malacca by the Scottish LMS missionary William Milne (1785–1822) under the leadership of LMS’ first missionary in China, Robert Morrison (1782–1834). Morrison was an important figure in the history of Chinese Christianity as the first Protestant missionary to enter China in 1807 (arriving at the Portuguese colony of Macau) and the first person to have translated and published the entire Bible into Chinese. He was also the founder of Ying Wa College. During their early stay in China, Milne and Morrison felt it was unsafe to use China as a base for printing evangelical publications, and thus shifted their base to Malacca. For this reason, the Chinese Monthly Magazine was printed in Chinese, but its primary targeted readership was the Chinese-speaking diaspora in Southeast Asia, although copies also entered China. In this way, the earliest history of newspapers in the Chinese-speaking world was deeply involved with Christian missions. 9. Wen was a Chinese currency that equalled 1000th of a dollar. Fifteen wen was a relatively low price at the time. In both in-text citations and the works cited list, I have opted to attribute Gems to LMS as an organisational author. Since the editorship changed hands twice, it would be more consistent to list LMS as the author rather than the various editors. 10. After all, the 1853 Hong Kong census put the population of Hong Kong at 39,017, of which 37,536 were Chinese (The Government of Hong

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Kong 1853). The number expanded as refugees rushed into Hong Kong as a result of the Taiping Rebellion, and was estimated at 86,941 (albeit including Europeans) by 1859, right before Hong Kong underwent its second phase of colonisation when the Kowloon peninsula was ceded to Britain after the Second Opium War (see Fan 1974). 11. These are my translations from the Chinese titles in the first issue. Gems only began supplying an English index of contents from the second issue onwards. 12. The Chinese were using their own calendar system at this point, based on lunar cycles. Hence, a chant about the Common Era, a calendar from the West, was necessary. 13. According to Zhou Weichi (2016), an alternative translation of these regulations was ‘Gold Mining Rules in American California for Chinese’. The translation in Gems was only an excerpt. 14. For a selection of these stories and a useful introduction to the genre, see Karl Kao (1985), available in full online on the publisher’s website. 15. He Tianhu (2015) is a lot more conservative in claiming that this edition is ‘the first’ ever Chinese translation of an English poem, but still regards it a highly accomplished translation, commending in particular its use of ancient Chinese poetic forms as a correspondence with Milton’s use of the Petrarchan sonnet rhyme scheme. 16. According to Shen Guowei (2005), these two articles were possibly written by Rev. Joseph Edkins, LMS (1823–1905) and Chinese poet Jiang Dunfu (1808–1867). 17. The English title is my translation, as it was omitted in the English index of contents of that issue. 18. For more about currency systems in British colonies, see Narsey (2016). 19. No wonder, then, that it was in Europe and North America where the international silver panic of 1873 began, and that the ripple effect of devaluation eventually hit European colonies around the world. 20. These 14 categories are: Governmental Announcements; Demographics and Population; Legislation and Laws; Finance and Revenues; Trade and Currencies; Diplomatic Relations; Defence and Public Order; Suppression of Pirates; Judicial Trials; Overseas Labourers; Matters of the [Victoria] Harbour; Sea Accidents and Incidents; Society and Customs; and Advertisements and Notifications. 21. This was one of the etymologies of the name ‘Hong Kong’, which literally means ‘fragrant harbour’. The other commonly accepted origin is the aromatic incense exported from the island.

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Works Cited Note:  In this list, I have followed the convention often adopted in the field of East Asian studies for East Asian names, that is, to not introduce a comma after surnames. This is because in bibliographies, the usual comma after a surname alerts reader to an inverted surname contrary to the Western naming convention. However, in East Asia, names naturally follow the ‘surname–given name’ convention, so adding a comma is unnecessary and is considered by some as an Orientalist practice. Albers, Anni. 1941. Handweaving Today: Textile Work at Black Mountain College. The Weaver 6 (1), January-February: 1-5. Anderson, Benedict. 2016. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso. Barlow, Tani E. 2005. Eugenic Woman, Semicolonialism, and Colonial Modernity as Problems for Postcolonial Theory. In Postcolonial Studies and Beyond, ed. Ania Loomba et al., 359-84. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Cheah, Pheng. 2016. What is a World? On Postcolonial Literature as World Literature. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Fan Shuh Ching. 1974. The Population of Hong Kong. Paris: The Committee for International Coordination of National Research in Demography. The Government of Hong Kong. 1853. Census of Hongkong 31 December, 1853. Hong Kong: Government of Hong Kong. https://sunzi.lib.hku.hk/ hkgro/view/g1854/727437.pdf. He Tianhu. 2015. Lun Mi’erdun ‘Yong Shiming’ ji qi Zaoqi Zhongguo Yinyuan [On Milton’s ‘On His Blindness’ and Its Early China Connections]. Journal of Central Southern University (Social Science) 21 (1), February: 198-203. Ingold, Tim. 2010. The Textility of Making. Cambridge Journal of Economics 34: 91-102. Ishida Yasuo. 1967. Xia’er guanzhen ni arawareta Miruton no shi (mōmoku no shi) ni tsuite [On Milton’s Poem that Appeared in Gems from Near and Afar]. Research Bulletin of Fukuoka Institute of Technology 1, May: 1-11. Jin Yufu, and Tian Yuqing. 1950. Taiping Tianguo Shiliao [Historical Archives on the Taiping Rebellion]. Beijing: Kaiming Shudian. Kao, Karl. 1985. Classical Chinese Tales of the Supernatural and the Fantastic: Selections from the Third to the Tenth Century. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. London Missionary Society [LMS]. 1853a. A Brief Introduction to Hong Kong. Gems from Near and Afar, August 1853. London Missionary Society [LMS]. 1853b. Preface. Gems from Near and Afar, August 1853.

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London Missionary Society [LMS]. 1854a. Notice of the Poet Milton, and Translation of the Sonnet on His Blindness. Gems From Near and Afar, September 1854. London Missionary Society [LMS]. 1854b. A Short Introduction to Gems from Near and Afar. Gems From Near and Afar, December 1854. London Missionary Society [LMS]. 1854c. Sketch of a Voyage Round the Cape and Several Months’ Residence in Great Britain. Gems from Near and Afar, July 1854. London Missionary Society [LMS]. 1854–1855. Account of a Visit to Japan in the Suite of the American Embassy, in 1854. Gems from Near and Afar, November 1854–January 1855. London Missionary Society [LMS]. 1855a. Attachment to Gems from Near and Afar, January 1855. London Missionary Society [LMS]. 1855b. History of Joan of Arc. Gems from Near and Afar, May 1855. London Missionary Society [LMS]. 1855c. Life of [Marcus Tullius] Cicero. Gems from Near and Afar, November 1855. Matsuura, Akira, Uchida Keiichi and Shen Guowei (eds.). 2005. Xia’er Guanzhen, fu Jieti, Suoyin [Gems from Near and Afar, with Critical Introduction and Index]. Shanghai: Shanghai Cishu Chubanshe. Mignolo, Walter D. 2018. What Does It Mean to Decolonize? In On Decoloniality, eds. Catherine E. Walsh and Walter D. Mignolo, 105-134. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Narsey, Wadan. 2016. British Imperialism and the Making of Colonial Currency Systems. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Shen Guowei. 2005. Xia’er guanzhen jieti [Approaches to Gems from Near and Afar]. In Xia’er Guanzhen, fu Jieti, Suoyin [Gems from Near and Afar, with Critical Introduction and Index], ed. Matsuura Akira, Uchida Keiichi and Shen Guowei. Shanghai: Shanghai Cishu Chubanshe. Sinn, Elizabeth. 2004. Beyond ‘Tianxia’: The ‘Zhongwai Xinwen Qiribao’ (Hong Kong 1871-1872) and the Construction of a Transnational Chinese Community. China Review 4 (1), Spring: 89-122. Tao De-min. 2005. Negotiating Language in the Opening of Japan: Luo Sen’s Journal of Perry’s 1854 Expedition. Japan Review 17: 91-119. Wong Tin. 2021. Haaji gwunzan: Hoenggong Siliu loeicaau [Gems from Near and Afar: A Classified Anthology of the Historical Records of Hong Kong]. Hong Kong: Joint Publishing. Zhao Xifang. 2019. Baokan Xianggang: Lishi yujing yu wenxue chang’i [Newspapers in Hong Kong: Historical Context and Literary Field]. Hong Kong: Joint Publishing. Zhou Weichi. 2016. The Origin of ‘A New Treatise on Aids to Administration’. In Yearbook of Chinese Theology, ed. Paulos Z. Huang, 77-110. Leiden: Brill.

CHAPTER 4

Turn-of-the-Century Buenos Aires: A Capital of Queer Spectacles Carlos Gustavo Halaburda

The Latin American capitals of the late nineteenth century exhibited a triumphalist image of unquestionable progress. The redesign of boulevards, opera houses, plazas and sumptuous mansions in Havana, Mexico City, Caracas, Bogotá, Lima and Santiago de Chile gave a distinguished contour to the new cosmopolitan cityscapes.1 In Argentina, the city of Buenos Aires showcased an architectural revolution. The urban layout now appeared as an assembly of fractions taken from various European cities. The great avenues resembled those of Paris, Madrid and Barcelona. In wealthy neighbourhoods, French-style petits hôtels abounded; public buildings featured neoclassical and art deco facades; the Government House displayed an Italian style, while the iconic Colón Theater and the Palace of the Argentine National Congress displayed an eclectic elegance (Sarlo 2007, 31). Buenos Aires’ splendour resulted from the economic and political consolidation of the Argentine conservative elites, which

C. G. Halaburda (*) Department of Spanish and Portuguese, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 A. Bhattacharya et al. (eds.), Literary Capitals in the Long Nineteenth Century, Literary Urban Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-13060-1_4

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reached a radical dynamism in the aftermath of the Civil Wars (1814–1880) between the port city and the provinces. Among the many projects, the Buenos Aires Great Southern Railway (BAGS) (Ferrocarril del Sud) became a powerful symbol of Argentine modernisation (Lewis 1983), and by the turn of the century, British railways in Argentina were one of the most influential companies for foreign investment in Latin America. The Argentine Generation of 1880, a group of intellectuals and political leaders educated in the positivist doctrine, designed a modern republic that looked with optimism at the advance of industrial capitalism, at the arrival of millions of transatlantic immigrants, and the agro-export boom that placed Argentina on the list of wealthy nations. Modernisation, in this particular form, required the adoption of French and British secular principles of scientific innovation, while eliminating from the national imaginary old beliefs rooted in the Spanish-colonial tradition, the memory of enslaved Africans and Afro-descendants, and the indigenous past. But soon, behind the lights of promising modernity, emerged the gloomy discontent of displaced minorities inhabiting the slums that had multiplied in marginalised areas of the city (Viñas 1983, 17). A remarkable body of critical scholarship about the Argentine turn of the century has shown that the growing clinical literature on vice and crime gave visibility to bodies and urban geographies dissociated from the modernising project (Salessi 1995, 126; Molloy 2012, 140; Yarfitz 2019, 20–40). Trash pickers, sex workers, unwanted immigrants, petty criminals, beggars and abandoned children composed a living tapestry that illustrated the conditions of destitute life. Inspired by Émile Zola’s literary school, Argentine naturalism aestheticised the new European doctrines of Social Darwinism with the purpose of warning high society against territories and dissident forms of gender and sexuality that threatened order and progress (Halaburda 2021, 2). Urban peripheries were invested with a power of degradation. Medical discourses on hereditary degeneration saturated Argentine fiction (Laera 2004, 183). Pathologised uses of sex and racial miscegenation accounted for the broken dreams of prosperity projected by the criollo2 nation builders. As Gabriela Nouzeilles argues, Argentine naturalism expressed anxieties about the future of the criollo lineages, seen as biological components of the nation. This fear over the cancellation of reproductive futures is part of the wider spectrum of discourses rooted in the form of ethnic nationalism, which ‘adopted as its own the all-explanatory principles of racism and its strict criteria of visual discrimination. Once this interdiscursive pact was established, the nation’s

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ethnic narrative was organised according to the conventions of kinship narratives and the logic of blood ties’ (2000, 21). However, I propose to momentarily leave aside discourses on degeneration as the dominant reading model of the Argentine late nineteenth century in order to turn attention to a spatial analysis of the production of queerness, which texts and cultural discourses of the time, inspired by the positivist school of legal medicine, would classify as ‘deviance’. Insufficient attention has been given to how urban architecture became a cultural laboratory in order to explore issues of race, gender, sexuality, hygiene and social status during the solidification of the Argentine nation-state at the turn of the century.3 In this chapter, I will examine how the literary mapping of Buenos Aires contributed to the cultural production of notions of queer. In particular, I shall explore an architectural polarisation of sexual overtones that takes place in the literary portrayals of private and public cartographies of the city. The nineteenth-century Buenos Aires oligarchic families generated an aesthetic repertoire in response to a lingering feeling of being invaded by a queer force in their spaces of influence. The ‘deviant’ factor left a mark on the Argentine fin de siècle. The drive to maintain family honour became a national mandate to protect intimate milieus from an impending sense of external corruption (Viñas 1996, 61).4 I argue that the literary making of heteronormative space depended on the queering of ‘outsider’ figures, particularly regarding stereotypical figurations of European immigrants, especially Spaniards, Italians and Jews. Drawing on the work of queer theorists Aaron Betsky (1997), Gayle Rubin (2012) and Paul B.  Preciado (2017), I use the term ‘queer force’ to refer to the unstable, hybrid and elusive aggregation of an eroticised otherness that destabilised the pillars of social cohesion, racial endogamy and heteronormativity.5 Besides referring to same-sex desire, in this chapter queerness accounts for multiple markers of transgression of the standard norms of nineteenth-century sexual conduct, that is, irregular pleasures, eccentric genders, deviations from reproductive heterosexuality and other dissident practices seen as an attack against the conventional sexual order of fin-de-siècle Argentina. The queer critique that I propose looks at how the making of a hierarchical heteronormative space in Buenos Aires depended on sexually pathologising the nation’s ‘outsiders’. As Héctor Domínguez Ruvalcaba argues, in the context of Latin America ‘queer studies are not only about self-­ representation of the queer subject but also about a circulation of queerness in the production, reception, prohibition and disruption that occur

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within the patriarchal realm’ (2016, 78). I explore such ‘disruption’ of the spatial economies of Argentine desire by looking at the procedures of a literary production of ‘sexualised villains’. The first part of the chapter outlines a contextual history that places Buenos Aires within the transnational context of modernisation; it then focuses its attention on the treatment of queerness in the canonical novels La Bolsa (The Stock Market, 1891) by Julián Martel and En la sangre (In the Blood, 1887) by Eugenio Cambaceres, together with the less-known short story ‘De cepa criolla’  by Miguel Cané  (Criollo Lineage, 1919), published in 1884. In these texts, written by famous naturalist authors of the time, queerness serves to reinforce the principles of Argentine nativism while underlining how spaces associated with power and prestige like the Club del Progreso and the Colón Theatre were subject to a ‘perverse’ invasion. The second part of the chapter considers the crime story ‘Buenos Aires tenebroso: ladrones vestidos de mujer’ (Gothic Buenos Aires: Thieves Dressed like Women, 1912) published by the journalist and novelist Juan José de Soiza Reilly in the modernist magazine Fray Mocho. Here, the elegant boulevards appear to be taken over by a singular figure of gender dissidence that begins to gain cultural relevance in the early twentieth century: the Spanish marica travesti. In the late nineteenth- and early twentieth centuries, the names marica, travesti or invertido (invert) referred to non-conforming sexual subcultures that resisted the repressive apparatuses of medical and police control over alternative economies of desire (Salessi 1995, 259). For example, the most famous institute for the incarceration of subjects detained for délits de moeurs (gross indecency) was the Depósito de Contraventores (Offenders Prison), an institute for the medical study of so-called alienated subjects. It operated with the joint management of the Police and the Faculty of Medicine. After a clinical diagnosis, psychiatrists would decide whether to hospitalise or release detainees. Based on social hygienic principles of order and work, the institute aimed at the social reinsertion of alienated individuals. For the most part, the detainees were ‘prostitutes, transvestites, anarchists, immigrants, and petty-criminals’ (Elcovich and Rodriguez  Sturla 2014, 32). More than 3000 persons passed through this institution; 1700 were interned and 1300 released. As Elcovich and Rodríguez Sturla indicate, ‘the notion of degeneration was the main cause by which the diagnosis of mental alienation was reached’ (2014, 33). A comparative analysis of the selected corpus allows me to draw some conclusions about the turn-of-the-century spatial codes of queerness in a

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group of texts of the Argentine naturalist canon. Architecture, as depicted in novels, short stories, crime fiction and photography, operates here with the force of an erotic signifier, accentuating the virtue of criollo heteronormativity while condemning the spatial circulation of new racial, gender and sexual sensibilities.



A Queer Invasion

The historical cycle that covers the years 1880–1916 was given the names of Conservative Argentina, the Conservative Republic or the Conservative Order, concepts coined by the historian Natalio R. Botana in the 1970s. The period was characterised by the leadership of the Generation of 1880, headed by Julio Argentino Roca (1843–1914), politician, military leader and president of the nation during two periods (1880–1886, 1898–1904). With the National Autonomist Party (PAN), Roca led the social class that modernised the Republic under the motto ‘peace and administration’ (Botana 1977, 40–60). The genocidal wars against indigenous peoples in the Patagonia region, an instance of domestic colonialism known as the Campaña del Desierto (Desert Campaign), activated a territorial reordering in order to establish a new racial, economic and political rationale (Viñas 2003, 17). In 1880, Buenos Aires was declared the capital of the Argentine Republic. The country strengthened its institutions of social control and joined the world economy as an exporter of primary goods, particularly cereals, meats and leather. Foreign investments, especially British, increased. Great Britain invested in Argentine land, banks, meat companies and railways (Cornblit et al. 1962, 3). There were numerous advances in the civil, educational and cultural sectors. The Civil Registry was founded in 1888, which controlled births, deaths and marriages, a task until then reserved to the church. The National Education Council would be directed by the writer and statesman Domingo Faustino Sarmiento (1811–1888). Key measures for national intellectual development were promoted, such as the Law 1420 (1884) on secular, free and mandatory elementary education. The bill also regulated universities. The Faculty of Philosophy and Letters of the University of Buenos Aires was inaugurated in 1896 (Biagini 1995, 26–32). Along with the economic success of the agro-export model, an ambitious immigration plan was launched in order to populate a country demographically affected by long internal wars between Buenos Aires and

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the provinces, as well as the above-mentioned military campaign of extermination of indigenous peoples. This plan was executed due to technological advancements in Europe, notably the steamship, that opened the possibility for thousands of Europeans to migrate to the Americas. Hundreds of thousands of newcomers, particularly Spaniards, Italians, Poles, Russians and Jews from different parts of Eastern Europe, reached the port of Buenos Aires. The causes of their migration were diverse. Some were escaping from political and religious persecution and others from economic hardship. Before 1880, the immigration phenomenon had already been taking place for two decades. The census carried out in 1869 counted 210,000 foreigners out of a total of 1,877,490 inhabitants, or an estimated 12% of the total population. In 1895, a second census reported a dramatic increase in the number of immigrants. Out of 4,044,911 inhabitants, 1,004,527 (roughly 25%) were foreigners. In the decade between 1880 and 1890, the majority of immigrants (70%) were Italian (García and Panesi 1996, 21). The division of the social field soon became the object of literature. Ideas about morality and hygiene flooded the fictions of the time. ¿Inocentes o culpables? (Innocent or Guilty?, 1884) by Antonio Argerich, Irresponsable (Irresponsible, 1889) by Manuel Podestá, and Sin rumbo (Aimless, 1944 [1885]) by Eugenio Cambaceres, among others, were exemplary novels of the nationalist impulse in the literary realm. As Josefina Ludmer has argued in her essay El cuerpo del delito (The Corpus Delicti, 1999), the men of the Generation of 1880 built a ‘cultural coalition’ to define their identity as representative of the interests of the entire nation, manufacturing a cultural canon that became instrumental for the reinforcement of state power (Ludmer 1999, 26). But these works, I want to insist, would also establish a mode of spatial inquiry in Argentine naturalism: the impending invasion of private and public spaces by a ‘perverse’ outsider. In what follows, I study this spatial question in three specific texts, beginning with La Bolsa (The Stock Market, 1891), a novelistic exploration of the Argentine financial crash of 1890. La Bolsa was written by Julián Martel (1867–1896), a pseudonym for José María Miró. He was a novelist, stock market journalist for the renowned newspaper La Nación, and member of an old aristocratic family. The story narrates the life of the speculator Luis Glow, a young and prestigious lawyer of British origin who abandons his profession to become a successful financial investor. His fortune and demise result from a corrupt alliance with business partners, state officials and scammers of various

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kinds. But the figure of the Jewish banker, Filiberto Von Mackser, is the scapegoat for Glow’s bankruptcy. The novel’s representation of the financial crisis of 1890 portrays a looming economic and moral collapse. But it does not stop at this diagnosis. It also offers an extremely reductive explanation which sees the Jews as uniquely responsible for the crisis and as dangerously keen on controlling Argentine finances, ‘as exemplified through the machinations of the banker Von Mackser (a Baron’s title bought from an impoverished German aristocrat)’ (Beckman 2013, 270). As David Viñas argues, since by 1890 ‘immigration’ was equated to ‘invasion’, it is ‘at the confluence of these two problems where La Bolsa should be contextualised’ (1975, 93). The novel’s ending shows that everything easily obtained by speculation disappears as the stock market turns into a monster. This fable of decadence ends when, alone in his room, the businessman is seduced by a beautiful woman who exhibits her sex, metamorphosises and then devours Glow while roaring: ‘Soy la Bolsa’ (I am the stock market; Martel 1891, 311). Jack Halberstam argues that ‘gothic fiction of the nineteenth century specifically used the body of the monster to produce race, class, gender and sexuality within narratives about the relation between subjectivities and certain bodies’ (1995, 6). Indeed, the gothic aspect in La Bolsa’s final scene produces the monster as a racialised entity by adhering to antisemitic tropes. Earlier in the novel, Glow claims that Europe was under the ‘Jewish yoke’ and the Americas (especially Argentina) ‘were threatened by the same danger’ (Martel 1891, 138) Glow points out that it was necessary to take ‘precautions’ because there was a lack of attention on the part of the Argentine press in covering the impact of Jewish banking on the world economy. Glow brings about the classic conspiratory belief that ‘the rise in gold was due to the devilish machinations of the Jews’ (1891, 138). Then, Glow ‘enthusiastically’ remarks that ‘Jews are the vampire of modern society; their job is to suck blood’ (1891, 138–139). This antisemitic gothic stereotype invested upon Jewish peoples responds to the discursive constellations of nineteenth-century Argentine antisemitism, for which the signs of Western decadence and capitalist excesses could be explained through the ‘Jewish menace’. But I want to suggest that the vampirical monstrosity attributed to Jews, an insistent antisemitic formula of Argentine naturalist fiction, is an insufficient model for the analysis of the text’s anxiety about corruption. Glow’s moral decline is also manifested in his erotic relation with money and power, specifically with the fetishist/

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queer relationship that he develops with a set of luxurious objects in his mansion that trigger his arousal. In Chapter 3, ‘Dr. Glow in his House’, the novel illustrates a critical moment in the thematic densification of ‘deviance’ and ‘invasion’. While Glow’s mansion starts to be lit up with candles in every single room, a distressing presence lurks in the street observing the splendour. Glow despises anything he finds displeasing. He feels offended by how his servants ruin with their mere presence each of the distinguished corners that shine before him: ‘In the stairways, the impertinent noise of the butler’s boots was heard’ (Martel 1891, 85). Glow then gives the order to ‘light every candle in the house’. After giving this order, the businessman sits in the dark and soon witnesses ‘a marvellous world that emerged from the chaos of darkness. The servant, perched on the top of his ladder, lit the porcelain candles of the great central chandelier one by one. Glow seemed, up there, a god dressed in his tuxedo and before him shone a universe of preciousness’ (Martel  1891, 85). Glow’s house becomes his sensorial armour. The interiors saturated with luxury protect him from the sombre outside, recalling the sensory experiences of Jean des Esseintes, Joris-Karl Huysmans’ eccentric aesthete in À rebours (Against the Grain, 1884). In Glow’s mansion, the theatrical composition of home comfort stages a transition from darkness to light. The apotheosis comes in the end when the businessman, dressed in his tuxedo, is looking from the heights, conjuring up a spectacular act of sorcery: things come to life from an incessant and promiscuous energy; objects excite him, seduce him, eroticise him. After the artificial lights give a new atmosphere to his house, he ‘enters a state of madness, intoxicated with joy and vanity. Glow began to wander among all the luxurious interiors, contemplating himself in each mirror, ecstatic before each painting, stopping before each piece of furniture’ (Martel 1891, 85–86). The aristocratic house becomes a queer domain. The candlelights, the gazebos, the gardens and patios, the furniture and paintings fascinate him to such an extent that he reaches a sublime joy by vainly contemplating his image in the mirror. As Aaron Betsky points out, the luxuriant interiors of the nineteenth century, especially those of the French aristocracy, exhibited all the hallmarks of queer space: ‘The walls became mirrors, the orders became rhetorical, the surfaces became sensual, the furnishings were collections of pieces gathered out of materials from all over the world […]. English observers and some French moralists decried such spaces as being decadent and effeminate’ (Betsky 1997, 52). In La Bolsa, the stock

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market, then, fabricates this decadent, fetishist regime of quasi-pornographic consumption. In this sense, the pleasure obtained from money, fictitiously reproduced via speculation, cannot be separated from the affective systems that develop through the erotic stimulation of luxury. Speculation and self-excitement are then the orgasmic sequence of a literary programme deployed by Martel. And only the irruption of an outsider can interrupt this libidinal flow, by provoking disgust. Glow witnesses on the other side of the gilded iron gate a group of people who, in the dark, stop in amazement before his mansion, which seemed to host a reception with distinguished guests. Among those individuals in the street, Glow looks at two eyes with feline characteristics, ‘that may belong to some hungry being like those who wander at night around the palaces of the rich, with daggers in their belts, a protest in their hearts, and hunger and envy as their main instigators. At this sight, Glow turns in disgust’ (Martel 1891, 87). Tracing the elite’s revulsion for the hungry and destitute implies discovering the mechanisms of an erotic withdrawal. Captivated by the opulence of his material belongings, true visual prosthesis for complacency, Glow sees his pleasure interrupted. The architectures of power in 1880s Argentina generated excitable bodies, a ‘sensual workforce’. Glow is sexually aroused before his objects: he touches them, contemplates them, penetrates them with his gaze. His enjoyment is the product of a continuous traffic of goods saturated with erotic potency. The disquieting presence from the outside incarnated in an undistinguishable feline figure comes to deactivate the fetish, disturbing the ecstasy of the speculator. Glow’s ‘queer becoming’ had been initiated through an alternative use of sexual energies. La Bolsa presents an excess of luxury and abhorrence for the vulgar presence that lurks from the outside. The spectacular ending shows Glow being devoured by a hypersexualised beast. The erotic relation of the monster and the fetishist patriarch point towards how irregular sexuality, for Martel, equals the demise of modernity, order and progress. This erotic crisis of the home called for greater attention to aristocratic perimeters. Family novels like La gran aldea (The Great Village, 1884; 1943) by Lucio V. López and personal memoirs like Buenos Aires desde setenta años atrás (Buenos Aires from Seventy Years Ago, 1881; 1944) by José Antonio Wilde, Vicente Quesada’s Memorias de un viejo (Memories of an Old Man, 1887; 1998) and Lucio V. Mansilla’s Retratos y recuerdos (Portraits and Memories, 1894; 1900) surveyed the transformation of Buenos Aires from a peripheral rural enclave into a cosmopolitan locus.

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Faced with a perceived ‘deviant threat’ in the cosmopolitan masses, it was imperative to erect a cultural wall built on moral enunciations. The idea was to reinforce an alliance between heteronormative/reproductive sex, architectural metaphors and family design. Representative of this criollo literary ‘counterattack’ on a constructed otherness is the short story ‘De cepa criolla’ (Criollo Lineage, 1919) by the politician, dandy and writer Miguel Cané (1851–1905). The text narrates the story of Carlos Narbal, a gentleman from an illustrious lineage. The Narbal family had fled Argentina during Juan Manuel de Rosas’ regime (1835–1852), becoming political refugees in Montevideo. But after Rosas’ fall in the Battle of Caseros (1852), Narbal returns to the homeland. The assets of his family are restored, and soon he travels to England to attend Oxford University, where ‘a radical transformation of his moral organism took place’ (1919, 249). For the narrator, the English milieu turns him into an honourable man as ‘the atmosphere of moral purity that an English home breathes penetrated him completely […]. The fundamental trait of his character was the unalterable depth of his affections’ (Cané 1919, 252). In other words, Narbal would be in control of his erotic force, the first sign of obtaining a differential status to return to Argentina and become the moral guardian of his class. Upon his return to Buenos Aires, Narbal becomes an influential man in local politics and an ardent protector of the women of his class. His obsession with racial purity echoes the principles of Social Darwinism, so dear to the Argentine positivist school (Nouzeilles 1994, 78).6 Narbal demands a vast and complete conception of honour based on strict gender and sexual codes and a request for ‘solidarity’ in a restricted world of class belonging. Afraid of seeing criollo women in a romantic affair with a cosmopolitan ‘guarango’ (scoundrel) ‘enriched in the shoe industry’, he expresses his terror at seeing the European immigrant ‘in a private club where he enters tripping over the furniture’ (Cané 1919, 259). For Narbal, stumbling on the furniture goes against standards of conduct, which in the Latin American context has been given the name of chusmería. As José Esteban Muñoz argues, ‘chusmería is a form of behaviour that refuses standards of bourgeois comportment. Chusmería is, to a large degree, linked to stigmatised class identity’ (1999, 182). But in the case of the European immigrant, it is not only vulgarity that deeply upsets Narbal: ‘You have no idea of the great irritation that invades me when I see a delicate, fine, chaste creature, whose mother was a friend of mine, attacked by an insolent inborn, brushed by a tailor, when I observe his

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eyes nailing bestially on the virginal body who gives herself in her innocence’ (Cané 1919, 259). I want to underline the xenophobic mechanism that operates around the ‘irritating invasion’ that Narbal suffers in his own body when observing the gaze of the immigrant on the chaste oligarchic lady. The immigrant is constructed as the carrier of an animalistic sexuality. It is in this sense that his body and sex are queered through the trope of monstrosity. As Mabel Moraña notes, ‘like the queer, the monstrous is the inappropriate and uncapturable, the “improper life” that James Campbell speaks of, which allows a biopolitical reflection on the thanatic orientation of culture’ (2017, 198). Indeed, in the nineteenth century, ‘monstrous’ sexuality was associated with animal instinct, which the psychiatrist Richard von Krafft-Ebing called ‘the never ceasing duel between animal instinct and morality’ (1939, 5). The literary production of sexual ‘beasts’ depended on the normativisation of monogamy, racial endogamy and reproductive sexuality. This system of social organisation required patriarchal subjects like Narbal, whose behaviours, values and desires were linked to family, citizenship and nationhood. In contrast, the sexual monster to which Narbal alludes fissured the Argentine civil project, transgressing criollo codes of honour due to a supposed untamed erotic drive. Following Moraña’s theory of queer monstrosity, I suggest that Cané’s story constructs the immigrant as a queered subject, that is, strange, foreign and anti-normative. In Narbal’s perspective, this ‘beastly’ sexual practice prophesied the dissolution of Argentine endogamous ties. Through the queered image of the beast, ‘De cepa criolla’ accounts for the affective, ethical and mystical pillars of Argentine respectability. In Cané’s short story, the immigrant appears as a queered monster because, as Foucault rightly points out, the monster calls into question the borders between the animal and the human: ‘its existence and form is not only a violation of the laws of society but also violation of the laws of nature. Its very existence is a breach of the law at both levels’ (2003, 55–56). In the voice of Narbal, the immigrant acquires a monstrous/queer sexuality as it reveals the terrors of fin-de-siècle hetero-reproductive reason: the immigrant is seen not only as someone who practises an excessive sexuality, but his progeny is presented as potentially degenerative for the human species. In the end, a legitimate biological and political Argentine dominance would be based on the cultivation of honour while marking, regulating and policing the private space of sexuality: ‘Let’s close the circle and watch over it’ (Cané 1919, 259), are Narbal’s concluding remarks. Closing the sexual circle implied recognising a problem of internal security. It meant

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regulating the spatial diagrams of sex and good taste. But the biopolitical and aesthetic fortress that Cané builds in this fable of criollo refinement would be demolished in En la sangre (In the Blood, 1887) by Eugenio Cambaceres. In this novel, the ‘temple’ of the aristocracy, the Colón Theatre, is defiled, as Genaro Piazza, the son of an Italian immigrant, breaches the patrician circle by sexually assaulting Máxima, the criollo virgin, in one of the theatre’s boxes. Eugenio Cambaceres (1843–1888) has been the object of numerous studies and controversies. Most critics have identified him as one of the definitive novelists of the canon of Spanish-American naturalism (Jitrik 1968; Viñas 1975; Nouzeilles 2000; Schlickers 2003; Laera 2004). In his 1885 novel Sin rumbo (Aimless), the depiction of a man of the landed oligarchy, who engages in his estancia in interracial sex with a mestiza, caused a scandal. For contemporary critics, Cambaceres was ‘an outlaw that disrespected all established ideas and insulted every virtue’ (García Merou 1886, 73–74). Sin rumbo argued that moral decay corroded Cambaceres’ inner circle. But in En la sangre, as Alejandra Laera argues, Cambaceres ‘recomposes class alliances, distances himself from his object and builds a closed and compact image of national identity (in which now the immigrant, configured as an invader, is installed on the margins)’ (2000, 146). En la sangre is the story of Genaro Piazza, the son of Neapolitan immigrants. Through an education promoted by his mother, he becomes a respected member of society, although, as the novel’s title indicates, he carries in his blood the signs of an allegedly ‘degenerate’ race, evidence of Cambaceres’ adherence to biological determinism. Piazza’s biggest ambition is economic success at all costs. He manages to pass the school exams by cheating. He longs for admission to the Club del Progreso, an aristocratic gentlemen’s club founded in 1852, whose distinguished members included aristocrats, politicians, military and presidents, such as Justo José de Urquiza (1801–1870), Domingo Faustino Sarmiento (1811–1888), Bartolomé Mitre (1821–1906) and Julio Argentino Roca (1843–1914). Piazza is indeed Carlos Narbal’s worst nightmare: he seduces Máxima, the daughter of a renowned family, and, after a persistent courtship, during the Carnival festivities, he takes her away from her mother to a secluded box in the Colón Theater where he rapes her. Máxima soon bears Piazza’s child. They get married to avoid defamation. Máxima’s father dies. Piazza steals her inheritance and invests it in land speculation, which leads the family to ruin.

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The novel is written under the schema of degenerative heredity, a discursive machine that Michel Foucault called a new form of racism: ‘This neoracism as the internal means of defense of a society against its abnormal individuals, is the child of psychiatry [which…] essentially functions as social defense or, to adopt the terms of the nineteenth century, which functions as a hunt for “degenerates”’ (2003, 317). En la sangre orchestrated these psychiatric phantasies by staging what Foucault defined as ‘the numberless family of perverts who were on friendly terms with delinquents and akin to madmen. In the course of the century, they successively bore the stamp of “moral folly”, “genital neurosis”, “aberration of the genetic instinct”, “degenerescence”, or “physical imbalance”’ (1978, 40). Following this argument, Piazza’s crime against Máxima endangers her future offspring. His paternity results from violating Maxima’s body, which establishes a class alliance through forced marriage. Piazza’s ‘aberrant seed’, linked to promiscuous sexuality and a degenerative future, resonates with Lee Edelman’s theory of sinthomosexuality. Edelman uses this neologism to define queerness as a category of anti-sociality. Sinthomosexuals are understood as living examples of the elimination of collective projects: ‘[...] sinthomosexuals, like the death drive they are made to represent—and made to represent insofar as the death drive both evades and undoes representation—endanger the fantasy of survival by endangering the survival of love’s fantasy, insisting instead on the machine-­ like working of the partial, dehumanising drives and offering a constant access to their surplus of jouissance’ (2004, 74). Following Edelman’s proposal, I want to note that En la sangre ensures that Piazza’s drive to destroy the reproductive futures of the Argentine elite is activated primordially by his constructed deviant sexuality. But, as in ‘De cepa criolla’, besides the predatory identity invested in the Europeans by Cané and Cambaceres, it is also the outsider’s vulgarity which serves as a warning against the collapse of the architectures of moral defence. The deflowering of the criollo virgin has taken place in the spiritual temple of high culture. The Colón Theatre was the pride of the fin-­ de-­siècle Argentine aristocracy. As a chronicler of the time notes, in 1887, the theatre was sold to the National Government by the municipality of Buenos Aires and underwent major renovations in order to become ‘an architectural monument representative of the grandeur of Buenos Aires’ (Galarce 1887, VI). In En la sangre, such predominance is dishonoured by a sexual crime and a lack of sophistication in the arts of courtship. Piazza takes Máxima to the box and from there he dispatches himself in

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insults against the female audience: ‘These women, my God. So nasty. Even dirty!’ (Cambaceres 1887, 194). And then the narrator highlights how Piazza’s presence defiles an architecture of splendour: ‘The air disturbed the atmosphere; it seized the senses; it had an acrid smell of sweat and patchouli. The air could cause disgust or desire, as some delicious foods that provoke repugnance or incitement to eat’ (Cambaceres 1887, 194). And then, the unthinkable: —What?... no!’— she stammered in amazement. —‘Shut up, if they hear you, if they see us, a scandal will break out!’— The elastics creaked, there was a dull and confusing rumble, a muffled noise of struggle, then silence. —‘You’re infamous, you’re miserable!’— Maxima exclaimed, standing in the middle of the box, repairing the disorder in her dress, lifting her mask from the ground. Her breath was laboured, her voice moved, her hands trembled. (Cambaceres 1887, 195) David Viñas has argued that rape was a categorical procedure in the politicisation of Argentine nineteenth-century letters, from the novel Amalia (1851) by José Mármol to Esteban Echeverría’s short story ‘El matadero’ (The Slaughter Yard, 1944), published posthumously in 1871. For the Argentine Romantic and realist traditions, sexual violence underlined the barbarity of racial others: gauchos, indigenous peoples and gringos (white Europeans). Enacting the rape scene, for Viñas, has been used as the conclusive strategy of an aristocratic counter-defence against otherness (1975, 70). And yet, if in the Argentine Romantic project rape occurs in the slaughterhouses against male political opponents and in the indigenous pampas against white captive women, in the literature of the 1880s there is an insistence on protecting urban spaces because danger is perceived as much closer to home. That Máxima loses her virginity, a victim of rape in the Colón Theatre, implies a regression. It is a terrifying destiny both for the republic and for a literary system of representation of the national woman. Ann J. Cahill notes that ‘the threat of rape, then, is a constitutive and sustained moment in the production of the feminine body’ (2010, 56). In this sense, the crime against Máxima entails destroying her reduced space of sentimental courtship: the Club, the theatre, the mansions of the patriciate. Piazza disturbs the erotic complex of the aristocratic city. Constructing the Italian as a sexual predator required from Cambaceres not only to display

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xenophobia in his literary project but also to represent Piazza within the spectrum of ‘deviant populations’ of the nineteenth century. Cambaceres made his protagonist commit the abominable transgression by establishing a direct kinship with the larger ‘family of perverts’ (Foucault 1978, 40) of the fin de siècle: the homosexual, the hysteric, the alcoholic, the fetishist. Here lies Piazza’s constructed deviance, a racialised and sexual monstrosity that incited horror from the Argentine elite upon seeing their biopolitical defences demolished by a parvenu. In Argentine Intimacies (2019), Joseph M.  Pierce argues that ‘the stakes for maintaining the architecture of patriarchal normativity were high at the turn of the century in Latin America, when the concept of family became a battleground for the consolidation of the discourses, institutions and technologies that shaped modern culture’ (2019, 4). I would add that the modernisation of Argentine literature depended on the delineation of an architecture of sexual suspicion. The violation of female bodies and the invasion of private space were insistent motifs that shaped aristocratic paranoia. In Argentina, naturalism à la Zola was used as a containment wall against a perceived transatlantic degeneracy. It was a great literary fortress seeking to isolate criollo virtue from cosmopolitan vice. But the symbolic walls of naturalist literature, while erected as a warning against European ‘perversion’, were always permeable. There would be no successful therapy of containment. On the contrary, a persistent movement of queer spectacles intensified the awareness of a dispute over public space that saturated representations of the city.



Feathers in the Boulevards: The Streets as Drag Space

One of the paramount spectacles of queer desire in turn-of-the-century Buenos Aires was dramatised in the cruising that took place in the city boulevards. Fictions about non-conforming sexual communities selected architectural and urban topoi to define the roads of illicit pleasures: public bathrooms, carriages, hotels and brothels provided a mise en scène for queer drama. The expansion of this ‘mala semilla’ (bad seed), as Sylvia Molloy calls the patrician fear of the loss of nationality, was construed as part of the social organism that required prevention or eradication measures (2012, 140).

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The streets of Buenos Aires witnessed the recurrence of clandestine desires that gave the urban layout a homoerotic/trans* design.7 Erotic dissidence occurred in the dark alleys as well as in the distinguished boulevards, the cafes and private clubs. The discreet interiors of the aristocracy required heteronormative rites of courtship. These were performed by a social class that, simultaneously, repressed their most hidden passions. If decorum and gallantry reigned in official places of power, occasional non-­ normative pleasures were sought in the streets by the same members of the elite. Queer cruising had its well-known locations, which were so well known that they were depicted and classified in the press. In 1912, the newly released modernist magazine Fray Mocho published an article by the novelist and reporter Juan José de Soiza Reilly (1880–1959), entitled ‘Buenos Aires tenebroso: ladrones vestidos de mujer’ (Gothic Buenos Aires: Thieves Dressed like Women, 1912). The article responded to a recognisable format for the reading public eager for stories about gauchos fallen into disgrace, or about small urban outlaws, known as lunfardos.8 What makes this chronicle of particular interest for queer scholarship is the literary and photographic visibility that was given to a homosexual/trans* subculture that until then had gained fame almost exclusively in medical journals, such as the Archivos de Psiquiatría y Criminología (1902–1913), which was read by medical and legal experts, or in pamphlets known for their pornographic language.9 Arguably, de  Soiza Reilly’s article is the first modern publication in turn-of-the-­ century Buenos Aires with such an abundant visual record of the existence of a transvestite/homosexual collective.10 Its primary purpose was to stigmatise the peripheral genders and sexualities of the city. And yet, it is possible to account for certain gestural rites, eroticised spaces and lovemaking transactions among erotic dissidents who are yet to create their own literary tradition in the course of the twentieth century.11 By 1912, their visibility in the cultural sphere depended almost exclusively on the medical imagination that shaped de Soiza Reilly’s thinking. The homoerotic encounter told in this crime story released the energies contained in the closets of the rural estancias (ranches) and the urban palaces. The carriage can be seen as the sensual space par excellence, a moving interior that put into operation a surprising economy of erotic gratification and that would dissolve, at least momentarily, the restrictions of heteronormative life. ‘Buenos Aires tenebroso’ narrates the fortuitous encounter of de  Soiza Reilly with a former schoolmate, now an ex-convict, who reveals the secrets learned in prison about the whereabouts of an erotic brotherhood that exploits the credulity of Argentine gentlemen. He

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characterises these subjects as ‘iniciados y estetas’ (professional thieves with an aesthetic sense of crime), since by using an effeminate appearance that they meticulously constructed, ‘young boys with beautiful features walked through the dark streets’ in search of wealthy clients (1912, 65). A distribution of queer, villainous cartographies is then recorded. With a stubborn frequency, the ‘Evas hombrunas’ (manly Eves) created public domains where the virtue of the bourgeois home, the solemnity of the public buildings and the formality of the offices and banks were diluted  (1912, 65). The maricas generated counter-sexual spaces and alter-economies of the flesh. The procedure operated by ‘falsas mujeres’ (false women), according to the narrator, involved pretending to be lost in the city, requesting a lift home: ‘I’m lost, sir. You, who seem like such a kind and distinguished gentleman, why don’t you come with me? I’m scared. I’m a widow’ (1912, 65). Here is the mischievous queer script that promised a moment of satisfaction (see Fig. 4.1). But dissident pleasures required a risk, an instant

Fig. 4.1  Queer cruising. The caption reads: ‘Julio Giménez (the man in the circle) known with the name “The Breeze of Spring”, seducing a visitor in the city dressed in female attire’

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of vulnerability shared between the homosexual bourgeois who knew the secret code and the queer sex workers who faced arrest. ‘In the depths of a gentleman hides a scoundrel’, de Soiza Reilly claims, suggesting a sharp suspicion of the supposed naivety of the gentleman who co-starred in this queer flânerie. More than 3000 queer sex workers paraded the streets of Buenos Aires, according to the statistics provided by the article (de Soiza Reilly 1912, 65). However, de Soiza Reilly would refuse to account for the sexual transaction. Calling the trans*/homosexual community ‘thieves in disguise’ was part of a wider plan to throw into the closet the very existence of an erotic minority. Homosexuality was diluted into a wider network of criminality (Salessi 1995, 391). In an examination of the reality of queer urban space in late nineteenth-­ century Buenos Aires, the stellar figure of la Princesa de Borbón (the Princess of Bourbon), a famous trans* person, stands out. She had arrived in Buenos Aires from Spain around 1899. By 1912, she was known to have twenty-two arrests for délits de moeurs, that is, gross indecency. The urban legend said that she fell in love with a young man from the Chilean aristocracy, who later committed suicide after they broke up. Like other trans* persons of the time, she cruised the streets of Buenos Aires, where she exhibited her extravagance and staged a small and ephemeral theatre of gendered eccentricities.12 La Bella Otero, another famous travesti of the time, who featured in the medical works of Francisco de Veyga, also transformed the ceremonial silhouettes of the city. She practised one of the trades most detested by intellectuals of the time: fortune telling. According to de Soiza Reilly, la Bella Otero belonged to what an anonymous writer in another article called ‘la plaga de las adivinas’ (the plague of fortune tellers): With magic powders, the desired person falls in love; illnesses declared incurable by doctors are cured; infallible remedies are available to prevent hair loss; tremendous luck is given in gambling; one speaks with the spirits. Happiness is guaranteed. And such charlatanism is exercised with impunity, under the eyes of the authorities, exploiting the supine ignorance of the foolish, more numerous in this country than might be expected. (Anon. 1920)

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La Bella Otero was a trans* immigrant to Argentina, born in Madrid in 1880. Before practising sex work in Buenos Aires, she had been employed as a maid (Veyga 1903, 494). Like many trans* figures of the fin de siècle, she took the name from the famous actress and courtesan Agustina del Carmen Otero Iglesias (1868–1965), symbol of the Parisian Belle Époque who gave herself the name La Bella Otero when she began her career in France. Those in charge of public health were concerned that these extravagant groups would dispute with medical experts the official knowledge about sex. Furthermore, in the mind of the cultural coalition of male nation-­ builders, travestis organised societies for the exploitation of bourgeois innocence. Travestis, sex workers, and fortune-tellers created counter-­ spaces and counter-knowledges of the body. Through their ‘vulgar parades’, they eroticised the merely commercial and civil territories of the city. Indeed, as Javier Guerrero argues, vulgarity became a gesture of political intervention performed by new cultural subjectivities in the modern city (2017, 54). Far from embodying a family fiction of national belonging, inspired by the aristocratic model, and now imitated by the emerging middle classes, the queer fraternities carried an aesthetic mark that detracted from heroic, reproductive masculinity: ‘Each one of them loves music, flowers, sewing, poetry. They all play the piano. They live off others. And when they fall into the hands of the police, they cry like little girls’, underlines de Soiza Reilly (1912, 66). This queer posing, a mixture of parody and exhibitionism, aimed at resignifying the taste of the bourgeoisie, which caused in patrician circles a persistent terror of seeing the literary buildings of compulsive heterosexuality destroyed. Cruising in turn-of-the-century Buenos Aires had its specific name: ‘plumear’ (feathering), a novel mix of pickpocket theft and queer seduction dramatised in the prestigious Avenida de Mayo. Feathering, in addition to constituting a conclusive sign of glamour and belonging, also became a survival technique, a small criminal ritual that combined the theft of wallets with the drag parade. De Soiza Reilly says: ‘Sometimes an assistant, the accomplice, goes behind to intervene or repel any aggression. Bella Otero had her nose cut open. The accomplice collaborates in the blackmail. The victims are usually men from outside the city. They choose hacendados (ranchers)’ (1912, 67). The queer/travesti ‘invasion’ had been initiated: ‘There are several of them who, elegantly dressed, rob in the trains. They sit in a car, choosing any rancher as a fool’ (1912, 67). And thus, the perfect melodrama of plebeian seduction is played out: the

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rancher estanciero, bearer of innocence and virtue, falls prey to the merchants of infamy. Once more, the queer/travesti invasion is enacted in the cultural repertoire of turn-of-the-century Argentina. Following Daniel Link’s theory of crime fiction in El juego silencioso de los cautos (The Silent Game of the Cautious, 2003), I am interested in underlining how the drag parades intersected with the modest misdeed of rummaging through careless pockets. Because the criminal act, according to Link, arises from ‘a conflict almost always told from the perspective of passion and desire, even in the “hardest” cases of the genre: [crime] is always about secrets, terrors, unspoken anguish, indescribably tolerated infamies, absurd and fanciful projects’ (Link 2003, 4). In fact, for de Soiza Reilly, the ‘tolerated infamy’ was part of the race for progress: ‘How has such a criminal industry been able to prosper in Buenos Aires? The fault lies with progress that brings us both mud and gold’ (1912, 67). It is assumed, then, that the travesti community, although associated with a dirty substance, was a constitutive and visible part of Argentine modernity. The streets of Buenos Aires were ‘dragged’ by a group of dissidents that wore make-up, skirts, hats, coats and gloves: a remarkable walking sculpture that exhibited with pride a vulgar elegance. According to Paul B. Preciado, the domain of drag is not limited to the act of cross-dressing the body, but also cross-dresses territories: it creates ‘performative spaces’ (2017, 13). Drawing from the work of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Preciado argues that drag is the name of the theatrical performance of gender. It is a ‘spatial dimension’ that refers both to the scenario that is installed and to the same norms that define it as a perverse place (2017, 13). Hence, de Soiza Reilly will try to dismantle this great platform of queer subjectivation. The fin-de-siècle queer collectives required the street and their ‘evil outfits’ to gain visibility. They could not have performed their parade without the cosmetic devices that gave them material existence. At the cost of police harassment, invasive psychiatric treatments in the asylum, and jail, the queer spectacle of the turn of the century disputed the uses of public space and its heteronormative aesthetic futures. Their ‘perverse’ parades deployed provocative tactics that expanded the narrow architectural and erotic limits of the phallocentric city.

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A Spectacular Containment

The wider spectrum of nineteenth-century degeneration theories was reinterpreted in the queered representations of Buenos Aires as the locus of a spatial conflict over the futures of sex. In this unstable yet productive alliance between medical discourse, naturalist literature and architecture, queerness permeated the work of Julián Martel, Miguel Cané, Eugenio Cambaceres and Juan José de Soiza Reilly. The queer ecosystem deployed in these literary works was thought to modify dominant systems of gender and sexual stratification. Because, as Gayle Rubin argues, ‘modern Western societies appraise sex acts according to a hierarchical system of sexual value. Marital, reproductive heterosexuals are alone at the top of the erotic pyramid’ (2012, 149). In this sense, it is my contention that in order to solidify a heteronormative and endogamic mapping of the city, it was necessary to erect an impenetrable fortress to contain the movement of subjects thought to embody dangerous desires. The intellectual elites imagined the aristocratic architectures of the Argentine turn of the century as territory invaded by a queer, anti-future energy. This force, saturated with dissident sexuality, could disfigure the rigid spatial economy of gender and race. The spaces of influence were written as dramatic building complexes. It was terrifying for the elite to imagine a future where ‘erotic outsiders’ took over their architectures of prestige and good taste. The aristocratic house, the Club, the theatre and the boulevards became spectacular buildings of sexual containment. Ballrooms, smoking rooms, bedrooms, theatre boxes and carriages were turned into sexual theatres seemingly attacked by a queer performance: the sinister gaze that interrupts the orgasmic power of the speculator in La Bolsa, the uncontrollable libido of the European immigrant in ‘De cepa criolla’ and En la sangre, and the ‘criminal outfits’ of queer sex workers in ‘Buenos Aires tenebroso’. Aristocratic space was fictionalised as besieged territory. The literary counterattack on ‘vulgarity’ and ‘deviance’ served to sustain a regime of good manners and optimal Argentine offspring. The counterattack involved an act of recognition of erotic dissidents, their sets, and their ‘perverse’ choreographies. In the twentieth century, the ‘invasion narrative’ would have a complex afterlife. The notion of ‘threat’ against national homogeneity would be reiterated in the discourses of defence against degeneration in various literary experiments, ranging from modernista writings to the so-called Latin American boom. If in the nineteenth century gauchos, indigenous peoples,

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Jews and Mediterranean immigrants appeared as political dissidents against high society, in the twentieth century anarchists, communists and homosexuals would be represented as the new menace (Giorgi 2004). This collective would lead the dispute against discursive structures that produced the pillars of an orthodox national identity: Catholicism, militarism, conservatism, whiteness and reproductive heteronormativity.

Notes 1. This research was supported by a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada postdoctoral award and a research assistantship grant from the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Toronto. My special thanks to Arunima Bhattacharya, Richard Hibbitt and Laura Scuriatti for their insightful comments and suggestions on the first drafts of this chapter. Susan Antebi, Bob Davidson, Alejandra Uslenghi, Nathalie Bouzaglo, Daniel Balderston and Patricio Simonetto have also provided invaluable feedback to improve this work. Many thanks to my research assistant Christina Wing Gi Tse for her vital contribution to this project. For a recent study of how turn-of-the-century Latin American intellectuals engaged with the world dynamics of economic modernisation, see Beckman (2013). 2. I use the term ‘criollo’ to designate the hegemonic groups that inherited colonial power. Ute Seydel develops the historical conditions for the consolidation of this identity: ‘The group that presented itself in Latin America and the Caribbean as hegemonic was that of the criollos. Although mestizos and indigenous peoples also participated in the first independence movement in the viceroyalty of New Spain, which was led by the priest Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla, the social group that finally managed to achieve independence was that of the criollos led by Agustín de Iturbide; that is, both in the New Spanish viceroyalty and in the other Spanish and Portuguese colonies in Latin America and the Caribbean, the criollos managed to articulate a political project of self-determination before the colonial authorities. Thus, they put an end to the colonial regime and aspired to occupy the positions previously occupied by the peninsulars’ (2009, 191). All translations from Spanish into English are mine, unless otherwise indicated. 3. Patricio Simonetto (2017) has studied the making of homosexual space in the second half of the twentieth century in Argentina (1950–1983). He examined, among other topics, the modes of relationality of homosexual subcultures with other minority groups, resistance practices against police control and the tactics of homosexual visibility.

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4. In 1910, the literary critic and politician Roberto Giusti, born in Italy in 1887 and resident of Buenos Aires from 1895 until his death in 1978, published an article in the Argentine journal Nosotros (Us) making a case against the racism of the ‘criollo’ nationalist Congressmen, who declared that ‘los elementos de corrupción y desorden son aquí todos extranjeros’ (the elements of corruption and disorder here are all foreign) (cited in Viñas 1996, 61). 5. For a queer history of architecture, see Betsky (1997) and Preciado (2017); for a study of the persecution of ‘deviant populations’, see ‘Thinking Sex’ in Rubin (2012). 6. Nouzeilles notes that Argentine positivist doctors and intellectuals ‘had access, in the original language, to the most popular heredity theorists in Europe and in France in particular; for example, Darwin, Spencer, Lucas, Morel, Ribot, Le Bon, Moreau de Tours, Letourneau, Griesinger, etc’ (1994, 78). 7. In LGBTQ studies, the use of the term ‘trans*’ indicates a set of identifications, knowledges and sexo-gender-dissident practices that define trans* as a sign of new political imaginaries and bodies historically disputed in the sciences of the state. The use of the asterisk is borrowed from the inaugural edition of the Transgender Studies Quarterly, in which Avery Tompkins described the role of the asterisk in opening the terms ‘transgender’ and ‘trans’ to a greater range of meanings (2004, 26). The trans* thus refers to an unstable condition of bodily and semiotic boundaries and to a range of indeterminate potentials that blur the established binaries for a hetero-­ colonial reason. 8. For a study of gaucho-themed pulp fiction publications, see Laera (2004) and Adamovsky (2019). 9. ‘Plebeian sexualities’, as Pablo Ben calls non-normative sexual practices, had their place in various publications for mass consumption that can be accessed in the Ibero-American Institute of Berlin. However, it is necessary to clarify that allusions to homosexuality also circulated orally among the working classes. See Ben (2007). 10. ‘Transvestite’ is a term coined by the German sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld. He used it in 1910 to describe ‘the erotic urge for disguise’. This is how he understood the motivation that led some people to wear clothes generally associated with a different gender than the one assigned to them at birth. For Hirschfeld, ‘transvestites’ were ‘sexual intermediaries’, including homosexuals and hermaphrodites. According to Susan Stryker, initially this term was used in much the same way as the identity category ‘transgender’ is used today: ‘to convey the sense of a wide range of gendervariant identities and behaviors’ (2008, 16).

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11. The existence of a homosexual/gay literary tradition of self-­representation and self-discovery in Latin American literature begins to take shape later in the twentieth century, starting in the 1960s and gaining cultural visibility in the 1980s. For an in-depth analysis of the trajectory of gay writing in the region, see Balderston (2006). 12. The police record identified La Princesa de Borbón as Luis Fernández, the name adjudicated to her at birth. It is with this masculine name that she appears in Soiza Reilly’s article. In this chapter, I use the feminine pronoun because that is the name that la Princesa chose to affirm her non-normative gender and sexual identity. La Princesa surprises for her ability to capture the clinical and cultural imagination of the turn of the century. She appears in the gallery of ‘infamous figures’ in criminology studies (Veyga 1903) as well as in police chronicles (Soiza Reilly 1912). In 1914, her name was brought to the theatre by José González Castillo in his play Los invertidos.

Works Cited Anon. 1920. La plaga de las adivinas. Mundo argentino 10 (486). Adamovsky, Ezequiel. 2019. El gaucho indómito: de Martín Fierro a Perón, el emblema imposible de una nación desgarrada. Buenos Aires: Siglo XXI. Argerich, Antonio. 1884. ¿Inocentes o culpables?. Buenos Aires: Imprenta del Courrier de la Plata. Balderston, Daniel. 2006. Los caminos del afecto: la invención de una tradición literaria queer en América Latina. Revista de Crítica Literaria Latinoamericana 32 (63/64): 117–130. Beckman, Ericka. 2013. Fiction and Fictitious Capital in Julián Martel’s La Bolsa. Hispanic Review 81 (1): 17–39. Ben, Pablo. 2007. Plebeian Masculinity and Sexual Comedy in Buenos Aires, 1880-1930. Journal of the History of Sexuality 16 (3): 436–58. Betsky, Aaron. 1997. Queer Space: Architecture and Same-Sex Desire. New York: William Morrow. Biagini, Hugo E. 1995. La generación del 80: cultura y política. Buenos Aires: Losada. Botana, Natalio. 1977. El orden conservador: la política argentina entre 1880 y 1916. Buenos Aires: Sudamericana. Cahill, Ann J. 2010. Foucault, Rape, and the Construction of the Feminine Body. In Foucault and Law, ed. Peter Fitzpatrick and Tom D.  Campbell, 235-56. Ashgate: Farnham. Cambaceres, Eugenio. 1887. En la sangre. Buenos Aires: Sudamérica. Cambaceres, Eugenio. 1944 [1885]. Sin rumbo. Buenos Aires: Jackson. Cané, Miguel. 1919. De cepa criolla. In Prosa ligera. Buenos Aires: Casa Vaccaro.

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Cornblit, Oscar E., Ezequiel Gallo and Alfredo O’Connell. 1962. La Generación del 80 y su proyecto: antecedente y consecuencias. Desarrollo Económico 1 (4): 5–46. Domínguez Ruvalcaba, Héctor. 2016. Translating the Queer: Body Politics and Transnational Conversations. London: Zed Books. Echeverría, Esteban. 1944. El matadero. Santiago de Chile: Cruz del Sur. Edelman, Lee. 2004. No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Elcovich, Hernán Gustavo and Pablo Rodríguez Sturla. 2014. Medicina y criminología. La sala de observación de alienados. In VI congreso internacional de investigación y práctica profesional en psicología, 32-35. Buenos Aires: Universidad de Buenos Aires. Foucault, Michel. 2003. Abnormal: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1974-1975, ed. Arnold I. Davidson and trans. Graham Burchell. London: Picador. Foucault, Michel. 1978. The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Pantheon Books. Galarce, A. 1887. Bosquejo de Buenos Aires. Buenos Aires: Stiller & Laass. García Merou, Martín. 1886. Libros y autores. Buenos Aires: Félix Lajouane. García, Susana Noemí and Jorge Panesi. 1996. Introducción. En la sangre de Eugenio Cambaceres. Buenos Aires: Colihue. Giorgi, Gabriel. 2004. Sueños de exterminio: homosexualidad y representación en la literatura argentina contemporánea. Rosario: Beatriz Viterbo Editora. Guerrero, Javier. 2017. Continente vulgar: Salvador Novo en Hollywood. Revista de Estudios Hispánicos 51 (1): 11–45. Halaburda, Carlos Gustavo. 2021. Lunfardos: Queerness, Social Prophylaxis, and the Futures of Reproduction in Fin-de-Siècle Argentine Dramaturgy. Latin American Theatre Review 54 (2): 119–143. Halberstam, Jack. 1995. Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Jitrik, Noé. 1968. El 80 y su mundo. Buenos Aires: Jorge Álvarez. Krafft-Ebing, Richard von. Psychopathia Sexualis: a Medico-Forensic Study. London: William Heinemann, 1939. Laera, Alejandra. 2000. Sin ‘olor a pueblo’: la polémica sobre el naturalismo en la literatura Argentina. Revista Iberoamericana 66 (190): 139–46. Laera, Alejandra. 2004. El tiempo vacío de la ficción: las novelas argentinas de Eduardo Gutiérrez y Eugenio Cambaceres. Buenos Aires: Fondo de Cultura Económica. Lewis, Colin M. 1983. British Railways in Argentina 1857-1914: A Case Study of Foreign Investment. London: Athlone Press. Link, Daniel. 2003. El juego silencioso de los cautos. In El juego de los cautos: literatura policial, de Edgar A. Poe a P. D. James, 9-17. Buenos Aires: La Marca. López, Lucio Vicente. 1943. La gran aldea. Buenos Aires: Editorial Tor.

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Ludmer, Josefina. 1999. El cuerpo del delito: un manual. Buenos Aires: Perfil. Mansilla, Lucio V. 1900. Retratos y recuerdos. Buenos Aires: W. M. Jackson. Mármol, José. 2001. Amalia. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Martel, Julián. 1891. La Bolsa. Buenos Aires: Imprenta de La Nación. Molloy, Sylvia. 2012. Poses de fin de siglo: desbordes del género en la modernidad. Buenos Aires: Eterna Cadencia. Moraña, Mabel. 2017. El monstruo como máquina de guerra. Madrid: Iberoamericana Vervuert. Muñoz, José Esteban. 1999. Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Nouzeilles, Gabriela. 2000. Ficciones somáticas: naturalismo, nacionalismo y políticas médicas del cuerpo (Argentina 1880-1910). Rosario: Beatriz Viterbo. Nouzeilles, Gabriela. 1994. El romance patológico: naturalismo, medicina y nacionalismo en Argentina (1880-1910). PhD thesis. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan. Podestá, Manuel. 1889. Irresponsable. Buenos Aires: Imprenta de La Tribuna Nacional. Pierce, Joseph M. 2019. Argentine Intimacies: Queer Kinship in an Age of Splendor, 1890-1910. New York: State University of New York Press. Preciado, Paul B. 2017. Cartografías queer: el flâneur perverso, la lesbiana topofóbica y la puta multicartográfica, o como hacer una cartografía “zorra” con Annie Sprinkle. Open Source. https://archive.org/details/144406396Be atrizPreciadoCartografiasQueer. Quesada, Vicente. 1998. Memorias de un viejo. Buenos Aires: Ediciones Ciudad Argentina. Rubin, Gayle. 2012. Deviations: A Gayle Rubin Reader. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Salessi, Jorge. 1995. Médicos maleantes y maricas: higiene, criminología y homosexualidad en la construcción de la nación Argentina (Buenos Aires, 1871-1914). Rosario: Beatriz Viterbo. Sarlo, Beatriz. 2007. Escritos sobre literatura argentina, ed. Sylvia Saítta. Buenos Aires: Siglo Veintiuno Editores. Schlickers, Sabine. 2003. El lado oscuro de la modernización: estudios sobre la novela naturalista hispanoamericana. Madrid: Iberoamericana Vervuert. Seydel, Ute. 2009. Nación. In Diccionario de estudios culturales latinoamericanos, ed. Mónica Szurmuk and Robert McKee Irwin, 189-96. Mexico City: Siglo XXI, Instituto Mora. Simonetto, Patricio. 2017. Fronteras del deseo: homosexualidad, sociabilidad y afecto en la ciudadde Buenos Aires (1950-1983). Cadernos Pagu 49, online: https://www.scielo.br/j/cpa/a/V6stBmQcfTW6r5rJpQTpThk/?lang=es. De Soiza Reilly, Juan José. 1912. Buenos Aires tenebroso: ladrones vestidos de mujer. Fray Mocho 1 (6): 65-67.

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Stryker, Susan. 2008. Transgender History. New York: Seal Press. Tompkins, Avery. 2004. Asterisk. Transgender Studies Quarterly 1 (1-2): 26–27. Veyga, Francisco. 1903. La inversión sexual adquirida. Archivos de Psiquiatría y Criminología, 492-96. Viñas, David. 1983. Anarquistas en América Latina. Buenos Aires: Katún. Viñas, David. 1975. Apogeo de la oligarquía. Buenos Aires: Ediciones Siglo Veinte. Viñas, David. 2003. Indios, ejército y frontera. Buenos Aires: Santiago Arcos. Viñas, David. 1996. Literatura argentina y política. Buenos Aires: Santiago Arcos. Wilde, José Antonio. 1944. Buenos Aires desde setenta años atrás. Buenos Aires: Espasa-Calpe. Yarfitz, Mir. 2019. Impure Migration: Jews and Sex Work in Golden Age Argentina. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.

PART II

Redefining Peripheries

CHAPTER 5

Bilingual Authors, Multilingual Printing Presses and ‘Informal Capital’: Pest-Buda in the Early Nineteenth Century Zsuzsanna Varga

Pest-Buda rarely gains a place in discussions of early European multiculturalism, nineteenth-century urban life or venues of literary creativity. However, the twin cities of Pest-Buda, as they were called before their official unification as Budapest in 1873, were multiethnic and multilingual in character, accommodating literary and cultural productivity not only in Hungarian, but also in Serbian, Slovak, German, Romanian and Latin, in addition to printing and publishing work in other languages. This chapter considers the changes in literary production in Pest–Buda from 1790 to the 1830s, arguing that the twin cities exemplify what Neubauer and Cornis-Pope call ‘literary nodes’, or ‘points of contact or interfaces’, whose perspectives include cities and regions, literary institutions and figures (D’haen 2017, 112). Pest-Buda was indeed a significant regional literary node around 1800: rather than a home to great national literary

Z. Varga (*) University of Glasgow, Glasgow, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 A. Bhattacharya et al. (eds.), Literary Capitals in the Long Nineteenth Century, Literary Urban Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-13060-1_5

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figures, it was the seat of those nascent cultural institutions that acted as arbiters of culture and taste and as makers or breakers of literary careers. It was these publishing houses, literary periodicals and national theatres which shaped and formed national readerships and audiences in the region. Pest-Buda did not become a place of residence for prominent literati until the 1820s: Ferenc Kazinczy (1759–1831), responsible for launching and masterminding the Hungarian language renewal movement, ran his movement by an extensive correspondence from his distant country estate and only occasionally visited the twin cities (Kósa 1937, 158), as did other prominent poets such as the neoclassical Dániel Berzsenyi (1776–1836). As a result, cultural activity was able to develop organically with relatively little interference and intervention from centres of literary power, be they the imperial Habsburg capital of Vienna or influential figures such as Kazinczy and others. In this city, it was the concentration of individual talent and national and transnational institutions – publishing houses, theatres and periodicals – that offered support for cultural production in different languages for the different linguistic and ethnic groups, thus creating a culturally hybrid capital that accommodated and helped to release creative talent. One of the reasons for the relative absence of detailed discussions concerning the multilingualism of cultural production in Pest-Buda in literary histories is what John Neubauer calls the ‘narrowing scope of Hungarian literary histories’ (2004, 384–385), namely the move from the first literary histories that included ‘all kinds of discourses written in all kinds of languages’ to histories that focused on ‘literature proper, written in the Hungarian language’ (2004, 384). In the first rudimentary Hungarian literary history, Pál Wallaszky’s Conspectus (1785), which includes generically different texts written in the territory of Hungary in any language, ‘Hungarian’ was understood topographically, and the slow narrowing of the definition happened in the nineteenth century as it increasingly came to mean works written in the Hungarian language either with ‘national content’, or ‘artistic qualities’ (Neubauer 2004, 384).1 This perspective has remained the mainstream mode of writing literary history and, as Neubauer suggests, has led to the omission of important authors and periods. There might be other reasons for shying away from more complex interrogations: the desire to provide a clear linear development of national literatures based on current political boundaries, and the fact that intellectuals, literary actors and authors around 1800 were naturally polyglot, sharing what Pieter Judson has called an ‘informal multilingual tradition’

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(2016, 80). Both Latin and German—which practically all learnt in secondary education and at home—were effortlessly used in writing, personal correspondence and educated conversation. Writers growing up in multiethnic areas were also literate in other languages, although literary production in more than one language was unusual. For modern scholars, the multiplicity of languages in a writer’s oeuvre, personal writings and correspondence presents an almost insurmountable task, though scholarship, such as József Demmel’s work on Slovak cultural production, is now beginning to explore the ways in which Pest-Buda fostered the work of many writers in their contribution to the European debate on national origins and to the dynamics that enabled the cultural production of the twin cities. This chapter addresses the cultural capital of Pest-Buda through an analysis of its printing presses, theatres, journals, salons and other literary groups. It culminates in a consideration of the bilingual poet, translator and critic Mihály Vitkovics (1778–1829), who was an archetypal mediator in the multiethnic and multilingual community at the beginning of the nineteenth century. This analysis suggests that we can see Pest-Buda as an ‘informal capital’ around 1800. It was neither ‘marginocentric’ (that is, offering ‘an alternative to the national pull’ of the metropolitan centres) nor ‘metropolitan’ (in the sense of offering cultural hegemony), as it did not define itself against, or in relation to, any existing national centres of literary culture (Cornis-Pope 2004, 9). Around 1800, it was the leading city not only for Hungarian literary production but also for the early works of several other national literatures, often instantiating national Romanticisms. It was the locus where works were both created and published, and where grammars, dictionaries and scholarly treatises, defining the shape of language renewal, were written and printed. Once Pest-Buda became again the official administrative capital of a multiethnic and multilingual country in 1784, it was able to develop an idiosyncratic status as a site of different forms of ethnic and linguistic cultural production. In this respect, the regional cosmopolitanism of Pest-­ Buda prefigures a less hierarchical conception of the multicultural modern city, where the co-existence of different ethnic groups and the organic development of different types of literature are less beholden to the hegemonic structures of the nation-state. The early nineteenth-century regional literary cosmopolitanism of Pest-Buda attests to a specific moment in literary history: a relatively small urban centre acquired symbolic capital from its newly awarded administrative status, which in turn exercised an

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immense centripetal force to attract intellectuals working on both cosmopolitan and national agendas.

The City and Its Inhabitants: Pest-Buda in the Early Nineteenth Century Pest-Buda was still a fairly small town in the last decades of the eighteenth century. Following its liberation from Ottoman rule in 1686, it changed its status to free royal burgh, but recovery was slow. In the early 1700s Buda, with around 13,000 to 16,000 inhabitants, was only the second largest city of the Kingdom of Hungary after Brasov (in present-day Romania), while Pest, with its 6000 inhabitants, lagged behind another six Hungarian cities (Poór 1997, 35). Even with the dynamic development of the region’s cities, Pest-Buda only had 80,000 inhabitants in the 1820s, as compared to the 600,000 inhabitants of pre-revolutionary Paris (Kósa 1937, 7). The twin cities, though discussed here in conjunction, were very different: Buda, on the right bank of the Danube, was a slowly developing and conservative administrative centre surrounded by wine-growing areas, while Pest, on the left bank, was a rapidly developing market town, hosting four annual national fairs, which attracted merchants who also frequently shipped books and offered postal services. Trade, rather than industry, was the dominant feature of Pest-Buda, and a metaphorical exchange in ideas and languages also characterised the twin cities in this period (Kósa 1937, 37). The ethnic composition rapidly changed too. In the long eighteenth century, Buda was predominantly German, secondarily Serbian and then Hungarian, while Pest, also inhabited by Germans, Hungarians and Serbs, was only about 10% Hungarian around 1770 (Poór 1997, 49). This rapidly emerging city became attractive for professionals for the opportunities offered after 1784, when Joseph II’s drive to centralise the empire through strengthening the regional capitals made it the official capital of Hungary (Nagy 1963, 365–367). The Administrative Council and the Hungarian Chamber moved to Pest-Buda, giving the city a significance that it had not enjoyed since the fifteenth century; it also hosted institutions and opportunities for professionals, whose personal origins were subsumed to the service of administrative bodies performing their functions in Latin and German as late as 1844 (Magyar Országos Levéltár 1844). The University of Buda relocated here in 1777 from Nagyszombat (today Trnava in

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Slovakia)—its traditional curriculum and its multilingual and multifaith professoriat created a cosmopolitan learning and intellectual environment, based on cultural exchange between different regions and linguistic areas (Sziklay 1991, 66). The multiethnic nature of the twin cities was based on the late eighteenth-­century notion of nationhood, understood in this context as the ‘membership of a community defined by common borders, by subjection to common laws, by a common government, and of course by common dynasty’ (Judson 2016, 48). Nationhood, in turn, was related to the complex meanings of the term ‘hungarus’: always used in the Latin form, it had a territorial connotation, and posited that the main determinant of identity was the sense of being subject to the Hungarian crown, to which any ethnic or linguistic aspect of the self or the collective played only a secondary role. However, the early nineteenth century saw the reconfiguration of national identity from a territorial (‘hungarus’) understanding to one based on categories of ethnos and lingua. The literati of Pest-Buda were witnesses to and agents of this shift, which also affected the local notion of cosmopolitanism: the earlier, Enlightenment and aristocratic connotations, resting on the communality of class with shared practices of the Grand Tour and the international consumption of leisure, were gradually replaced by the sense that Hungarian Enlightenment literati were also citizens of the republic of letters, whilst being mostly loyal subjects to the Crown. Their cosmopolitanism therefore was less focused on the sociability of the international salons such as Mme de Staël’s, but rather on the programme of literary modernisation through translation and the import of different European genres. This programme represented one part of the language renewal movement, and it continued well into the period of national Romanticism, when nation was increasingly seen as a matter of ethnicity and language.

 Printing for the Empire: The Buda University Press Pest-Buda’s status as the site of regional multilingual literary and cultural production is nowhere more apparent than in the operations of the Buda University Press, the institution that was responsible for what Pascale Casanova describes as a ‘philological-lexicographic revolution’ and the invention or reinvention of self-consciously national languages in the region (2004, 48). The press issued the most important encyclopaedias, histories and dictionaries in the different regional languages. These

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documents were produced as a result of the imperial scholarly and educational remit of the University Press, which rested on the privilege to print for state education in Hungary, Croatia and Slavonia (Varga 2020, 12–14). This privilege, awarded in 1779, was expanded in 1795 with the purchase of equipment required for Cyrillic printing, which also brought the right to print in the oriental languages for the whole of Austria, the crown estates and Hungary (with the exception of Transylvania), including Cyrillic, Greek and Hebrew alphabets. The combination of these rights brought for the Press the exclusive right to schoolbooks and broadly understood educational material in all languages, as well as general printing in the non-Latin alphabets. Thus, the Press effectively turned into a multilingual state publishing house and a sort of ‘academy of sciences’ press, under the careful eye of government censor-editors responsible for ensuring that work produced in different languages should not diminish obedience to the sovereigns, excite doubt in religious matters, or expose the ‘servants of religion to ridicule and make them ridiculous or despicable’ (Krueger 2009, 59). In addition, it also worked on a commercial basis on commission for those authors who could cover their expenses, which led to the publication of a plethora of modern European works in translation. Scholarly texts making significant interventions in the debates around establishing linguistic modernity and interrogating ethnic origins were printed here; as the century wore on, they were increasingly deployed to support political identity formation and came to be seen as the early articulations and foundational texts for agendas of Romantic nationalism. The first generation of Romanian dictionaries, encyclopaedias and grammars were issued by the University Press, which was also the third largest publisher for the language. The career opportunities offered by the need to supply the Transylvanian Greek Catholic (Uniate) primary schools with schoolbooks were quickly grasped by Transylvanian-Romanian intellectuals. Their crowning achievement, the multivolume Lexicon Budense dictionary (Dictionarul de la Buda, Romanian-Latin-Hungarian-German, Buda, 1825), serves as an encyclopaedia of language history, orthography and the history of the Romanian language, and was arguably the largest and most important single enterprise of the University Press. Through publishing ethnic histories, grammar books and dictionaries, these intellectuals established the provenance of Romanian from Latin, thus providing a significant contribution to European imaginings about ethnic and linguistic origins.

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Pest-Buda’s reputation as the centre of Serbian literary culture of the time also rests on the printing output of the University Press, although Serbian books were also printed outside Hungary (Póth 1988, 225). The new state employment opportunities and an established rich local Serbian merchant class, intertwined with the highly educated members of the Orthodox clergy, positioned Buda as the centre of cultural modernisation and Serbian book production until the opening of the first press in Belgrade in 1832. It has been argued that, with the University Press’s responsibility for educational and liturgical texts, the publication of Serbian books represented Buda University Press’s largest contribution to Central European language renewal: the number of published Serbian-language texts was the highest after Hungarian, German, and Latin (Käfer 1977, 116). The publication of these significant works in the city to which the authors only had tangential connections asserts its strength as a node in book publishing and the conferring of cultural authority. The significance of Pest-Buda as a locus for Slovak intellectual life and national revival can be best seen in its role in the formation of a unified, modernised national language suited to secular purposes. Pest Slovaks were mostly field labourers, Lutheran ministers, or government employees who all migrated to Pest-Buda in adulthood. With no Slovak territory outside Habsburg Austria, Pest-Buda and Pressburg (known in Hungarian as Pozsony and in Slovak as Bratislava) emerged as unrivalled centres for Slovak literary life (Käfer 1977, 116), and as attractive locations for professional opportunities (Fried 2004, 37–38). By the 1820s, a Slovak-speaking literary centre also emerged, following the example of the Serbs, and with close personal connection between the two groups. The University Press also participated in the process of Slovak language renewal, which started in Upper Hungary with the publication of Grammatica Slavica in Pressburg (1790) by the Roman Catholic priest Anton Bernolák (1762–1813) (Demmel 2011, 47–48). A ‘hungarus’ in politics and a believer in improving the linguistic and cultural conditions of Slovaks, Bernolák asserted the difference of Slovak from Czech, and built the erudite version of Slovak on the basis of the phonetics of the educated classes’ Slovak pronunciation. Convinced by the cultural authority of the Press, the literary executors of Bernolák decided to arrange for the German edition of his Slovak grammar (Slowakische Grammatik, 1817) to be published there. Bernolák had no personal connection to Pest-Buda, but the publication of the Grammatik and his six-volume Slovak dictionary

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(1825–1827) evidenced the intellectual weight of the Press in academic publishing. The University Press played a somewhat similar role in Hungarian literature in the period around 1800, though the field of Hungarian publishing in Pest-Buda was much richer than the Romanian or Serbian ones (Fenyő 1971, 53), and many important Hungarian books were printed by the Trattner publishing house (Fenyő 1971, 52). The University Press printed primers for village schools (1800, 1809, 1831) and several volumes of piety and tracts on morality and medical texts. Although the director of the Press, Ferenc Sághy, opposed the Hungarian language renewal movement, debates about language and correct spelling were conducted in publications by Miklós Révai and Ferenc Verseghy, who championed etymological versus phonetic spelling, respectively. For a predominantly scholarly publisher, the Press was surprisingly active in publishing poetry—a role it shared with the important literary magazine Aurora (1822–1837), to which I shall return. All in all, the publishing house fulfilled its primary state function of providing textbooks for pupils of different native languages, but the very existence of the institution also offered a call for men of letters to migrate to Pest-Buda. The language editors worked mostly in parallel with each other, but often collaborated on the dictionary projects (Sziklay 1991, 60). They all appeared to follow a particular pattern of multilingualism: multilingual in personal and private life, their scholarly work was either in the local linguae francae of scholarship (Latin and German), or in some instances, they were beginning to explore the possibility offered by the vernaculars for scholarly treatises. The turn towards ethno-linguistic nationalism is evident in the history of Slovak publications, as more explicitly political texts gradually replaced the original scholarly treatises on diachronic linguistics. In 1819, the bilingual German-Slovak Ján Kollár (1793–1852) was appointed to the ministry of the Slovak Lutheran community in Pest, where Lutheran life was still predominantly German (Neubauer and Szegedy-Maszák 2004, 167). In a bid to establish ethnic and linguistic origins, Kollár developed the theory of Slavonic reciprocity based on the notion that initially all Slavs spoke the same language (divided into the four major dialects of Russian, Polish, Illyrian and Czech), and that they were also ethnically identical (Demmel 2011, 48). These theses were voiced in Kollár’s epic poem Slávi dcéra (‘The Daughter of the Slavs’ or ‘The Daughter of Glory,’ Buda, 1824), which displayed a pathos-filled admiration for the past and a hope

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for a glorious future, and introduced a system of national topographical symbols like the Tatra mountains (Kiss-Szemán 2010, 50–75). The career of Pavel Šafarík (1795–1861) shows that Kollár’s circle attracted like-­ minded Slovaks from a distance. Šafarík worked as the headmaster of the Novi Sad Orthodox Gymnasium from 1819 to 1833, where he also studied Serbian literature. His systematic account of the Slavonic languages, Die Geschichte der slawischen Sprache und Literatur nach allen Mundarten (The History of the Slavonic Languages and Literature in All Vernacular Idioms), was published in Buda in 1826. His historical account, Über die Abkunft der Slawen nach Lorenz Surowiecki (On the Ancestry of the Slavs after Lorenz Surowiecki, Buda, 1828), articulated his theory about the historic presence of the Slavs in East Central Europe. The notion that Slavs were awaiting their national awakening in the region gives a clear indication that ‘pre-history’ was already being used as part of a more politically focused national programme (Demmel 2011, 48). For the contributors to the University Press around 1800, patriotism and multilingualism were central issues, but their understanding of these categories operated much more on a dialectical model than as a pair of dichotomies: authors were both producers of genealogies of ethnicity and language and active contributors to agendas of cosmopolitanism through translation and the introduction of European genres into vernacular literatures. Rather than only aiming at expanding the horizons of the readers, translation was also a tool for the exploration of the limits of language and the enhancing of its expressive potential. Occasionally, the translations were meant to fill existing gaps in the target country’s textual heritage, like in the case of rendering Virgil, Horace or Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1799) into Serbian, or through the introduction of a new genre, as in the case of the animal fables by Dositej Obradović (Sziklay 1991, 50). Much work was devoted to translating the aesthetics and philosophy of history of French classicism and the Enlightenment; Voltaire, Rousseau and Marmontel were immensely popular amongst Serbs and Hungarians. For Slovak translators, the importance of eighteenth-century English poets, such as Pope and George Lyttleton, was paramount. Geographical horizons were also expanded by publishing travelogues about home and abroad. These volumes, in addition to books teaching languages spoken outside the region such as English and French (Király 2003, 480–495), not only showed an eager personal interest but also confirmed the conviction that translation supported agendas of national linguistic and cultural

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emancipation, and that Buda contributed, through cultural openness, to the agenda of transnational knowledge mediation.

Acts of Staging From about the 1780s onwards and under the influence of the Enlightenment, the members of the nobility, first in Vienna and then in Pest-Buda, began to establish new cultural institutions such as learned societies, clubs, public libraries, semi-public salons and museums. Though the founding figures were often aristocrats, the members from nobility’s lower end—with insignificant monetary capital but much cultural capital—were at the forefront of this process. These men of letters and their possible readership—Serbian merchants, Protestant ministers like Kollár from Upper Hungary and Hungarian lawyers—shared a culture based on Latin authors studied at the gymnasium, and legal studies either in Pest or at Protestant German universities. Lawyers and ministers by profession, they all pursued literature in addition to their other paid employment, unless they were landowners of independent means, since literary work did not become a source of livelihood until the 1840s (Margócsy 1999, 48–74). These institutions were nationally oriented, with the core agenda of cultural modernisation not only of Hungarian but also of Serbian and Slovak cultures; they fostered projects that connected individuals and disseminated information, while constituting hybrid social gatherings that represented a newer form of sociability in a profoundly rank and kinship-­ based society. The personal connections formed in these venues pointed to the beginnings of a social transformation, which eventually led to the formation of a writing and reading public in the 1840s. Theatrical culture played an immensely important role in artistic sociability. Nicholas Vazsonyi’s essay on Bayreuth as an artistic capital gives us important insights into the eighteenth-century interpretation of its social and moral functions: as Vazsonyi notes, the ‘remedy for modernity’s ills lay […] specifically in the genre of drama, the most effective medium for the peaceful transmission of ideas to a public in need of moral, ethical and political persuasion [...] the theatre was the institution that could undertake the re-education and redemption of humanity’ (2017, 207). Apart from this universal affective and educative mission, urban theatrical performances presented the opportunity for the public use of emerging modern vernaculars before sizeable audiences, which saw a parallel shrinking of German-speaking spectatorship, and an increasing importance of

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Hungarian-speaking audiences. Pest-Buda emerged as the venue of important theatrical developments, where the staging of nations and language communities reflected the closeness and simultaneous competition between the German and Hungarian theatre communities, whilst also exercising their influence on Serbian and Slovak theatrical life. These beginnings were different from those in larger imperial capitals like Vienna, Moscow, Paris and Berlin, where royal edicts established national theatres in the late eighteenth century (Imre 2008, 2), and they also differed from the local tradition of aristocratic mansion theatres, or Catholic and Protestant academies that regularly staged performances. With its predominantly German-speaking inhabitants, eighteenth-century theatrical life was primarily German-speaking, as the histories of the Rondella Theatre, the summer theatre in Buda and the Castle Theatre exemplify (Neubauer and Szegedy-Maszák 2004, 163). German was the language of performances of Shakespeare, Lessing and Goethe, and also of German plays concerning Hungarian historical topics. Still with German spectators in mind, a permanent 3500-seat theatre was opened in 1812 on the Pest side, offering a repertoire of operas and plays by Kotzebue, which, however, quickly proved to be far too big, due to the gradual shrinking of the German-language audience (Pukánszkyné 1936, 42–51). Secular Hungarian theatre had a slow start in the predominantly non-­ Hungarian-­speaking city. During their time as a guest troupe in the Castle Theatre between 1790 and 1796, the first Hungarian theatre ensemble staged 469 performances, including tragic dramas (Trauerspiele) and comedies, translated or adapted from the German versions of French and English plays, which were also running simultaneously in German. After 1807, Hungarian theatrical performances became more regular, and Hungarians also gained access to the German theatre building from 1812 (Sánta 2000, 19). Despite the uncertainties around the performance venue and the low number of Hungarian plays, theatre patronage in the national language enjoyed much cultural prestige. The Serbian-Hungarian Mihály Vitkovics, already an acknowledged translator of German plays, recorded the hero’s theatre visits in his epistolary novel, A költő regénye (The Novel of the Poet): I went to the theatre again where they played Sighs; or, the Daughter by Kotzebue.2 It is really tender where the black piece of bread is shown to the

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major […]. I felt so much love for this play that I go to see it every time they play it. I recognise my own nature in Flok.3 (Vitkovics 1980, 284)

Hearing Hungarian words spoken from the stage had broader, communal and socially cohesive dimensions, which transgressed the differences of class. It was the weight of this social cohesion that motivated the inhabitants of Pest to donate the necessary amount for building the first Hungarian national theatre in 1837. The public of Pest showed a passion for securing the permanence of Hungarian-language plays performed by local actors in Pest. The city’s centrality as the venue of transnational artistic collaboration is also apparent in the fostering of Serbian theatre, in which the playwright Joakim Vujić (1772–1837) played a central role. The audience for such endeavours came from the sizeable Serbian spectatorship, and the Press had already printed a Serbian play, Jovan Raic’s Tragedija o smerti Urosa Pjatogo (Tragedy about the Death of Urosa V.). Prior to his arrival in Pest, Vujić had already gained experience as a thespian in Trieste, where he had adapted German plays to the Serbian-language stage. In Pest, he discovered that Vitkovics was already working on a comparable endeavour of adapting German plays to the Hungarian stage (Bor 1972, 170). The major impetus came in 1812, when a highly relevant performance about recent Serbian history was programmed: the Hungarian actor István Balog’s play Czerni Gyúró vagy Belgrád megvétele a törökökto ̋l (Black George, or the Recapture of Belgrade from the Turks) staged the recent Belgrade uprising, which was still a vivid historical memory in the mind of the audience. The inclusion of folk songs sung on stage, before the first major collection of folk poetry under the influence of Herder had been published, was already an important public statement, but singing some of them in Serbian represented the first-ever occasion of hearing Serbian songs in a theatre (Waldapfel 1932, 1, 227). This performance prompted Vujić to develop his skills as playwright and dramaturg (Bor 1972, 178–180). The friendship between Balog and Vujić proved to be a productive one: in 1813, they petitioned the Administrative Council for a permit to perform Kotzebue’s Papagoy (Parrot; Serbian: Kreštalica) in Serbian, with student actors. The play, which was the first Serbian-language theatrical performance in Habsburg Austria, was a major success; its review, published in the Viennese Novine Serbske, was arguably the first ever of its genre in Serbian. Though the Serbian audience did not command sufficient economic power to support further performances in the

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language, the merits of Pest-Buda are still unquestionable: the first Serbian song sung on stage, the first theatre performance in Serbian and the first theatre review in Serbian were all made possible by the city’s ability to encourage such transnational collaborations. The importance of this collaboration for Vujić was immense: a training in dramaturgy and adaptation proved to be instrumental to his role as the founder of the first national theatre in independent Serbia in the 1830s (Bor 1972, 201). The genre of theatrical adaptations was another form through which Pest-Buda showed its power to start artistic innovation, and the training offered to Vujić showed the city’s significant contribution to the rise of Serbian theatre.

Literary Sociability and the Press Literary sociability and the desire for cultural emancipation played an important role in the establishment of cultural institutions in the city, with particular significance accorded to the donation of library and museum collections by patriotic-minded aristocrats. Prominent representatives include Count Ferenc Széchényi, whose family collections provided the foundation for the National Museum and Library, and Count József Teleki, who donated his 30,000 strong book collection to the Academy of Sciences in 1831. The opening of the Serbian library in 1838—the largest Serbian library at the time—also owed much to the rich Serbian landowner Sava Tekeli (Póth 1988, 235). Aristocratic patronage also involved the possibility of employment to young men of letters, who would work as secretaries or personal aides. Another product of this version of sociability was the Hungarian Scholarly Society (Magyar Tudós Társaság, from 1840: Hungarian Academy of Sciences/Magyar Tudományos Akadémia), Hungary’s most important institution based on voluntary association, established in 1825 through Count István Széchenyi’s initiative and financial backing. Before this date, literary life in Pest-Buda took place in salons and groups of informal sociability, which supported vibrant scholarly exchange, as described in Vitkovics’s novel A költő regénye (The Novel of the Poet): ‘there are things that keep you amused. The library, full of many scholarly men, the journals, the bridge—these are my main locations of entertainment’ (1980, 274).4 Initially, the salons were based in grand aristocratic houses, such as Lajos Abaffy’s, where intellectuals involved in the Jacobine movement of 1794–1795 also gathered; while the salon of the female salonnière Baroness Anna Podmaniczky hosted the circle around József Kármán (1769–1795), whose Fanni hagyományai (The Memoirs of

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Fanny, 1794) was to be the first Hungarian sentimental novel. The idea for establishing the journal Uránia, where Kármán’s novel was published, probably also emerged in this salon (Szilágyi 2015, 769–777). In the 1810s, the contributors to the first Hungarian scholarly periodical Tudományos Gyűjtemény met in Count László Teleki’s salon. Another centre of social life was the circle around the Romantic poet Károly Kisfaludy, which provided the intellectual background for Aurora, the periodical championing national Romanticism. Kisfaludy’s role in gathering professional writers passed on after his death to the Kisfaludy Society, which gradually took on a complementary position to the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (Kósa 1937, 157–158, and Toldy 1875, 1–15). These emerging cultural institutions—whether salons or more formal organisations— were specifically Hungarian in orientation, but, as I will later suggest, provided the impetus and viable models for the establishment of similar national cultural institutions in the shape of the Serbian and Slovak maticas. The Serbian word matica (lit. ‘queen bee’) was used in the nineteenth century to refer to a ‘cultural institution’ or ‘cultural centre’ (Lajosi and Stynen 2020). The twin cities were also home to more robust beginnings of literary journalism, though press histories also document the importance of Hungarian, Serbian and Slovak journals outside Pest-Buda (Sziklay 1981, 23–34). The 1790s saw the launch of one particularly important journal, Kármán’s Uránia (1794–1795), which only lasted three issues (Szilágyi 1996b, 127–144). Despite its short life, its significance was enormous: inspired by an idealised moral utopia of the general improvement of humankind (Szilágyi 1998, 411), the journal’s content shows an intensive engagement with, and extensive translations and adaptations from, the German magazine Anzeigen, filling the pages with a significant number of translations from Kleist, Abbot Raynal and August Meissner. It also introduced new genres, such as journalistic essay writing and stories based on mystery or supernatural elements like magic to the budding Hungarian literature, which was still experimenting with the absorption and adaptation of genres previously unknown or unused (Szilágyi 1998, Ch. 2). The year of 1817 was fundamental in the process of Pest becoming the unrivalled regional centre for literature. The aspects mentioned so far— the number of young professionals with a passion for literature and cultural improvement, the diverse means of financial and moral support received from the increasingly Pest-Buda-based aristocracy, the tradition of scholarly printing by the University Press and other smaller presses, and

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their embracement of cosmopolitan multilingualism—were favourable circumstances that made the transformation possible. The year 1817 saw the launch of the monthly Tudományos Gyűjtemény (Scholarly Repository), the first-ever Hungarian-language scholarly periodical. The cultivation of national language and identity was core to its agenda, with the focus on the printing of historical and archival documents, statistics, geography and the human sciences. The periodical also challenged the misrepresentation of Hungarians in foreign histories and journals—a thematic tradition that was to be continued in 1830s–1840s Hungarian travel writing (Bracewell 2008, vol. 2, 195–222). Although poems, dramas and short stories were excluded, literary criticism was present from the beginning. The periodical straddled what we would today call humanities and the sociology of literature; they also advocated the need for the development of the reading and theatre-going public and for the remuneration of literary and theatrical authorship (Katona 1821, 3–22). Its ‘hungarus’ commitment was reflected by articles about the Orthodox religion and Serbian scholarly life (Sziklay 1981, 29), and its wide coverage shaped the ‘thinking about modern Central European nations for over a quarter of a century’ (Kiss-Szemán 2010, 26). Though regional in focus, it also ran a separate column ‘Külföldi literatura’ (Foreign Literature), and in the 1820s, Sámuel and Pál Almási Balogh regularly reported on European Romanticism, especially on French, Italian and British literature (Balogh 1824, 70–91). Thus, the journal introduced the Hungarian audience to regular scholarly discourse about literature, language and other scholarly disciplines, while claiming a larger social influence for scholarly exchange. 1817 was also the year of Károly Kisfaludy’s arrival in Pest-Buda. Kisfaludy was a major agent in the launch of Aurora (1822–1838), the first Hungarian journal that specifically focused on publishing literary work. A former army officer and successful playwright, he managed to attract the best literati of the age and involve them in the formation of the first lasting literary gathering, the ‘Aurora circle’. The standing of Aurora is nowhere better captured than in the words of Ferenc Toldy, considered to be the father of Hungarian national literary historiography: None of the literatures has had an almanac, so varied as the one of Kisfaludy [held together by editorial principles, and containing] tragic and comic plays, classical and romance epics, in prose and in Zrinyi stanzas, in stanzas with and without metre […] tales and short stories, serious and comic sto-

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ries, [...] and amongst so many works, a few but unsurpassable translations. (Toldy 1828, 87–88)

Beyond generic richness and variety, the magazine also stood out as a champion of national Romanticism, and published the work of the best Romantic writers of the age, including the poets Vörösmarty, Kölcsey and Bajza. With aesthetic treatises written by the most influential critics of the age, and publications of the work of poets who were to become national classics, the scholarly Tudományos Gyűjtemény and the belles lettres periodical Aurora jointly prepared the ground for the movement’s success. Pest, with the concentration of literary intellectuals who may have pursued competing national agendas but shared ideas about fostering national cultural modernity, provided the ideal location for these pursuits through periodical publications in other languages. The first Romanian-language literary and historical magazine Bibliotheca romaneasca was published here by Zaharia Carcalechi in 1821. Some further issues came out in 1829–1830 and 1834, but the journal moved to Bucharest in 1837, when the Romanian city was already becoming the centre of gravity for its literature (Drace-Francis 2012, 117). Inspired by the Hungarian developments, the economically and intellectually powerful Serbian community also launched their own periodical Serbske Letopisi (Serbian Annual; 1825–1864), under the auspices of the Serbian cultural association Matica Srpska (Serbian Matica) (Varga 2020, 11–29). Previously, the only Serbian publication of Habsburg Austria—where approximately half of the Serbian population lived—was the Vienna-based newspaper Novine Serbske (The Serbian News; 1813–1821). Serbske Letopisi, under the editorship of Georgije Magarasević (1793–1830), came out with an all-Slav mission: it covered everything that concerned Slavs from the Baltic to the Black Sea, with particular emphasis on Serbian history and the pre-Ottoman past (Vujicsics 1997, 37). The model of the matica-type cultural associations was successfully transplanted to other parts of Habsburg Austria and beyond in the next few decades, but it is important to note that the model organisation was set up by the Buda Serbs (Lajosi and Stynen 2020). The affinity and closeness between the Hungarian Academy and the Serbian Matica was such that in the late 1830s, the maecenas of Serbian letters Sava Tekeli even considered the merger of the two scholarly bodies when he took over the directorship of the organisation. This plan came to nothing, but his Tekelianum, an institution for the education of poor Serbian students in Pest-Buda (1838), became an important base for generations of Serbian

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intellectuals of Serbia and Habsburg Austria (Vujicsics 1997, 45–47). The buoyant Slovak literary life of Pest-Buda also organised literary societies in the 1820s, which modelled themselves on the Hungarian ones and gained inspiration from the Serbian developments. Kollár and the civil servant ̌ spolok) Martin Hamulják started a Slovak reading club (Slovenský c ̌itatelský in 1826, moving on to forming the Spolok Milovńíkow Rec ̌i a Literatúri Slowenskiéj (Society of the Friends of Slovak Language and Literature) in 1834 (Sziklay 1991, 118–119). The influence of the Hungarian literary magazine Aurora is undeniable in their collective enterprise, the short-­ lived literary magazine Zora (Dawn; 1835), which self-consciously followed the existing German, Hungarian and Serbian models of literary magazines (Matóvcík 1981, 44). The periodical attempted to shape Slovak literature by publishing the best work through the publication of Romantic poetry and pre-Romantic prose (Sziklay 1981, 27), and it also showed much similarity to Aurora in its layout and fascination with Romantic works capturing the Ottoman past (Matóvcík 1981, 42–46). Despite its short life, Zora made a significant contribution to language cultivation, the nurturing of Slovak poetry, the development of cultivated readerships, and attempts to reconcile different positions on the nature of literary Slovak (Matóvcík 1981, 46). As the examples of Serbian and Slovak scholarly associations and periodical publications show, these bodies were first in the national languages, and demonstrably draw inspiration from similar Hungarian organisations in Pest-Buda.



The Literary Mediator: Mihály Vitkovics

Mihály Vitkovics (1778–1829) played a central role in the story of multilingualism, textual production and cultural transmission between the languages of Pest-Buda. Unlike other men of letters, multilingual in private but authors only in one vernacular, Vitkovics wrote in Serbian and Hungarian, and cultural mediation—translation, adaptation, conveying knowledge—was his literary mission. His father, an Orthodox priest in Eger, was known to be equally able to preach in Serbian, Greek, Hungarian and Latin, and was also a correspondent of Karadžić. When Vitkovics, a lawyer by profession, settled in Buda in 1803 to act as legal counsel for the aristocratic Marczibányi and Zichy families and for the Buda Orthodox parish, he seamlessly fitted into the circles of affluent Serbian and Hungarian merchants and also into circles of literature. His affection for the Hungarian language was unquestionable. As he put in a letter to

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Kazinczy, ‘the fact that our mother tongue is sacred and dear to me, and that I have used it to pursue the literary profession, is the effect of your highly esteemed writings. Without them, I would have made myself heard in Latin, or, God forbid, German’—clearly pointing to the fact that notwithstanding his investment in general cultural and personal multilingualism, Vitkovics was very aware of the German-language dominance in the Habsburg Empire (Vitkovics 1978, 271). Cultivating the less fully fledged Hungarian (and Serbian) literary language was, for him, a deliberate choice. He also cherished his Serbian language and was actively encouraged by his friend, the neoclassical poet Lukijan Mušicki, to write more in Serbian (Kósa 1937, 69). In the 1810s, he became one of the writers of the ‘trio of Pest’ (‘Pesti triász’), three young men of letters, who acted as Kazinczy’s representatives in Pest-Buda in promoting the cause of language renewal. His hospitable and affluent house was the focus of literary sociability well into the 1820s, hosting neoclassical poets like Benedek Virág and Romantics like Károly Kisfaludy. In the twentieth-century literary historian János Horváth’s words, he ‘busied himself with fostering the sense of belonging together in the estate [sic] of writers, to which he was qualified by his sociable disposition and favourable material circumstances’ (Horváth 1978, 762).5 This ‘estate of writers’ also stood behind the launch of Tudományos Gyűjtemény and Aurora. A poet well versed in the genres of European classicism, Vitkovics initially wrote epistles, epigrams and fables in the vein of Lessing, but also had a fascination for theatre. He translated much from Kotzebue, whose work was a standard staple for the Pest-Buda performances in German and in Hungarian. Although only one of his translations was put on the Hungarian stage, we are aware of two Serbian translations being performed, and it is assumed that these also had Hungarian versions (Sziklay 1972, 239–240). His translations were led by the principle of domestication, the characteristic mode of theatrical translation of the time; when he worked on Johann Friedrich Jünger’s Das Kleid aus Lyon (The Cloak from Lyon, 1787), he translated it as Pozsonyi kabát (The Cloak from Pressburg) for the Hungarian audience, and as Odelo iz Triesta (The Cloak from Trieste) for the Serbian stage. The Hungarian texts have not been recovered, but the Serbian ones were published by Matica Srpska (Sziklay 1972, 240). His passion for mediation between Serbian and Hungarian textual cultures gained particular importance in his friendship with Kazinczy. A generation older than him, Kazinczy was not only a hungarus patriot but also

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an Enlightenment cosmopolitan, who saw translation as a tool for the expansion of both individual cultural horizons and the target language’s expressive potential. Kazinczy’s interest in literary cross-fertilisation led him to translate the Serbian ‘Hasaganica’ (‘Gyászdal Azzan agánk, szép, de szerencsétlen nője felől’/'Funerary song about the beautiful and unfortunate wife of Aga Azzan’, 1789) from Goethe’s German. The public friendship of the two men started with Kazinczy’s epistle to Vitkovics from 1811 (in which he ridiculed a fictitious poet for his belief that poetic expression is the prerogative of a monolingual writer), which introduced the young lawyer to the Pest-Buda public (Vitkovics 1978, 138). Vitkovics then brought his childhood friend Mušicki and Kazinczy together. The most productive moment of their friendship was a letter from Kazinczy to Mušicki, in which he provides a complex representation of the relationship between patriotism and cosmopolitanism: [m]y patriotism does not contradict cosmopolitanism, and when I wish for the blossoming of the Hungarian language, when I assist it as much as I can, I do not pray to the heavens that my language blossoms at the expense of causing damage to other languages; more specifically, I do not pray for failure of the language in which the heavenly beautiful elegy of Azan Aga was sung. […] Truth is shared by each language and each denomination and the good and the wise find each other in different lands. (Lökős 1980, 23)6

Kölcsey was another major poet with a passion for Serbian poetry, who entertained a lengthy correspondence with Vitkovics (Sziklay 1972, 256); it was through the latter’s inspiration and possibly with his cribs that Kölcsey translated Serbian folk songs from Vuk Karadžić’s 1814 Serbian-­ language collection (Fried 1969, 702–704). Kölcsey’s appreciation of Serbian poetry is made clear in a passage in Tudományos Gyűjtemény (Scholarly Repository) in 1817, which was redacted from the published version, but it is now restored (Császár 1917, 468). Here, Kölcsey favourably compares Serbian with Hungarian poetry: the Serbians ‘compose their songs with as much poetic levitation, obstinate determination and as much simple sublimity as Anacreon and Homer’, in contrast with the Hungarians’ ‘poverty of poetics’ (‘poetai szegénység’) (Császár 1917, 468).7 This review, echoing Grimm’s views on the Karadžić collection, asserts the use and importance of Serbian poetry as a source of inspiration. The introduction of Serbian poetry to a Hungarian audience can be generally attributed to Vitkovics. Although Karadžić’s folk song collection

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(Pismenica serbskoga jezika/Little Slavo-Serbian Songbook, Vienna, 1814) and his grammar (Srpska gramatika, 1814 and 1818) were already published in Vienna, they did not reach the general audience until Goethe’s praise came out in the journal Über Kunst und Altertum (On Art and Antiquity) in 1823 (Penavin 1987, 862), and Grimm’s and Talvj’s translations appeared. Vitkovics’s effort to familiarise the Hungarian audience with the collection preceded its international success, which confirmed his fundamental and unique role as translator and mediator. Indeed, he translated at least twenty-four Serbian folk songs from the collection, including lyrical (‘Az elváló leány’/The parting girl) and epic poetry (‘Hajkun’/ Haykun), which were published in periodicals (Vitkovics 1978, 89–110). These poems influenced the poetry of Hungarian writers such as Czuczor, Kisfaludy and Vörösmarty, thus introducing the ‘serbus manier’ (Serbian manner), which Toldy characterised as ‘the embodiment of calm and dispassionate warmth’ (Fenyő 1971, 59).8 Vitkovics also regularly reported about the culture and religion of the Austro-Serbs in Hungarian periodicals such as Pest-Budáról, Hasznos Mulatságok and Magyar Kurir (Sziklay 1972, 223). An article, under the title ‘Servia állapotának röved esmértetése’ (A Short Report on the Conditions of Serbia), offered an introduction to the Karageorgevic-led struggle for liberation from the Ottoman Empire between 1804 and 1813. This article was banned and the manuscript is lost, but Vitkovics did publish two significant essays in Tudományos Gyűjtemény. His enumeration of Hungarian-language Orthodox writers in ‘Az ó-hitű magyar írókról’ (About Orthodox Hungarian Writers, 1818) shows a deliberate effort to establish his own artistic provenance whilst also attempting to integrate this tradition into a broader Hungarian literary history (Vitkovics 1980, 432–437). His ‘A szerbus vagy rác nyelvről’ (About Serbian or Ratz Language, 1819) provides a linguistic introduction to Slaveno-Serb and calls for a more complete grammar than Karadžić’s book from 1814 (Vitkovics 1980, 429). The discussion ends with an appreciation of the language, which, though ‘not very cultured in the way of knowledge,’ is superbly suited for poetic expression because of its melodious nature, and with a plea for more sponsorship for South-Slav languages (Vitkovics 1980, 430). As he suggests, ‘the Serbian language is luckier than those [i.e. Croat, Dalmatian, and other Illyrian languages], because it is a language used in its churches, and therefore it is more capable of approaching the main culture, but only if more patrons could be found’ (1980, 432).9 For Vitkovics, patronage and support for Serbian literary culture was an

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unquestionable personal imperative: he himself contributed financially to Pavle Solaric’s Buda edition of Dositej Obradović’s work, and he also actively recruited subscribers to the Karadžić collection (Sziklay 1972, 213). As a lawyer, he was well known for turning his pupils into patriots appropriate to their origins: the Hungarian Ferenc Deák learnt the legal trade in Vitkovics’s office, only to become the architect of the 1867 Austro-Hungarian compromise (Sziklay 1972, 221), while his Serbian pupil Teodor Pavlovic (1784–1854) was to become the secretary of Matica Srpska in 1837. Vitkovics’s office was the training school for public-­spirited patriotism for both nationalities. Vitkovics’s most important contribution to Serbian literature is Spomen Milice (The Memoirs of Milica, 1816), a transcreation of Kármán’s epistolary novel Fanny. In keeping with the contemporary consensus about the work’s authorship, Vitkovics, too, assumed that Fanny was an unstructured collection of diary records by a young woman, hence available for poetic reworking (Szilágyi 1996a, 698). He made some significant changes to the plot and the narrative: he took away some of the drama by softening the figure of the girl’s cruel father into a weak man acting under the influence of Milica’s stepmother, but added some pathos to Milica’s tragic life by staging a deathbed scene (Sziklay 1972, 233–234). Although the expressions are considered much less vivid and powerful than in the original, and Vitkovics’s own creative writing was undoubtedly less powerful than Kármán’s, the text was immensely effective in shaping the Serbian readership’s receptivity to sentimental fiction (Sziklay 1972, 234–235). Scholars agree that Vitkovics’s role as a characteristically early nineteenth-­century agent of literary multilingualism and literary transmission is unmatched. As Sziklay summarises, ‘the greatness of Vitkovics’s literary contribution consists in the noble endeavour of building a fraternity between the heroic and most poetic Slav race [here: ethnicity] with the Hungarian’ (1972, 258).10 He performed this role through a range of literary roles: a translator of drama, prose and poetry between Serbian, Hungarian and also German, a cultural commentator and scholar of literary history and philology, an educator of future lawyers in matters of patriotic duty and cultural nation building, and a poet and novelist in two languages with a sharp eye for the innovative potential of epistolary fiction and the fusion of folk poetry and literary Romanticism, Vitkovics’s work and productivity reflected on and enriched the multilingual culture of an organically growing literary community of the twin cities. Affectionately patriotic and self-consciously cosmopolitan, Vitkovics was the epitome of

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the city, which accommodated and encouraged cultural productivity in different languages, and whose regional cosmopolitanism and openness to European Romanticism helped pave the way for Romantic poetry in more than one literary culture.



Conclusion

This chapter has argued that Pest-Buda in the early decades of the nineteenth century was the publishing and creative centre of literatures that later went on to forge their own, largely isolated, literary traditions. It might appear that these national literary beginnings—at the time when the generic demarcations between ‘literature’, history and other reflexive or scholarly genres were still in the making—existed in separation from each other, with parallel production for Romanian, Slovak, Serbian and Hungarian literatures and readerships, thus defining Pest-Buda as a site whose role was primarily to accommodate such parallelisms. Some of these projects were conflicting or competitive, as they staked their claim to the ‘right’ form of modern national languages, as is seen in the case of the Slovak or Serbian linguistic debates, or they presented diverse imaginings of ethnic pre-histories and claims to an ancestral status in the Carpathian basin. Yet the high concentration of authors and the relative density of cultural institutions shifted the character of the city from a passive space of accommodation to an active place of a ‘literary node’, which encouraged productive collaborations amongst different authors committed to a pursuit of cultural modernisation through the introduction of new literary genres and types of publication. The discussion of the Buda University Press showed how the Press gave publication opportunities to the linguistic and cultural theories of national origins and collectives, and it also pointed to the attractive character of the institution for scholars and writers whose relationship to the city was largely tangential. From the early 1810s onwards, the emergence and proliferation of national theatre productions, scholarly and literary societies, and periodicals enabled the sustenance of intellectual ties between literary authors. Often, they reflected and reported on each other’s work: for the multilingual Romanian dictionary, the contribution of the Hungarian Virág was invaluable, while for Kollár, the Serbian Srpski narodni list represented the first opportunity to have his work  on cultural reciprocity  translated into a foreign language (Sziklay 1991, 54). Cultural productivity and cross-fertilisation existed because of the communal multilingualism of its readers and writers.

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Authors did not embark on a programme of promoting each other’s work in the service of the general, transnational cause of literature, or for the acquisition of cultural capital for Pest-Buda: as the century wore on, their scholarly debates about ethnic or linguistic origins became increasingly bound up with politicised issues and separate and conflicting political movements of collective identity. Yet serving as a venue where these debates could be conducted was an important factor in the enhancement of the twin cities’ status as a regional capital: the proliferation of institutions—publishing houses, periodicals, scholarly societies and theatres—led to the production of creative and cultural scholarship that both was receptive of European Romantic national writing and, as the early reception of Serbian poetry shows, occasionally even preceded the international response to such poetry. Through the analysis of the bilingual, bicultural Serbian–Hungarian author Vitkovics’s work of mediation, the chapter illustrated the immense personal and linguistic transformative potential of such rich conditions. Pest-Buda’s position as both national and regional cultural node within Habsburg Austria was transformed after the 1867 Austro-Hungarian compromise (Ausgleich). By 1891, the city of Budapest had half a million inhabitants, of which 67.1 % considered themselves to be Hungarian, while 23.7% German (Neubauer 2004, 169). No longer an organically multilingual city with significant multiethnic groups, artists—writers, journalists, publishers and thespians—were now primarily publishing and staging for the Hungarian-language audience. With the new neighbouring countries of Romania and Serbia now enjoying independent statehood, the rapidly urbanising capitals of Bucharest and Belgrade had become the seats of literary cultures and publishing industries, and Budapest was no longer the major producer of textual modernity for their audiences. Despite its sudden growth in population, transport and urbanisation between 1867 and 1900, and its visual similarity to Vienna, Budapest could never reach the status of a cosmopolitan metropolis that could serve as the birthplace of an international literary movement. Hungarian thought could only reach a wider audience if written in a language of international circulation, and while international circulation was easily accessible for German-speaking cultural theoreticians like György Lukács and Béla Balázs, it was at most accidental for literary authors. But artists made sense of this position: they developed a vibrant culture of coffee houses and performances of Italian and German operas, attracting international artists like Gustav Mahler; they also created a translation

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culture, in which sources and inspiration no longer came from German-­ speaking countries, but from English, French, Italian and Russian. Baudelaire, Verlaine, Rossetti, Turgenev and others all found their way to the reader on the pages of literary journals and ordinary broadsheets, and made significant contributions to the world literary emancipation of Hungarian readers. Through translation, Hungarian writers embraced those naturalist and modernist influences that they in turn absorbed and deployed in their own creative work. Capturing the moment of regional literary cosmopolitanism of Pest-­ Buda offers a particularly important contribution to the history of urban literary production. A small urban centre with no empowering cultural tradition in living memory and with no political agency, Pest-Buda suddenly gained a new status in administration by its appointment as an imperial publishing and university centre, which in turn made it an attractive destination for intellectuals and creative writers. It emerged as a new ‘informal capital’: neither a hegemonic national ‘metropolitan’ centre nor a ‘marginocentric’ challenge to a national centre, it was able to accommodate and inspire transnational creativity and plurivocal production. Though this milieu of transnational productivity subsided by the 1840s, its concentrated and collaborative nature led to the emergence of literary agents whose work is broadly acknowledged by individual literary histories of the region. Further interdisciplinary and transnational research on the literary dimensions of imperial cities must rely on these individual endeavours in the service of grasping historical multilingual modernities.

Notes 1. Neubauer draws here on János Horváth’s A magyar irodalom fejlődéstörténete (1978, 57). 2. The original title is Armut und Edelsinn (Poverty and Noble-mindedness); it is translated as A szegénység és nemesszívűség into Hungarian, and as Sighs; or, the Daughter into English. 3. ‘Ismét a játékszínben valék. A szegénység és nemesszívűség cimű Kotzebue darabját jádzották. Ahol a majornak megmutatja a fekete darab kenyeret a tiszt, igen érzékeny. […] Sőt annyira beleszerettem e darabba, hogy akárhány szó jádzandják, megjelenek. Flokban magam természetét látom lefestve’ (Vitkovics 1980, 284). 4. ‘van miben mulassa magát az ember. A sok tudós férfiakkal a könyvtár, a sok újság, a híd – ez fő mulató helyem’ (Vitkovics 1980, 274).

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5. ‘Ő inkább az írói rend összetartozása érzésén munkálkodott, mire társas hajlama s kedvező anyagi körülményei képesítették.’ 6. ‘Az én patriotismusom nem ellenkezik a cosmopolitismussal, s midőn a magyar nyelvnek virágzását óhajtom, midőn azt, amennyire tőlem telik, elősegélleni igyekszem, nem könyörgök azért az egeknek, hogy  - más nyelveknek károkkal virágozzék az én nyelvem; nevezetesen nem könyörgök azért, hogy az a nyelv ne boldolguljon, amelyen az Azan Aga mennyei szépségű elégiája elénekeltetett. […] Az igazság minden nemzettel, mindne felekezettel közös, s a jók s bölcsek fellelik egymást különböző feleken is.’ 7. ‘ezek a csak nem köztünk élő serbusok, a mi Dunánknak, a mi Szávánknak partjain olly poétai lebegéssel, olly makacs kedvvel s olyy egyszerű fennköltséggel költik dalaikat, mint Anakreon és a Homeridák.’ 8. ‘A szerbus manier [...] bizonyos “nyugalmas, szenvedélytelen melegség" [...] megtestesülése.’ 9. ‘A rác nyelv azért, hogy a szláv nyelv uralkodik a templomaiban, szerencsésebb amazoknál, és ugyanezért sokkal inkább közelíthet a főbb cultúrához, de úgy, ha több mecénásai, mintsem most vannak, találkoznának.’ 10. This quotation is from Dusán Radits in 1909: ‘Vitkovics irodalmi munkásságának nagysága azon nemes törekvésben van, hogy a bajnoki és legköltőibb szláv faj össszerokonuljon a magyarral.’

Works Cited Anon. 2018. The Srpska Times, Novine Serbske - The first Serbian daily newspaper. 28 February. https://thesrpskatimes.com/7247-­2/?msclkid=3c49e389b5bb1 1eca860a43e4c6e4fc4. Balogh Sámuel. 1824. A' Románokról. Tudományos Gyűjtemény 4: 70-91. Bor, Kálmán. 1972. A szerb színjátszás kezdetei és Pest-Buda. In Szomszédság és közösség: délszláv-magyar irodalmi kapcsolatok, ed. Sztoján Vujićsics, 167-202. Budapest: Akadémiai. Bracewell, Wendy. 2008. East Looks West: East European Travel Writing, 3 vols. Budapest: CEU Press. Casanova, Pascale. 2004. The World Republic of Letters, trans. M. B. DeBevoise. Cambridge, MA: Harvard. Cornis-Pope, Marcel. 2004. Introduction: Representing East Central Europe’s Marginocentric Cities. The History of the Literary Cultures of East Central Europe, vol. 2, 9-11. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Császár, Elemér. 1917. A Berzsenyi-kritika eredeti fogalmazványa. Irodalomtörténeti Közlemények 27: 464–469.

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D’Haen, Theo. 2017. ‘Capitalising (on) World Literature: Brussels as Shadow Capital of Modernity/Modernism.’ In Other Capitals of the Nineteenth Century: An Alternative Mapping of Literary and Cultural Space, ed. Richard Hibbitt, 111-27. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Demmel, József. 2011. Szlávokból szlovákok. Ludovit Stur és a szlovák nemzeti mozgalom születése a 19. századi Magyarországon. Ph.D. Budapest, ELTE. Drace-Francis, Alex. 2012. The Making of Modern Romanian Culture: Literacy and the Development of National Identity. London: Tauris. Fenyő, István. 1971. A szerb népköltészet hatása a magyar irodalmi gondolkodás fejlődésére a reformkor kezdetén. Hungarológiai Közlemények 9: 51-61. Fried, István. 1969. Kölcsey fordításai. Irodalomtörténeti Közlemények 6: 702-704. Fried, István. 2004. Szlovákok Pest-Budán a 19. században. In his A névadás lehetségessége, 35-50. Pozsony: Madách-Possonium. Horváth, János. 1978. Vitkovics Mihály. Irodalomtörténet 3: 749-787. Imre, Zoltán. 2008. Staging the Nation: Changing Concepts of a National Theatre in Europe. New Theatre Quarterly 24 (1), February: 1-20. Judson, Pieter M.. 2016. The Habsburg Empire: A New History. Cambridge and London: Belknap. Käfer, István. 1977. Az Egyetemi Nyomda négyszáz éve 1577-1977. Budapest: Magyar Helikon. Katona, József. 1821. Mi az oka, hogy Magyar Országban a' játékszíni Költő-­ mesterség lábra nem tud kapni? Tudományos Gyűjtemény 4: 3-22. Király, Péter. 2003. A kelet-közép-európai helyesírások és irodalmi nyelvek kialakulása: a Budai Egyetemi Nyomda kiadványainak tanulságai, 1777-1848. Nyiregyháza: Imprint Kft. Kiss-Szemán, Róbert. 2010. Szláv pokol Pesten. Ján Kollár munkássága 1819 és 1849 között. Budapest: Balassi. Kósa, János. 1937. Pest és Buda elmagyarosodása 1848-ig. Budapest: Általános Nyomda. Krueger, Rita. 2009. Czech, German and Noble: Status and National Identity in Habsburg Bohemia. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lajosi, Krisztina and Andreas Stynen (eds.) 2020. The Matica and Beyond: Cultural Associations and Nationalism in Europe. Leiden: Brill. Lökős, István. 1980. Vitkovics Mihály. In Vitkovics Mihály. Válogatott művei, 5-30. Budapest: Szépirodalmi. Magyar Országos Levéltár. 1844. A magyar nyelv hivatalossá tételéről rendelkező törvény. https://mnl.gov.hu/mnl/ol/hirek/a_magyar_nyelv_hivatalossa_ tetelerol_rendelkezo_torveny_1844. Margócsy, István. 1999. Petőfi Sándor: Kísérlet. Budapest: Korona. Matóvcík, Augustin. 1981. Literárny almanach Zora a madjárská. Aurora. Slovenská literatúra 1: 42-46.

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Nagy, István. 1963. II József reformjai Budapesten. Tanulmányok Budapest múltjábol 15: 363-403. Neubauer, John and Mihály Szegedy-Maszák. 2004. Topographies of Literary Culture in Budapest. In The History of the Literary Cultures of East Central Europe, vol. 2, 162-175. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Neubauer, John. 2004. The Narrowing Scope of Hungarian Literary Histories. In The History of the Literary Cultures of East Central Europe, vol. 3, 384-391. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Penavin, Olga. 1987. Vuk Stefanovic Karadzic és kora. Létünk 17 (6): 861-884. Poór, János. 1997. Buda, Pest and Óbuda between 1703 and 1815. In Budapest: A History from Its Beginnings to 1998, ed. András Gerő and János Poór, 35-67. Boulder, CO: Atlantic Research. Póth, István. 1988. Pest-Buda: az egyetemes szerbség kultúrközpontja. Budapesti Történeti Múzeum évkönyve: Tanulmányok Budapest múltjából XII, 225-238. Budapest: Budapesti Történeti Múzeum. Pukánszkyné, Jolán Kádár. 1936. Budai szinészet. A Színpad: Színháztudományi Szemle 2: 42-51. Sánta, Gábor. 2000. ‘Minden nemzetnek van egy szent városa’ Fejezetek a dualizmus korának Budapest-irodalmából. Pécs: Pannónia könyvek. Sziklay, László. 1972. Vitkovics Mihály, kétnyelvű költő. In Szomszédság és közösség: délszláv-magyar irodalmi kapcsolatok, ed. Sztoján Vujicsics, 203-258. Budapest: Akadémiai. Sziklay, László. 1981. A magyarországi nem magyar nyelvű sajtó kezdetei. Magyar Könyvszemle 97 (1-2): 23-34. Sziklay, László. 1991. Pest-Buda szellemi élete a 18-19.század fordulóján. Budapest: MTA-Argumentum. Szilágyi, Márton. 1996a. Kármán vagy Fanni? Irodalomtörténeti Közlemények 5-6: 686-700. Szilágyi, Márton. 1996b. Schedius Lajos szerepe az Uránia körül. Irodalomtörténeti Közlemények: 127-144. Szilágyi, Márton. 1998. Kármán József és Pajor Gáspár Urániája. Debrecen: Kossuth Egyetemi Kiadó. Szilágyi, Márton. 2015. Beleznay Miklósné Podmaniczky Anna Mária irodalmi szalonja: legenda és valóság. Irodalomtörténeti Közlemények 119: 769-777. Toldy, Ferenc. 1828. Aurora. Tudományos Gyűjtemény 12 (1): 85-88. Toldy, Ferenc. 1875. Irodalmi társasköreink emlékezete. Budapesti Szemle 15: 1-15. Varga, Zsuzsanna. The Buda University Press and National Awakenings in Habsburg Austria. In The Matica and Beyond: Cultural Associations and Nationalism in Europe, ed. Krisztina Lajosi and Andreas Stynen, 11-29. Leiden: Brill, 2020.

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CHAPTER 6

Helsinki or Helsingfors? Jean Sibelius and the Stage Philip Ross Bullock

Located at the easternmost reach of what has traditionally constituted ‘western’ Europe, and—at the same time—having a significant history as one of the most westerly outposts of the Russian Empire, Helsinki (or Helsingfors as it is known in Swedish) constitutes a fascinating case study in what is means to be a capital city. Within the Nordic region, its status is equally polyvalent, given Finland’s close, yet nonetheless oblique relationship—politically, historically, linguistically and culturally—to the Scandinavian nations of Denmark, Norway and Sweden, not to mention its ties to the Baltic states, above all Estonia. The geographical and historical factors determining Helsinki’s status are matched, too, by temporal considerations. Although Helsinki’s foundation dates back to the sixteenth century, it was little more than a military outpost until the nineteenth century. Then, after several centuries of Swedish rule, Finland was ceded to the Russian Empire in 1809. In 1812, the Russian authorities deliberately established Helsinki as the capital of the new Grand Duchy of

P. R. Bullock (*) Wadham College, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 A. Bhattacharya et al. (eds.), Literary Capitals in the Long Nineteenth Century, Literary Urban Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-13060-1_6

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Finland in a strategic attempt to weaken the Swedish influence represented by the former capital, Turku (Åbo in Swedish). At the behest of Tsar Alexander I, the city’s scale and aspect were comprehensively transformed by the German-born architect, Carl Ludvig Engel. Thus, and perhaps ironically, many of its most obviously national institutions—its legislature, administration, university and bank—were inaugurated through processes of external imperial rule, even whilst they came to express a powerful sense of local autonomy, culminating in Finland’s declaration of independence on 6 December 1917 in the wake of the October Revolution. The story of Finnish self-determination and eventual independence has been told many times and remains a powerful prism through which the Finnish arts have typically been viewed. Whether through its participation in the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1900, interest in the Kalevala (the Finnish national epic, originally compiled and published by Elias Lönnrot in 1835 and 1849) and Karelian culture more generally, cultivation of its autonomous administrative institutions, resistance to Tsar Nicholas II’s policies of Russification, and eventually the assassination of Nikolay Bobrikov, the Russian governor-general, in June 1904, Finland has often been seen as the archetypal ‘small nation’, intent on freeing itself from imperial domination. This chapter charts a rather different course, seizing on the fractures and discontinuities within Finnish history in order to explore the complex and multilayered nature of Helsinki’s status as the Finnish capital under the period of Russian rule. In particular, it examines the interaction between Finnish- and Swedish-language institutions, primarily in the world of the theatre. In doing so, it challenges accounts which have tended to foreground national Romanticism, a search for self-­ determination, and a rejection of Russian influence as the principal features of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Finnish culture, emphasising instead hybridity and multiplicity as central elements in the city’s make-up around the turn of the century. This polyphony extends to Helsinki’s transnational and international engagements too. On the one hand, the city was often held to embody a coherent and uniform sense of Finnishness (not least in the context of international exhibitions and the global circulation of culture). At the same time, Helsinki itself served as a multilingual and multinational entrepôt for the import and export of various cultural models which were subsequently taken up by various factions within the city’s artistic communities. Indeed, its physical distance from many of Europe’s main centres was the precondition for its many cosmopolitan cultural encounters.

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The individual who best embodies this chapter’s themes is, perhaps paradoxically, Jean Sibelius (1865–1957). Perhaps best known as the composer of Finlandia and other patriotic works and celebrated as the most famous musical expression of Finnish nationalism, Sibelius instead emerges as a complex and ambiguous figure, whose own multilingualism and cosmopolitanism well match those of the Finnish capital.

City and Nation Given the prominence of the narrative of national self-determination in many accounts of Finnish history, it is perhaps surprising to see how often Helsinki’s status as Finland’s capital has been called into question. As Lieven Ameel suggests, ‘Helsinki has long been defined by what it seems to be lacking. It has been claimed that it has little or no history, that it is an artificial construction that is not representative of the Finnish nation and its culture’ (2016, 10). As late as 1914, the novelist and poet Veikko Antero Koskenniemi—author of patriotic words sung to the tune of Sibelius’s Finlandia—was lamenting Helsinki’s failure to produce a writer who could express the city’s character both within the nation and internationally: Stockholm has Strindberg, St. Petersburg has Dostoevsky, Berlin has Kretzer, Hamburg has Frenssen, Oulu has Pakkala and Rauma has Nortamo—but who is Helsinki’s poet? Who has claimed for Helsinki the admission ticket into the society of literary cities? Who is the poet of Helsinki? (Koskenniemi 1914, cited in Ameel 2016, 10)

Koskenniemi’s sense of scale here is revealing; Helsinki appears to be caught uncomfortably between the great European capitals and financial centres on the one hand (Stockholm, St Petersburg, Berlin and Hamburg) and seemingly more ‘authentic’ expressions of Finnish regionalism such as Oulu and Rauma on the other. Equally significant is Koskenniemi’s presumption that a capital city should be the organic expression of a nation’s identity, even—perhaps especially—when that nation is not (yet) a state. Complaining about the absence of any ‘synthetic literary work about Helsinki, a novel or an epic, in which this Northern capital would live in its totality with all those characteristics which nature, race and culture have bestowed upon her’ (Koskenniemi 1914, cited in Ameel 2016, 10), he imposes a particular linguistic and ethnocentric vision on the city and its

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relationship vis-à-vis the nation. In this regard, Koskenniemi harks back to a complaint voiced some three decades earlier by the writer, Zachris Topelius, who had suggested that Helsinki was ‘alien to the country it had to represent’ (1885/1986, 21, cited in Ameel 2016, 30). Topelius’s complaint was based on the observation that the Finnish capital was still dominated by Swedish-speaking Finns (including, ironically enough, Topelius himself). Throughout the nineteenth century, Helsinki—or, rather, Helsingfors as it is known in Swedish—was predominantly a Swedish-speaking city. Even by 1900, when Finnish nationalism was at its most intense, the capital was split roughly equally between the two language communities, whereas by the same date, the number of Swedish speakers in the Grand Duchy as a whole amounted to just 12.9 percent (Engman 1995, 192). Matters were further complicated by questions of class. Swedish remained the language of many members of the social, political, economic and cultural elite, with Finnish being the language of the less educated working classes, many of whom had moved to the city from the countryside (Ameel 2016, 53). Topelius presupposes that a nation’s capital can be conveyed adequately only through the use of a shared national language as spoken and written by its leading literary representatives. This was, of course, a widespread view at the time, even if it evidently fails to convey the complexity of language politics in many European cities, as well as the lived, multilingual experience of many of their inhabitants. It is, moreover, a view which underpins—explicitly or implicitly—much modern scholarship. Studies of the representation of Helsinki in literature tend to bifurcate into distinct linguistic traditions, even when many writers were themselves bilingual in daily life, if not in literary practice. Lieven Ameel (2016), for instance, focuses on the image of Helsinki in Finnish-language prose, whereas Massimo Ciaravolo (2000) and Arne Toftegaard Pedersen (2007) devote their attention to the canon of works by Swedish-speaking Finns. More recently, however, narratives such as these have been nuanced and complicated by the application of comparative, transnational approaches to the study of Finnish literature. In particular, Riikka Rossi’s consideration of the impact of French literature on Finnish naturalism (2007) and work by Pirjo Lyytikäinen and others (1997, 2003, 2020) on the international entanglements of Finnish Symbolism and Decadence have painted a more complex and wide-ranging narrative of turn-of-the-­ century literary culture. This widening of perspective offers a useful counter-­ narrative to accounts of Finnish culture that are written on

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exclusively national or linguistic grounds and can be productively applied to the cityscape of Helsinki/Helsingfors itself. By setting aside a narrative of national Romanticism which has tended to emphasise the rejection of Russian domination and the emergence of a distinctly Finnish national consciousness, it becomes possible to attend to the internal fissures of language, class and identity which shaped the city as a site of lived artistic experience.

City and Language One of the most distinctive features of Helsinki/Helsingfors in the nineteenth century was the emergence of a parallel set of cultural institutions designed to cater to the needs of its two chief language communities. To this day, it hosts both a Finnish Literature Society (Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seura, or SKS) and a Society of Swedish Literature in Finland (Svenska litteratursällskapet i Finland, or SLS). Founded in 1831 and 1885 respectively, these institutions not only reflect Finland’s two national languages, but actively shape its twin canons of literature and culture through print. The importance of print in creating and maintaining a coherent sense of national identity is a well-established theme in scholarship, and both the SKS and the SLS are central to the emergence of what Benedict Anderson would call the ‘imagined communities’ of Finnish- and Swedish-speaking Finns (1983). As in the case of studies by Ameel, Ciaravolo and Toftegaard Pedersen of the representation of the Finnish capital in prose, such practices can have the effect of instantiating linguistic difference. Yet such seemingly rigid distinctions are belied by the realities of living in a multilingual urban environment (and note that in the nineteenth century, in addition to speakers of Finnish and Swedish, Helsinki was also home to a substantial number of German and Russian speakers, as well as communities of Jews, Tatars and Roma [Kent 2004, 69]).1 One way of accessing this experience is by shifting the focus of attention from the world of print to that of everyday life and artistic performance, both of which operate according to cultural practices very different from those structuring the production and consumption of published texts. Consider, for instance, how inhabitants of turn-of-the-century Helsinki/Helsingfors might have interacted with the various spaces of the capital. As a modern, carefully planned and compact city, Helsinki was ideally suited to the activities of the flâneur or flâneuse (Ameel 2010).

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Architecturally and administratively speaking, the official centre of the city was—and remains—Senate Square (Senaatintori in Finnish, Senatstorget in Swedish). Flanked to the west by the main buildings of the university, to the north by the city’s imposing Lutheran cathedral and to the east by the senate (and now government), it unites the institutions of learning, religion and politics. The statue to Tsar Alexander II that stands in the middle of the square indicates, moreover, that Finnish autonomy was overseen from St Petersburg, some 300 kilometres away, just as the frieze adorning the nearby House of the Estates shows Tsar Alexander I presiding over the Diet of Porvoo (Finland’s first legislative assembly, which was convened so that the country’s four estates of the nobility, clergy, burghers and peasantry could pledge allegiance to the Russian Emperor in 1809). Certainly Engel’s neoclassical designs for many of Helsinki’s principal nineteenth-century buildings are redolent of the Russian capital. Yet the elegant spectacle of Senate Square (not to mention its exposed and windswept expanse) means that it does not readily accommodate some of the more mundane elements of everyday life. Here, another space proved more conducive to ordinary companionability: the central Esplanade a few hundred metres to the south of Senate Square. To be sure, the Esplanade— Esplanadi in Finnish and Esplanaden in Swedish—contains its share of official buildings, not least the official residency of the Finnish president (and one of the imperial palaces of the Russian ruling dynasty before 1917). Yet the Esplanade’s primary function is oriented more towards the needs of Helsinki’s ordinary citizens, or at least its educated bourgeoisie. At its eastern extent is one of the city’s open-air markets, as well as a small brick-built market hall. To the north and south of the Esplanade are shops, hotels, restaurants and offices, creating spaces of sociability and interaction on a variety of scales. The park which runs between the north and south sides of the Esplanade functions as one of the city’s principal areas for pleasurable strolling and gentle entertainment, and constitutes an ideal space to see and be seen. The notion of the Esplanade as Helsinki’s outdoor ‘salon’ is reinforced by the presence of many of its most celebrated cafés and bars, including the Kämp in the hotel of the same name and, perhaps most famously, Kappeli (the ‘Chapel’, or Kapellet in Swedish). Looking rather like a cross between a Grecian pavilion and a Victorian palm house, it provided a luminous symbol of the city’s social life. It was also a site of temptation and even ruin; many turn-of-the-century fictions include scenes in which the young and innocent hero encounters here both alcohol and sex. Indeed, historically speaking, Esplanadi was also the

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haunt of prostitutes and streetwalkers, adding an edgier undertone to its urbane sophistication (Ameel 2016, 56–80). The spaces of the Esplanade were always likely to accommodate a variety of languages, accents and idiolects, and one very striking cultural expression of linguistic identity is to be found at its western-most extent. This is the location of the Swedish Theatre, the city’s first theatre in fact, and certainly its most significant one until the construction of the Finnish National Theatre in 1902 (Byckling 2003a and 2003b). The original building was constructed to designs by Engel in 1826–1827 (it was, in fact, first known as the Engels Theater) and accommodated an audience of up to 400. This was replaced by a rather larger building in 1860, which burned down in 1863. The present structure dates from 1866 and was constructed to designs by Nikolai Benois of the Imperial Academy of the Arts in St Petersburg (it has been renovated a number of times since) (Kent 2004, 227–228). Known until 1887 as the New Theatre (Nya Teatern), and since then as the Swedish Theatre (Svenska Teatern), it was primarily home to Swedish-language productions. Although many Russian interventions in Helsinki were intended to diminish Swedish influence by supporting key aspects of Finnish national sentiment (a chair in Finnish language and literature was established at the university in 1850, for instance, and much ethnographical work on the Kalevala and other key documents of Finnish culture was supported by the Russian Academy of Sciences in St Petersburg), it is striking that throughout the nineteenth century the city’s leading theatre was associated with its Swedish-speaking elite. A visible expression of the cultural confidence and even supremacy of Swedish drama in the city at the time, the theatre attests both to a native tradition of Swedish-language literature and to close connections with the theatrical world of Sweden itself in ways that are perhaps analogous to the relationship between Paris and Brussels (Casanova 2004, 131–133; D’haen 2017). Helsinki/Helsingfors is, then, a linguistic palimpsest shaped by the cultural practices of its varied inhabitants.2

Sibelius and the Theatre Best known as a composer of symphonies and orchestral works, Jean Sibelius is closely associated with Finnish nationalism. In works such the Lemminkäinen Suite (1895), the choral symphony, Kullervo (1891–1892), the tone poem, Pohjola’s Daughter (1906) and the dramatic vocal scena, Luonnotar (1913), he drew on elements of the Kalevala. Musically, he

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was drawn to the runic singing and other folkloric traditions of Karelia, a region reaching across the Russo-Finnish border, which many nationalists saw as a pristine repository of national culture. Many of his close friends were active in the national revival, and his marriage to Aino Järnefelt in 1892 brought him into yet closer contact with a group of Finnish patriots. Accordingly, his music was increasingly interpreted as the artistic expression of the move towards national self-determination, much as Akseli Gallen-Kallela’s paintings were in the world of the visual arts. Sibelius’s participation in the European tour of the Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra in 1900 brought him to the attention of European audiences too. Coinciding with both the Exposition Universelle in Paris (at which Finland was represented with its own pavilion) and growing awareness of Russia’s oppressive policies in the Grand Duchy, this tour translated Sibelius’s music into an act of unofficial cultural diplomacy on behalf of the Finnish nation (Smeds 1992; Tyrväinen 1998). In its broad outline, this story is typical of how small nations under imperial domination often deploy culture in service of their political aspirations (Chitnis et  al., 2019). Just as the music of Fryderyk Chopin embodied the voice of Poland (then partitioned between Austria, Prussia and Russia), or that of Bedřich Smetana or Antonín Dvořák articulated the experience of Bohemia within the Austro-Hungarian Empire, so too did Sibelius’s music come to serve as the metonymic representation of Finnishness. Yet this is to overlook significant features of his artistic output and creative identity, not to mention his lived experience. After all, his first language was Swedish, not Finnish. This was not, in fact, an uncommon situation among Finnish patriots around the turn of the century, many of whom learned Finnish later in life and made efforts to Fennicise themselves in other ways. Gallen-Kallela, for instance, had been born into a Swedish-speaking family in Pori and only later changed his name from Axel Waldemar Gallén. Sibelius was aged ten when he began to learn Finnish at Finland’s first Finnish-language secondary school, the Normaalilyseo in Hämeenlinna. Even when he had learned the language— and married into one of Finland’s leading Fennoman families—he corresponded with his wife primarily in Swedish (Aino replied insistently in Finnish) and kept his diary mainly in that language too (Talas 2001, 2003, 2007).3 None of this should be taken to imply that Swedish-speaking Finns were somehow less patriotic than speakers of Finnish or that the Swedish language is any less central to modern Finnish culture. Many of the central

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figures of the national revival in the nineteenth century—above all, perhaps, the poet Johan Ludvig Runeberg—were and remain revered figures, just as Tove Jansson has become an international icon of Finnish culture in the twentieth century. Rather, it highlights that whilst from the outside, Finnish artists were increasingly and even exclusively seen through a prism of a kind of Romantic nationalism that was organically linked to language, their experience of cultural life at home was always mediated through the experience of multilingual hybridity. As James Hepokoski has argued, Sibelius remained faithful to the twin heritage of Finnish and Swedish culture which characterised turn-of-the-century Finland and which was played out in daily life in the Finnish capital: During the 1890s […] Sibelius cultivated and blended not one style but two, generated by different aspects of his personality. At the risk of oversimplification, one might also suggest that these differences intersected in vital ways with the ever-present dialectic of language and world-view in Sibelius’s (and Finland’s) life: the ‘Finnish-language’ (or Kalevalaic) and ‘Swedish-­ Finnish’ tendencies. The two styles were not mutually exclusive: there was much overlap between them, but certain compositions tilted towards one or the other. While the rugged Finnish manner, concerned with burning issues of ethnic authenticity and cultural legitimacy, was the more politicized and disruptive, the Swedish-Finnish impulse sought a larger, more international audience on traditional terms. (Hepokoski 2001, 326)

If Sibelius’s orchestral works tended towards what Hepokoski refers to as the ‘Kalevalaic’ (and hence the ‘Finnish’) aspects of his artistic make-up, then other, perhaps less familiar aspects of his creativity express his affinity with the ‘Swedish-Finnish’ tradition within Finnish culture. That is certainly the case when it comes to his more than 100 songs (romanser in Swedish), almost all of which were composed to Swedish-language texts, whether by Swedish poets or Swedish-Finnish poets. If these romanser are at least reasonably well represented internationally in recitals and on recordings, then Sibelius’s music for the theatre constitutes a far more neglected facet of his contribution to turn-of-the-century life in the Finnish capital. These scores have not always been accorded the attention they deserve, partly because incidental music for the theatre has not enjoyed particularly high status in musicological criticism. A less obvious, but—for the purposes of this chapter—more significant reason for their neglect is that they do not easily inscribe themselves into the kind of

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nationalist historiography that has for so long been characteristic of Sibelius’s reception as an icon of Finnish identity. Instead, his work in the theatre reveals two important additional axes around which Sibelius’s artistic identity operates, and which are, moreover, closely intertwined with the world of turn-of-the-century Helsinki/Helsingfors: his involvement in the Swedish Theatre and the Swedish Theatre’s role as a cite of cosmopolitan cultural production and consumption. Sibelius’s habit of rearranging his theatrical scores as concert suites, as well as refashioning individual movements as stand-alone pieces for concert performance, has largely effaced their relationship to the original plays and productions for which they were conceived. Take, for instance, his most popular work, the ‘Valse triste’, which was originally composed for a production of Kuolema (Death), a play by his brother-in-law, Arvid Järnefelt. Even the iconic Finlandia had its origins in a series of seven historical tableaux staged at the Swedish Theatre on 4 November 1899 (three other movements were repurposed as the Scènes historiques in 1911). However, when restored to their original context, these scores shed light on the interaction of Finnish and Swedish theatrical traditions in the Finnish capital itself, as well as on the relationship between Finnish turn-of-the century culture and developments elsewhere in Europe. Although Sibelius had written some theatre music in the 1890s—a single song for a production of Gunnar Wennerberg’s Näcken (The Watersprite) in 1888, and the entire score for Adolf Paul’s Kung Christian II (King Christian II) at the Swedish Theatre in 1898—, it was in the first decade of the twentieth century that he turned most decisively to the stage. In 1903, he produced the score for the first performance of Järnefelt’s Kuolema, which opened at the Finnish National Theatre on 2 December that year (Kurki 2001, 79–82). Given Sibelius’s reputation as a composer of works on national themes, one might have expected this collaboration with one of Finland’s leading Finnish-language authors to lead to more scores for the National Theatre. Yet in terms of language and cultural politics, Kuolema seems more like an extension of the Kalevala-­ inspired nationalism of the 1890s than a new direction in Sibelius’s artistic development. It was, instead, to be another institution that stimulated a new bout of creativity. In 1902, a group of Swedish-speaking intellectuals had founded Euterpe, a journal committed to an international vision of Finnish culture, with a particular interest in the French arts (Goss 2009, 306–312). Sibelius’s association with the group had a decisive impact on

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his creativity, which can be traced through a series of scores composed in the 1900s for landmark productions at the Swedish Theatre. The first of these was the 1906 production of Maurice Maeterlinck’s Pelléas och Mélisande (Pelléas and Mélisande), which was given in a translation by Bertel Gripenberg, one of the founders of Euterpe (three of Sibelius’s romanser also set poems by Gripenberg). Maeterlinck’s play was, of course, a cornerstone of Symbolist drama across Europe at the time, so it is unsurprising that the Swedish Theatre should want to stage it. As shaped by the legacy of the English Pre-Raphaelites as much as by the theories of Richard Wagner, it offers a timeless, syncretic approach to drama that was very different from the socially inflected naturalism of Henrik Ibsen, Georg Hauptmann, Maksim Gorky or George Bernard Shaw. This production was, however, significant for another reason. It starred Harriet Bosse, the Norwegian actress who was later to become the third wife of the Swedish dramatist, August Strindberg. It was Bosse who subsequently suggested to Strindberg that Sibelius should compose the music for his as-yet unstaged Svanevit (Swanwhite). Plans for a premiere in Stockholm fell through, and so the play’s premiere took place at the Swedish Theatre in Helsinki/Helsingfors on 8 April 1908 instead (Kurki 2001, 85–92). Marking a lyric strain in Strindberg’s oeuvre that was distinct from the more naturalistic tenor of plays such as Fröken Julie (Miss Julie, 1888), Svanevit further highlights how Sibelius’s engagement with the Swedish Theatre was part of a broader pan-European interest in myth and archetype. Between Pelléas och Mélisande and Svanevit came Belsazars gästabud (Belshazzar’s Feast) by another member of the Euterpe group, Hjalmar Procopé. Based on a story taken from the Biblical Book of Daniel, Belsazars gästabud also attests to the powerful impact of Oscar Wilde’s Salomé, written, of course, in French, and, thanks to Max Reinhardt’s famous German-language production at Berlin’s Kleines Theater in 1902 and the Dresden premiere of Richard Strauss’s operatic version in 1905, a canonical document of European Decadence (Grimley 2016; Kurki 2001, 82–84). If Procopé’s play suggests that Finnish artists were keen to emulate the latest trends in modern drama, then the fourth of Sibelius’s theatre scores illustrates the further development of a distinct brand of Nordic Symbolism. Mikael Lybeck—like Procopé, a member of the Euterpe group—published his Ödlan (The Lizard) in 1908, but rather than following Procopé’s Biblical example, he produced a play that attests to a powerful internalisation of Maeterlinck’s symbolism, particularly through his evocative use of silence and abstraction. Sibelius’s music was composed

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the following year, and the play eventually opened on 6 April 1910, again at the Swedish Theatre, running for just six performances (Kallberg 2011). Taken together, these four productions—a Swedish translation of a French-language play by the Belgian Maeterlinck, a world premiere of a play by Sweden’s leading dramatist, and two plays by Swedish-speaking Finns that drew heavily on contemporary trends in European drama— illustrate something of the specificity of the cultural role played by the Swedish Theatre in the artistic life of the Finnish capital. The Swedish Theatre certainly catered to a local Swedish-speaking audience, yet it was intimately bound up with wider networks of cultural production, extending across the Gulf of Bothnia to Stockholm, and southwards to the European mainland. The generic range represented by these four plays also maps some of the principal creative preoccupations of Europe’s leading dramatists at the time. Rejecting the social dictates of realism and naturalism, they embraced instead plots, motifs and characters that resisted narrowly national categories of language, milieu and setting. As much as the Kalevala and other documents of Finnish national identity, these Swedish-language plays were central to debates around Finnish modernity in the early twentieth century, and Sibelius’s involvement in them is as crucial to his artistic development as his more well-documented ‘Finnish’ compositions. It might be tempting, therefore, on the basis of Sibelius’s scores for Pelléas och Mélisande, Belsazars gästabud, Svanevit and Ödlan, to posit a distinction between the cosmopolitan repertoire of the Swedish Theatre and the more parochial ambit of the Finnish National Theatre. As Daniel M. Grimley argues, however, the ‘complex cultural urban geography’ of the Finnish capital means that it would be ‘overly simplistic to map notions of provincialism and isolation onto the Finnish National Theater and a more international outlook onto its Swedish-Finnish counterpart’ (2016, 239). Whilst Sibelius might have kept his distance from the Finnish National Theatre after the premiere of Järnefelt’s Kuolema, it is certainly not the case that the theatre was somehow more local or limited in focus. To be sure, it was much younger than the Swedish Theatre, dating from as recently as 1902. Yet that youth gave it a distinct advantage of its own in other respects. The canon of Finnish-language drama was still comparatively limited, both with regard to Finnish-language prose and poetry and with regard to the Swedish-language repertoire.4 Accordingly, Finnish-­ language drama emerged as a younger, arguably more energetic cousin to the older and most established Swedish tradition. Moreover, whilst

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artworks inspired by the Kalevala could be interpreted as an expression of a primal Finnish identity more closely associated with the untouched rural landscape of Karelia, they could equally be incorporated into a modernist interest in myth, ritual, symbol and archetype (Lyytikäinen 2021). The international sympathies of the Swedish-speaking members of the Euterpe group might have emerged ‘in opposition to what they regarded as the more insular Finnish Romantic nationalism’ (Grimley 2016, 236), yet that was to overlook both the receptivity and the contemporaneity of Finnish-­ language culture, especially after the heyday of Romantic nationalism in the 1890s. Something of this can be seen by turning to Sibelius’s renewed engagement with the Finnish National Theatre after his close involvement with the Swedish Theatre in the 1900s. Initially, though, he stayed away from the Finnish theatre; after Ödlan, his next theatre score was Scaramouche, a ballet pantomime to a libretto by the Danish writer, Poul Knudsen. Composed in 1913, but not premiered until 1922  in Copenhagen and 1924  in Stockholm, it draws on characters and ideas of the commedia dell’arte tradition, thereby setting Scandinavian culture in an explicitly European, cosmopolitan context (Broad 2020). Sibelius’s turn to the gestures and idiom of dance seems, moreover, to reject language itself, and with it, the linguistic justification for distinct national canons that appeared to govern the world of theatre in the Finnish capital and elsewhere. Much as he had become an icon of the Finnish nation and its struggle for autonomy, if not yet independence, Sibelius seemed keen to find ways to resist such a narrative and situate himself as a leading representative of European modernism. In 1916, however, he returned to the Finnish National Theatre, and the details of this production shed important light both on his artistic priorities and on those of the capital’s Finnish-language stage. At the height of the Great War, rather than commit himself to a patriotic national drama by a native author, Sibelius produced a score to accompany a production of Jokamies (Everyman) by Hugo von Hofmannsthal in a translation by Huugo Jalkanen. Based on a number of earlier sources, including mysteries and morality plays from the Low Countries and England, Hofmannsthal’s Jedermann was an attempt ‘to reimagine a much earlier theatrical tradition while also striving to address the challenge of how to create a genuinely popular drama within a modern post-symbolist aesthetic context’ (Grimley 2021, 135). Premiered in Berlin in 1911, Jedermann went on to inaugurate the Salzburg Festival in 1920 (both

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productions were directed by Max Reinhardt in a striking evolution of his aesthetics from the earlier production of Wilde’s Salomé in Berlin in 1902 which had made his name). There are a number of ways we might construe the 1916 production of Jokamies and Sibelius’s involvement in it. Whilst it is not a piece of Finnish drama, it nonetheless bears witness to the political context of the time. As a Grand Duchy of the Russian Empire, Finland had entered the Great War on the side of the Allied Powers (France, Great Britain and Russia). However, long-standing cultural affinities with Germany and a prevailing anti-Russian sentiment meant that few Finns were motivated to fight on the Russian side. Indeed, in 1916, a number of Finnish infantry soldiers formed a voluntary association of pro-­ German Jäger, many of whom trained in Germany and fought on the German side in the war. In 1917, Sibelius wrote his Jääkärimarssi (Jäger March) to words by Heikki Nurmio, who was serving in the German Imperial Army at the time. The music for Jokamies does not directly reflect this military and political context, yet it is nonetheless striking to see how Sibelius’s return to the Finnish National Theatre was linked to a major work of German-language drama. It may well have been the play’s origins that led the Russian governor general to cancel its premiere on 3 November (although it did eventually open just two days later) (Grimley 2021, 139). It would be an exaggeration, though, to impute direct political motives to Sibelius’s involvement in Jokamies. He was most likely motivated by financial considerations, as well as a growing sense of his own mortality in the year after he had turned fifty (the play deals with Everyman’s growing awareness of his responsibility for his actions as he faces death and the final judgement). Yet Jokamies does point to a reorientation in the nature of Sibelius’s theatrical engagements. Whereas his collaborations with the Swedish Theatre were situated at the intersection of a number of transnational influences, with a strong predisposition towards France, Jokamies marks a shift towards Germanic culture, however momentary and contingent. In terms of genre, the symbolism, stylisation and syncretism of Pelléas och Mélisande, Belsazars gästabud, Svanevit and Ödlan give way to a more archaic form of popular, participatory theatre. Sibelius’s next— and final—piece of incidental music would confirm aspects of this shift, yet would once again unmoor his relationship to language and nation. In May 1925, he was approached to produce the score for a production of William Shakespeare’s The Tempest to be staged at the Royal Theatre in Copenhagen. He completed the score that

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autumn, and—after a number of delays—the production opened on 16 March 1926. As with Jokamies, Stormen (as The Tempest is known in Danish) represents a retreat from the contemporary repertoire that had characterised Sibelius’s scores for the Swedish Theatre in Helsinki/ Helsingfors. Similarly, it continues the geographical reorientation of Sibelius’s theatrical attention towards the European north that had been precipitated by Jokamies. The perils of pursuing this argument too relentlessly should be clear enough, of course. Sibelius’s German critics had long stressed the nature of his music as Heimatkunst, to borrow Walter Neimann’s influential description (1906, 137). The appropriation of his music in the Third Reich similarly rested on an ethnocentric vision of Finnish culture as an organic part of an unsullied Nordic expression of Aryanism (Jackson 2010). Yet The Tempest is a play about a shipwreck and evokes themes of dislocation, deracination and hybridity. Modern-day critics are increasingly inclined to see it through the prism of postcoloniality, ecocriticism and even the posthuman (Vaughan and Vaughan 2014; Raber 2018). Within the context of this chapter, however, it seems most important to note that Sibelius’s last piece of incidental music was commissioned for a theatre outside of his homeland. It reminds us that the history of national theatres can certainly be thought of in centripetal terms, tending towards a gathering of forces inwards to establish and reinforce distinct national canons (Senelick 2009; Wilmer 2008; van Maanen and Wilmer 1998). At the same time, theatre also functions centrifugally, throwing out ideas and influences, and creating an unstable blend of transnational motifs through the contingencies of translation, reception and performance (Bullock 2017; Fischer-Lichte and Gronau 2010; Rem and Fulsås 2018; Brodie and Cole 2017). This may be a particular propensity of ‘smaller’ nations, especially those at crucial moments in the emergence of their sense of identity, who deploy manifestations of their valuable cultural capital in the international arena as a means of enhancing their geopolitical reach and defending their often hard-won autonomy (Van Maanen et  al. 2009). Sibelius’s music for the stage also suggests that whilst the city of Helsinki/ Helsingfors played a central role in the forging of modern Finnish statehood, it also stands for a more linguistically diverse account of turn-of-­ the-century Finnish culture than often proposed in nationalist narratives and evokes the productive relationship between nationalism and cosmopolitanism that is crucial to urban modernity.

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Notes 1. See Schoolfield (1998a) for a capacious survey of literature in Finland that actually devotes more space to writing in Swedish than in Finnish. 2. Beyond the purview of this chapter is the history of the Russian Theatre in Helsinki. Completed in 1879 and opened in 1880, it was designed to cater to the city’s Russian-speaking audiences. It also hosted regular performances of opera and later became the official home of the Finnish National Opera and Ballet from 1918 until 1993. On the history of the Russian theatre, see Byckling (2009). On Russo-Finnish cultural relations more generally, see Bullock (2011). 3. Talas’s edition of Sibelius’s correspondence with his wife is not unproblematic, as the contents of the first two volumes are given entirely in Finnish translation. Only the third volume retains the original Swedish, alongside Oili Suominen’s Finnish translations. Compare Fabian Dahlström’s edition of Sibelius’s diary, which is reproduced in its original Swedish, with occasional Finnish interjections (Sibelius 2005). 4. According to Kai Laitinen and George C.  Schoolfield, the first Finnish-­ language play to have been staged in Finland was Pietari Hannikainen’s Silmän-kääntäjä (The Conjurer), seen in Lappeenranta in 1848, with Aleksis Kivi’s Anttonius Putronius eli Antti Puuronen the first Finnish-­ language play to be seen in Helsinki in 1858 (1998, 62). On Swedish-­ language theatre, see Schoolfield (1998b, 389-91).

Works Cited Ameel, Lieven. 2010. Walking the Streets of Helsinki. Traces of the Flâneur in Early Finnish Prose Literature. In In the Vanguard of Cultural Transfer: Cultural Transmitters and Authors in Peripheral Literary Fields, eds. Petra Broomans and Marta Ronne, 119-34. Groningen: Barkhuis. Ameel, Lieven. 2016. Helsinki in Early Twentieth-Century Literature: Urban Experiences in Finnish Prose Fiction 1890-1940. Helsinki: Finnish Literature Society. Anderson, Benedict. 1983. Imagined Communities: Reflection on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso. Broad, Leah. 2020. Scaramouche, Scaramouche: Sibelius on Stage. Journal of the Royal Musical Association 145 (2), November: 417-56. Brodie, Geraldine, and Emma Cole. 2017. Adapting Translation for the Stage. London: Routledge. Bullock, Philip Ross. 2011. Sibelius and the Russian Traditions. In Sibelius and His World, ed. Daniel M. Grimley, 3-57. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

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Bullock, Philip Ross. 2017. ‘Ibsen on the London Stage: Independent Theatre as Transnational Space’, Forum for Modern Language Studies 53 (3), July: 360-70. Byckling, Liisa. 2003a. Finnish National Theatre. In The Oxford Encyclopaedia of Theatre and Performance, ed. Dennis Kennedy, 2 vols, I, 467. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Byckling, Liisa. 2003b. Helsinki. In The Oxford Encyclopaedia of Theatre and Performance, ed. Dennis Kennedy, 2 vols, I, 580. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Byckling, Liisa. 2009. Keisarinajan kulisseissa: Helsingin venäläisen teatterin historia 1868-1918. Helsinki: Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seura. Casanova, Pascale. 2004. The World Republic of Letters, trans. M. B. DeBevoise. Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press. Chitnis, Rajendra, Jakob Stougaard-Nielson, Rhian Atkin, and Zoran Milutinović (eds.). 2019. Translating the Literatures of Small European Nations. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. Ciaravolo, Massimo. 2000. En ungdomsvän från Sverige: Om mottagandet av Hjalmar Söderbergs verk i Finland 1895–1920. Helsingfors: Svenska litteratursällskapet i Finland. D’haen, Theo. 2017. Capitalising (on) World Literature: Brussels as Shadow Capital of Modernity/Modernism. In Other Capitals of the Nineteenth Century: An Alternative Mapping of Literary and Cultural Space, ed. Richard Hibbitt, 111-27. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Engman, Max. 1995. Finns and Swedes in Finland. In Ethnicity and Nation Building in the Nordic World, ed. Sven Tägil, 179-216. London: Hurst. Fischer-Lichte, Erika, and Barbara Gronau (eds.). 2010. Global Ibsen: Performing Multiple Modernities. London and New York: Routledge. Goss, Glenda Dawn. 2009. Sibelius: A Composer’s Life and the Awakening of Finland. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Grimley, Daniel M. 2016. Vers un cosmopolitisme nordique: Space, Place, and the Case of Sibelius’s ‘Nordic Cosmopolitanism’, Musical Quarterly 99 (2), Summer: 230-53. Grimley, Daniel M. 2021. Music beyond the Breakthrough: Sibelius, Hofmannsthal, and the Summoning of Everyman. In Music’s Nordic Breakthrough: Aesthetics, Modernity, and Cultural Exchange, 1890-1930, ed. Philip Ross Bullock and Daniel M. Grimley, 127-49. Woodbridge: Boydell. Hepokoski, James. 2001. Sibelius, Jean. In The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, ed. Stanley Sadie, 2nd edn., 29 vols, XXIII, 319-47. London: Macmillan. Jackson, Timothy L. 2010. Sibelius the Political. In Sibelius in the Old and New World: Aspects of His Music, Its Interpretation, and Reception, ed. Timothy L. Jackson and Veijo Murtomäki, 69-124. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang.

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Kallberg, Jeffrey. 2011. Theatrical Sibelius: The Melodramatic Lizard. In Jean Sibelius and His World, ed. Daniel M. Grimley, 74-88. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press. Kent, Neil. 2004. Helsinki: A Cultural and Literary History. Oxford: Signal Books. Koskenniemi, V. A. 1914. Runon kaupunkeja. Porvoo: Werner Söderström. Kurki, Eija. 2001. Sibelius and the Theater: A Study of the Incidental Music for Symbolist Plays. In Sibelius Studies, ed. Timothy L.  Jackson and Veijo Murtomäki, 76-94. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Laitinen, Kai, and George C.  Schoolfield. 1998. New Beginnings, Latin and Finnish. In A History of Finland’s Literature, ed. George C. Schoolfield, 34-63. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press. Lyytikäinen, Pirjo. 1997. Narkissos ja sfinksi. Helsinki: Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seura. Lyytikäinen, Pirjo. (ed.). 2003. Changing Scenes: Encounters between European and Finnish Fin de Siècle. Helsinki: Finnish Literature Society. Lyytikäinen, Pirjo, Riikka Rossi, Viola Parente-Čapková, and Mirjam Hinrikus (eds.). 2020. Nordic Literature of Decadence. New York: Routledge. Lyytikäinen, Pirjo, Riikka Rossi, Viola Parente-Čapková, and Mirjam Hinrikus. 2021. Shooting Tuonela’s Swan: Modern Myths and Artistic Convergence in Finnish Symbolism. In Music’s Nordic Breakthrough: Aesthetics, Modernity, and Cultural Exchange, 1890-1930, ed. Philip Ross Bullock and Daniel M. Grimley, 111-25. Woodbridge: Boydell. Niemann, Walter. 1906. Die Musik Skandinaviens: Ein Führer durch die Volks- und Kunstmusik von Dänemark, Norwegen, Schweden und Finnland bis zur Gegenwart. Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel. Raber, Karen. 2018. Shakespeare and Posthumanist Thought. London: Arden. Rem, Tore, and Narve Fulsås. 2018. Ibsen, Scandinavia and the Making of a World Drama. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rossi, Riikka. 2007. Le naturalisme finlandais: une conception entropique du quotidien. Helsinki: SKS. Schoolfield, George C. 1998a. A History of Finland’s Literature. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press. Schoolfield, George C. 1998b. A Sense of Minority. In A History of Finland’s Literature, ed. George C.  Schoolfield, 354-452. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press. Senelick, Laurence (ed.). 2009. National Theatre in Northern and Eastern Europe, 1746-1900. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sibelius, Jean. 2005. Dagbok 1909–1944, ed. Fabian Dahlström. Helsingfors and Stockholm: Svenska litteratursällskapet i Finland. Smeds, Kerstin. 1992. The Image of Finland at the World Exhibitions, 1900-1992. In The Finland Pavilions: Finland at the Universal Expositions, 1900-1992, ed. Peter B. MacKeith and Kerstin Smeds, 12-105. Helsinki: Kustannus Oy City.

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Talas, Suvisirkku (ed.). 2001. Sydämen aamu: Aino Järnefeltin ja Jean Sibeliuksen kihlausajan kirjeitä, trans. Oili Souminen. Helsinki: Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seura. Talas, Suvisirkku (ed.). 2003. Tulen synty: Aino ja Jean Sibeliuksen kirjeenvaihtoa, 1892–1904, trans. Oili Suominen. Helsinki: Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seura. Talas, Suvisirkku (ed). 2007. Syysilta: Aino ja Jean Sibeliuksen kirjeenvaihtoa, 1905–1931, trans. Oili Suominen. Helsinki: Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seura. Toftegaard Pedersen, Arne. 2007. Urbana odysseer: Helsingfors, staden och 1910-talets finlandssvenska prosa. Helsingfors: Svenska litteratursällskapet i Finland. Topelius, Zacharius. 1885/1986. Muistiinpanoja vanhasta Helsingistä. Helsinki: Helsinki-seura. Tyrväinen, Helena. 1998. Sibelius at the Paris Universal Exposition of 1900. In Sibelius Forum: Proceedings from the Second International Jean Sibelius Conference, Helsinki, 25-29 November, 1995, ed. Veijo Murtomäki, Kari Kilpeläinen and Risto Väisänen, 114-28. Helsinki: Sibelius Academy. van Maanen, Hans, and Stephen Wilmer (eds.). 1998. Theatre Worlds in Motion. Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi. van Maanen, Hans, Andreas Kotte and Anneli Saro (eds.). 2009. Global Changes – Local Stages: How Theatre Functions in Smaller European Countries. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi. Vaughan, Alden T., and Virginia Mason Vaughan (eds.) 2014. The Tempest: A Critical Reader. London: Bloomsbury. Wilmer, S. E. 2008 (ed.). National Theatres in a Changing Europe. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

CHAPTER 7

‘A Place in Hungary’: The Phantasmal Dublin of Ulysses Catherine Toal

The ‘marginal’ origins of literary modernism have long been emphasized by scholars. Contrary to the assumed dominance of the major European capitals—London, Paris, Vienna—in the movement, the ‘peripheral’ background of some of its key practitioners forms a standard theme in critical reflections on English-language literary modernism in particular.1 Perhaps the pinnacle of these now-familiar kinds of emphasis can be found in Fredric Jameson’s essay—republished in The Modernist Papers— ‘Modernism and Imperialism,’ which juxtaposes the postcolonial qualities of James Joyce’s Ulysses to the aesthetics of the modernist novel in the metropolitan imperial centres (2016, 152–169). Although Jameson’s essay primarily seeks to show that English, specifically London-centred, modernist style and narrative strategy develop as a means of representing, through absence, the dominated spaces invisible from the imperial capitals, it has another implication. By claiming that Joyce’s text does not share this genesis, Jameson also challenges the assumptions of the

C. Toal (*) Bard College Berlin, Berlin, Germany e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 A. Bhattacharya et al. (eds.), Literary Capitals in the Long Nineteenth Century, Literary Urban Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-13060-1_7

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theoretical debate over modernism that he brought to the attention of an English-speaking audience with the collection Aesthetics and Politics, which included essays by Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin and Georg Lukács (Adorno et al. 1977). Most important for Jameson’s own work among these viewpoints is Lukács’s perspective, which he has modified, expanded and adapted beyond its original significance as a rejection of modernist experimentalism. As is well known, Lukács considered modernist innovation a distortion of social reality, a fixation on appearances, preferring Thomas Mann’s invention of socially ‘typical’ characters who evoke the essential structure of material determinants on communal life (Adorno et al. 1977, 34–36). In opposition to this view, Ernst Bloch defended expressionist literature and painting as attempts to ‘exploit’ and ‘shatter’ the essential ‘discontinuity’ of ‘authentic reality’ in modernity (Adorno et al. 1977, 22). In a similar vein, Walter Benjamin heralded modernist aesthetics as an encapsulation of the ways in which capitalism renders the underlying basis of social life inaccessible, or available only as physiological ‘shocks’ (1992, 155, 158–159, 190). By arguing that Ulysses lacks the English modernist interest in creating compensatory stand-ins for the distant colonial territories to which Britain remained economically connected, Jameson in effect presents a Lukácsian Ulysses. The English, or London-based modernists, Jameson proposes, invent a poetic ‘style’ as a placeholder for the unbridgeable ‘infinity’ of imperial space, and rely on a providential encounter between characters to shape a utopian sense of community (2016, 163–164). By contrast, style in Ulysses appears only as the emanation of individual consciousness, as ‘impersonal sentence combinations and variations, beyond all point of view’ (165) or as ‘an enumeration of English styles, of the styles of the imperial occupying armies’ (166). Chance encounters in Ulysses, rather than being providential, are ‘not merely normal but expected’ (166). This is because Dublin remains ‘a classical city’—compactly organized around its central public landmarks—rather than, like London, an ‘agglomeration.’ As a result of its position as a ‘colonial’ city ‘condemned to an older colonial past and the survivals of oratory’, these encounters are ‘already’ or rather ‘still’ linguistic, constituted by storytelling, gossip and political discussion (166). The picture of Ulysses Jameson constructs seems very much that of an actual social and historical landscape, the features of which give rise to specific narrative characteristics, rather than being subsumed by aestheticizing evasions. He cites the parallel with the Odyssey to suggest that the

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novel pursues an anti-imperial strategy, mapping a self-contained (and not a subordinate or secondary) world. Jameson’s essay can be considered part of a general critical reinterpretation of Ulysses in relationship to Irish political history that was inspired to a degree by the advent of postcolonial theory and marked a definitive end to the long estrangement between Joyce’s work and its culture of origin (Cleary 2021, 43). Most importantly, this approach challenged the understanding of modernism as a ‘placeless’ phenomenon, as the rootless expression of a cosmopolitan or even abstract literary system. One element—notably absent from Jameson’s essay—that complicates the re-­ inscription of a linguistically experimental text within the context of a specific place, is the role of print media, with its capacity to traverse locations and construct a variety of identities. Amid its other innovations of form and rhetoric, Ulysses encompasses a vast proliferation of allusions to and imitations of advertising and newspaper discourses as well as an array of mass-cultural publications and signs. Theorists of the narrative and its significance for modernism have configured the interplay between print culture and place in opposing ways. For Franco Moretti, Joyce’s mimicry of the newspaper form indicates the ‘equivalence’ of all styles under global capitalism, with Dublin merely a propitious vantage point for observing the operation of this inescapable regime (1983, 206 and 189–90). Jennifer Wicke, by contrast, argues that Ulysses ‘decolonizes’ media discourses, making use of the capacity of advertising to reassign meaning (1993). R. Brandon Kershner has suggested that the novel in its entirety functions like a newspaper, exhibiting many of the characteristics of the medium at the period it addresses (2010, 79–127). Declan Kiberd, on the other hand, views it as a ‘counter-newspaper,’ which seeks to retrieve from disposability—and memorialize forever—the details and deep historical background of a single day (2009, 117). The novel’s allusions to one figure in particular from the world of journalism raise an alternative implication to this opposition between transnational modernity and local place. Arthur Griffith was editor of the newspaper the United Irishman and later became a politician and key figure in the founding of the Free State in 1922, partly due to his authorship in 1904 of a subsequently influential pamphlet, The Resurrection of Hungary.2 This text argued that Ireland’s elected representatives should give up advocating for home rule (the restoration of the Irish parliament that had been abolished by the Act of Union in 1801) at Westminster, and instead follow the example of the nineteenth-century Hungarian liberals

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who had boycotted the imperial parliament in Vienna, eventually achieving the Ausgleich or Compromise of 1867 which re-established a legislature in Pest (the city of Budapest, of which Pest formed the largest component, was created in 1873). Joyce’s biographer Richard Ellmann suggests that the numerous references to Griffith in Ulysses are in part a personal tribute, although they are significant too in being the only ones pertaining to a politician of the Irish revolutionary period of 1916–1923 (1982, 335n). It is clear that Joyce endorsed Griffith’s signature idea, conveying to his brother Stanislaus his approval of the newspaper Griffith founded to promote his programme, which bore the same name as the political party he had created in 1905 for the same purpose: Sinn Féin (Joyce 1957, 167). Joyce reiterated elements of Griffith’s analysis in his own commentaries on Irish politics.3 Aligning Griffith and Joyce has proved controversial, however: Emer Nolan rejects any such affinity on the grounds that Griffith was ‘notoriously racist and anti-Semitic’, and invoked through his Austro-­ Hungarian prototype a ‘monarchist’ solution to the question of national self-determination (1995, 21–2, 102, 123). One conclusion remains certain: as Andras Ungar observes, Ulysses accords Griffith a significance he did not yet have in 1904, a year possibly chosen for the day of the narrative action in partial acknowledgement of the ‘Hungarian’ pamphlet (2002, 19–21). Also, as this chapter outlines, the novel not only inhabits the newspaper landscape of Griffith’s professional life, it reflects the structure and dynamics of The Resurrection of Hungary itself, whose story and argument are fashioned from the citation of newspaper sources. Most significantly, in its evocation of the physical architecture of the city, Ulysses at several points follows the logic of its one particular quotation from Griffith, a quotation that summarizes the journalist’s core political position: unilateral assertion of a renewed political centrality for Dublin and of legislative autonomy for Ireland. The effect of this gesture is ultimately to create a phantasmal (and not, as Jameson puts it, a ‘self-contained’) Dublin, one that mirrors the dispossessed, expectant capital of the journalist’s polemic, while also repudiating the more chauvinistic aspects of his nationalism. The connection between Ulysses and The Resurrection of Hungary presents a striking variant on Bertrand Westphal’s conception of the divergent ways in which literary and putatively non-literary texts deal with space. Westphal proposes that while the non-literary work may select and reproduce one aspect of a real landscape, the literary text ‘plays’, constructing a newly imagined topography (2007, 275). In this instance, both the

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literary fiction and the journalistic text grapple with the layers of discourse that traverse space, often portraying place only through the prism of such layers. Joyce’s allusions to Griffith and his pamphlet seem to endorse the prospect of political centrality envisaged for a particular location, the Dublin of the early twentieth century, and—at the same time—to throw this at once symbolic and practical transformation into doubt. It is worth noting, to cite another Jameson essay on Ulysses, that this double or ambivalent implication is not the expression of a ‘point of view,’ authorial or otherwise (Jameson  1982, 136), but the effect of the way in which Joyce adapts rhetorically the image of the city that appears in the pivotal line he quotes from Griffith. The Resurrection of Hungary sought to intervene in the impasse that had beleaguered Irish politics since the death of Charles Stewart Parnell in 1891. The campaign to restore the parliament in Dublin had been begun by Daniel O’Connell after the achievement of Catholic Emancipation in 1829. Stagnating for a time after O’Connell’s death, it was dramatically reinvigorated by Parnell in the 1870s through a combination of parliamentary disruption at Westminster, and a continuation of O’Connell’s use of mass rallies and campaigning organizations that allowed even the poorest to join.4 After Parnell’s leadership ended in 1890 as a result of his being named as co-respondent in a divorce case pursued by one of his colleagues (he died in 1891), the Home Rule Party split, and until 1911 (when the Liberals abolished this constitutional privilege) faced obstruction of its cause from a House of Lords veto (Lyons 1960, 65–70; Lyons 1951). Sinn Féin played no great role in Irish affairs until the Home Rule Crisis of 1912, and the advent of the First World War altered the parameters determining the issue of Irish legislative autonomy (Ferriter 2015, 184). The threat of armed resistance to home rule from Ulster Unionists prompted supporters of the prospect to arm as well: Eoin MacNeill’s The North Began (1913; 2022), which advocated this response, was probably the most important pamphlet alongside Griffith’s to influence events.5 After home rule—finally law in 1914—was postponed with the outbreak of the war, a small group of radical nationalists and trade unionists mounted a rebellion in 1916, dubbed by the authorities the ‘Sinn Féin rebellion’, although Griffith had not taken part in it (Kenny 2020a, 160). A repressive reaction to the event contributed to Sinn Féin’s landslide victory in the general election of 1918 (Ferriter 2015, 162). The party followed Griffith’s proposal and convened a parliament in Dublin, while a new militia, the Irish Republican Army, prosecuted a partisan war against

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the auxiliary (or ‘black and tan’) forces sent to suppress the initiative (Ferriter 2015, 162–244). Griffith was briefly president of the Dublin parliament after its first leader, Eamon de Valera, refused to accept the terms of the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921. He died shortly after assuming this responsibility, in the same year as the Free State’s founding (Kenny 2020a, 221–230). The vicissitudes of Joyce’s direct personal connections to Griffith encapsulate the themes in his attitudes to the journalist’s politics. In 1901, Griffith recommended to his readers the young author’s attack on the fustiness of W.B. Yeats’s Irish Literary Theatre, ‘The Day of the Rabblement’. The text had been rejected by the Royal Dublin University newsletter St Stephen’s (supposedly for its references to Gabriele D’Annunzio, then on the Index) and was published independently (Kenny 2020a, 130; Ellmann 1982, 88). In 1903, Griffith was less than pleased when Joyce negatively reviewed a collection of poetry by his deceased friend William Rooney, objecting to its patriotic sentimentality (Ellmann 1982, 112). Showing a characteristic preference for counterblast over suppression, Griffith used Joyce’s own words to promote the book, a phrase that later appears in Ulysses: ‘he might have written well if he had not suffered from one of those big words [Patriotism] that make us so unhappy’ (Ellmann 112n). In 1909, Joyce placed with Griffith an advertisement for an ultimately unsuccessful business venture, the Volta cinema in Dublin.6 Any rift between the two over the Rooney episode seems to have been completely healed by 1911, when Griffith issued Joyce’s letter on the difficulties he faced in securing the unexpurgated publication of Dubliners (Ellmann 1982, 315). The letter contained the contested passages, and so made a nonsense of the controversy. During Joyce’s visit to Dublin (from his self-imposed exile in Trieste) to try and resolve the matter, he consulted with Griffith, who offered kindly advice (Ellmann 1982, 334–335). According to his brother Stanislaus, Joyce read Griffith’s United Irishman every week until the paper was bankrupted in 1906 due to a libel action by a priest (Stanislaus Joyce 2003, 169). When in the same year Joyce communicated to Stanislaus his positive opinion of Griffith’s next venture, Sinn Féin, he expressed praise for the newspaper editor’s long-­ standing efforts to ‘revive the separatist idea along modern lines’ (Joyce 1957, 167). As Maurice Earls (2021) has pointed out, the Anglicized Irish Edwardian middle class of which Joyce was a member maintained an interest in the prospect of political autonomy for economic reasons. This was the central basis on which Joyce affirmed Griffith’s programme. He found

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in it much that was ‘absurd’, but noted that ‘at least it tries to inaugurate some commercial life for Ireland’ (Joyce 1957, 167). In his 1907 essay ‘Home Rule Comes of Age’, Joyce repeats Griffith’s diagnosis both of the economic situation and of the bad investment represented by the Irish Parliamentary or Home Rule Party: ‘The Irish Parliamentary Party is bankrupt. For twenty-seven years it has been agitating and talking. In that time it has drawn 35 million from its supporters, and the fruits of that agitation are that Irish taxes have increased by 88 million, while the Irish population has decreased by 1 million’ (Joyce 2008, 144). Joyce’s own attempts at entrepreneurial activity show the mark of his class (placing the ad for the Volta with Griffith was all too appropriate). What he disliked viscerally in Sinn Féin was its indoctrination of readers in ‘the old pap of racial hatred’, registering a nascent socialism in his analysis: ‘if the Irish question exists, it exists for the Irish proletariat chiefly’ (Joyce 1957, 167). Also unpalatable to him was the commitment to re-establishing Irish as the national language (187). Griffith’s role in the promulgation of ‘racial hatred’ has recently become a closer object of scholarly scrutiny. Though he was a friend and ally to individual members of the Jewish community in Dublin, his United Irishman adopted an anti-Dreyfusard position and in 1904 supported a boycott of Jewish-owned businesses in Limerick.7 Griffith condemned the treatment of indigenous populations by the European empires, but his criticisms were often skewed by a relentlessly anti-British perspective (Kenny 2020a, 94–95, 103). A low point in the contradictions generated by this worldview was his defence of the later career of one of the leaders of the revolutionary ‘Young Ireland’ movement of 1848, John Mitchel, who supported slavery and fought on the side of the American Confederacy (Kenny 2020a, 98). The United Irishman played host to a notoriously anti-Semitic columnist, Frank Hugh O’Donnell, under the pseudonym ‘the foreign secretary’ (171). Both Joyce brothers noticed with distaste the inclusion in Sinn Féin of contributions from Oliver St John Gogarty— the prototype for Buck Mulligan—who also penned anti-Semitic diatribes (Joyce 1957, 187). By 1915, Griffith appears to have repudiated these kinds of views (Kenny 2020a, 180), but the fact that he had entertained them seems to shape the treatment of his ideas in Ulysses, and the way in which the novel adopts and revises his characterization of Dublin in the ‘Hungarian’ pamphlet as a dispossessed, expectant capital. Andras Ungar argues that Ulysses presents history as a fait accompli, following the paradigm of epic in contrast to the messianism of A Portrait of

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the Artist and the paralysis of Dubliners (2002, 3). The references to Griffith certainly possess the irony characteristic of this genre, in that they emphasize a leadership significance undreamt of in 1904, but well known to the audience of 1922. In ‘Proteus’, Stephen Dedalus recalls meeting the exiled Fenian Kevin Egan in Paris, who rhapsodized ‘Of Ireland, the Dalcassians, of hopes, conspiracies, of Arthur Griffith now’, an anticipation of the later alignment between revolutionary republicanism and Griffith’s Hungarian proposal (Joyce  2000, 53). When Leopold Bloom saunters out in ‘Calypso’, his rumination on the experiences of Molly’s soldier father, ‘old Tweedy’, in the Russo-Turkish war of 1877–1878, prompts a reverie about ‘somewhere in the east’ (68). Realizing that the elements of this daydream are probably inspired by the ‘[k]ind of stuff you read’, Bloom amusedly remembers another instance in which fantasy was punctured: ‘What Arthur Griffith said about the headpiece over the Freeman leader: a homerule sun rising up in the northwest from the laneway behind the bank of Ireland’ (68). This quotation of Griffith’s mockery of the home rule-supporting newspaper’s vision, its confusion of cardinal direction and flouting of physical fact, identifies him as the harbinger of a new and more viable orientation in Irish politics. ‘Lotus Eaters’ also takes up the theme of Griffith’s portentous significance, when Bloom notes his echo of Maud Gonne’s call for British troops to be removed from Dublin’s streets (88). In ‘Lestrygonians’, Bloom’s doubts about Griffith’s authority carry heavy historical irony, since they turn on his capacity to harness the forces of mass agitation on which success would depend: ‘you must have a certain fascination: Parnell. Arthur Griffith is a squareheaded fellow but he has no go in him for the mob’ (207). Molly Bloom later articulates misgivings as well: ‘he says that little man he showed me without the neck is very intelligent the coming man Griffith is he well he doesnt look it thats all I can say’ (886). Alongside these auguries, contrary to Andras Ungar’s interpretation, the novel’s references to a (then non-existent) Sinn Féin suggest that Griffith’s aims have not so much been fulfilled as caught in a cycle of repetition. This implication begins to be developed when the prospect of a visit to the Dublin Corporation public baths in ‘Calypso’ reminds Bloom of the prison escape mounted in 1865 by the leader of the revolutionary movement founded a decade after the famine, the Irish Republican or Fenian Brotherhood: ‘Chap in the paybox there got away James Stephens they say. O’Brien’ (83). Dropping in to All Hallows church in ‘Lotus Eaters’, he remembers a striking fact concerning a breakaway Fenian

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organization, ‘The Invincibles’, responsible for one of the most shocking and singular events of late nineteenth-century Irish history: the assassination of the Chief Secretary and the Under-Secretary to the Viceroy in the Phoenix Park in 1882: ‘that fellow that turned queen’s evidence on the invincibles he used to receive the, Carey was his name, the communion every morning. This very church’ (100). The doubts expressed about Griffith’s leadership in ‘Lestrygonians’ are enmeshed in this problem of how to manage adherents and prevent betrayal. In that episode, Bloom’s belief that Griffith lacks the unifying charisma of Parnell or has ‘no go in him for the mob’ follows an observation in praise of the Fenian leader: ‘James Stephens’ idea was the best. He knew them. Circles of ten so that a fellow couldn’t round on more than his own ring’ (207). At this point, Bloom’s pessimism takes a swift historical leap: ‘Sinn Fein. Back out you get the knife. Hidden Hand. Stay in, the firing squad’ (207). It is clear that this line refers to 1916 and the method by which the leaders of the insurrection were executed. It also incorporates the awareness that the organization acquired a certain ruthlessness inspired by the failures of previous revolutionary conspiracies. The fragments possibly even allude to the emerging conflict between the party’s two wings after the signing of the Anglo-Irish Treaty in 1921. Bloom does not continue on this trajectory, flitting instead back to James Stephens’s prison escape: ‘Turnkey’s daughter got him out of Richmond, off from Lusk. Putting up in the Buckingham Palace hotel under their very noses’ (207). The references to Sinn Féin suggest a continuing dynamic of political conflict—and in addition, a detachment between Griffith and the eventual character of the political organization he created, which is portrayed as caught in a deadly round of persecution, internal and external. Interestingly, the series of details linking Griffith, Sinn Féin and the Fenians occur in connection with dreams of escape to other spaces, the ‘Oriental’ city of ‘Calypso’ and a trip to the Dublin Corporation public baths that mutates into a wish to visit the Turkish baths. In ‘Lestrygonians’, Bloom abruptly drops dark thoughts of backstabbing and firing squads by imagining James Stephens’s prison break in a manner so abridged and miraculous that Dublin (the location of Richmond prison) is not even mentioned on the itinerary of the Fenian leader’s dramatic journey (involving a shipwreck off Lusk) to the Buckingham Palace hotel in London. This triumph of the motif of escape (mental and physical) over any sense of resolution suggests not the presentation of history as a fait accompli but rather an ambivalence about as well as an attraction to the potential of Griffith’s programme.

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Elsewhere in Ulysses this combination of attitudes is expressed in a portrayal of the cityscape that follows the logic of Griffith’s mocking comment on the Freeman’s Journal headpiece. Both The Resurrection of Hungary and Ulysses inhabit a newspaper world. In ‘Hades,’ Bloom uses the home rule-supporting Freeman’s Journal as a kneeling pad at Dignam’s funeral (130). The entire episode stresses the moribund condition of that political movement, passing memorials to O’Connell and Parnell, and mentioning the graves of both men. ‘Aeolus’, famously, takes its structure from headlines, and contains among its vignettes Bloom’s efforts to sell an advertisement with an ‘innuendo of home rule’ (153), a discussion of the assassination carried out by ‘The Invincibles’ in terms of its sensation-value for The New York World (172), and Stephen’s placing of the letter from his employer, the Unionist headmaster Deasy, in The Evening Telegraph (168). Stephen’s speech on Shakespeare in the National Library in ‘Scylla and Charybdis’ represents a prospective contribution to a literary journal: Dana (275). The question is whether he can receive remuneration for the work, and the speech itself concerns Shakespeare’s own business savvy in supplying the propaganda needs of the Elizabethan state. Instead of rendering discourses equivalent, the emphasis on circulation and selling traces a void in Irish politics that Griffith’s programme might fill. Not only is home rule dead and violent Republicanism mere fleeting scandal, the literary revival (Stephen’s ‘target audience’ in the library) shows insufficient awareness of the economic and social preconditions of cultural production. If these forms of nationalism are criticised and discarded, so too is Unionism. Deasy’s treatment of Stephen converts him into the ‘servant’ he complains of being in ‘Telemachus’ (24). The Irish Times, Unionism’s most venerable mouthpiece at this date, features principally as the facilitator of Bloom’s illicit correspondence with the ‘smart lady typist’ he seeks through its notices (202). The pastiche of consumerist women’s magazines in ‘Nausicaa’ mocks these publications partly by invoking an Anglo-­ Irish Trinity beau as Gerty McDowell’s ideal (454). In ‘Cyclops,’ the parodic description of an Irish revolutionary hero’s execution suggests that yellow-press nationalist sentimentalism is a form of colonial servility: the bereaved heroine is given an instant happy ending, accepting ‘on the spot’ a marriage proposal from an Oxford suitor (401). An extreme kind of nationalism is also discarded in ‘Cyclops’ through an emphasis on the ‘Citizen’s’ destructive monomania, underlined by reference to newspapers. This archetypal character is appalled at the litany of English names in

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the notices of the Irish Independent, ‘founded by Parnell to be the workingman’s friend’ (384). Although he uses a version of the phrase ‘Sinn Féin’ (which had already become a slogan of the Gaelic League, an organization founded to revive the Irish language), it is notable that the Citizen’s rebarbative and narrow-minded cohort are hostile to the new ‘Hungarian’ programme (436), again indicating that Griffith may point a way out of the divisions and failed solutions that pervade the question of legislative autonomy. The Resurrection of Hungary shares a key feature with Ulysses in staging a contestation between print publications as much as between persons or groups. The text opens by citing an Austrian instruction to the ‘reptile’ Hungarian press to announce the Emperor’s 1857 visit to Pest (Griffith 1918, 8), an event designed to quiet calls for the restoration of the 1848 constitution. The Vienna press, equally obsequious, declares the visit ‘a marvellous success’ despite the resistance on display (11). After a Hungarian parliament convened in 1861 reiterates its demands to Franz Josef, the Vienna papers ‘exploded with indignation’ (22). Throughout, Griffith draws parallels with what he mockingly calls ‘the liberty-loving press of England’ (33), which he describes as by turns hypocritically supportive of the Hungarian cause and sympathetic to Austrian imperial authority. Other European perspectives are also driven by national self-­ interest: Prussian and French newspapers mock the imperial pretentions of a Viennese parliament that lacks Hungarian participation (33). The high point of propagandistic, sycophantic media exertion surrounds a royal visit to Pest in 1865 (38). At the point where Austrian compromise with the Hungarians finally becomes inevitable, the Viennese press frames defeat as realism: ‘we must choose between two evils’ (55). Readers of the pamphlet experience the jubilance of the Hungarian reaction through Griffith’s quotations from ‘a perhaps excited chronicler’ and his mockery of a ‘scandalised’ English journalist who denounced the revelries as quite ‘Irish’ (66). Underlining the role of newspapers as instruments of policy, Griffith seeks to change the location from which information and interpretation are produced. He develops his parallel between Hungary and Ireland by noting the role of imperial presses in the dissemination of racial calumny against the populations they control (70). Providing an exemplary guide for their Irish counterparts, Hungary’s writers and journalists have restored and strengthened their country’s culture by staying in ‘Buda-Pesth’ and publishing in their native tongue (73). In a comment that resonates with the exhaustive cataloguing of print cultures in Ulysses, he jokes that even

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journals of fashion can contribute to the consolidation of national identity if they are published in the native language (75). Finally, he regards his own text as a contribution to available political resources for Ireland, where the story of Hungary’s achievement of national autonomy remains— thanks to the British press—relatively unknown (82). Griffith’s pamphlet contains inflated patriotic rhetoric of the type Joyce mocks in Ulysses: ‘[how Hungary] has prospered and grown giant-like in her strength once she became mistress of her household we shall relate’ (60). At the same time, it can be identified as a source for one of the novel’s descriptive strategies. The account of the royal visit of 1857 includes lists enumerating the pomp of the occasion (9) which recall the elaborate sequence on the hero’s execution in ‘Cyclops’, as well as other litanies of public ostentation in the novel. In his own rudimentary manner, Griffith also deploys abrupt changes of register to puncture ideological pomposity. The Austrian schemes of 1865 constitute ‘the humbugging of Hungary’ (45); exalted speech from the powerful descends to colloquial, comic abruptness: ‘“Faithful subjects”, said he  [Emperor Franz Josef, addressing the Hungarian Diet] “you are acting in an extremely silly manner”’ (23). As well as switching codes, Griffith compresses space and time, opening up a narrative flexibility that has affinities with the transgression of realist conventions and the encroachment of politics on individual consciousness in Ulysses. Policy and its implementation become simultaneous in-person exchanges, between the Hungarians and the Emperor, the Emperor and his ministers, the ministers and the nationalists. The most important connection between Joyce’s novel and The Resurrection of Hungary lies in the pamphlet’s aim of restoring the status of national legislative capital to Dublin. Throughout his polemic, Griffith stresses the importance of the return of Budapest’s political centrality as the locus of Hungary’s economic, political and cultural life. The country’s tragedy is that it has been reduced to a ‘province’ (20), with its affairs decided on in ‘a foreign assembly sitting in the capital of a foreign country and calling itself an imperial parliament’ (18). He quotes the chairman of the ‘County Council of Pesth’ declaring in 1861: ‘Today the soldiers of the Emperor of Austria have driven the representatives of the people of the capital of Hungary from their assembly-house, and the representatives of the people answer Francis Josef that never shall he pervert Hungary into Austria—never subdue the Hungarian spirit—never live to see our noble nation an Austrian province’ (31). The hero of Griffith’s story is Ferenc Deák, a moderate liberal leader, who in the pamphlet’s telling becomes

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the physical substitute for Pest’s not-yet-restored centrality: ‘when the Hungarian flag had been trampled in the blood of its soldiers and Hungary lay prostrate, all her other leaders dead or in exile, Deak bethought himself it was time to sell his estate and move into town’ (1). Later in the narrative, as developments evolve, Deák still occupies this position: ‘Meantime Deak walked about Pesth smoking his pipe, and gathered his friends around him each night in the Queen of England Hotel, discussing affairs’ (32). Once Hungary’s nation-status has been regained, ‘he wished to retire to his little home at Kehida’ (67), proving his absence of vanity as well as his function as the ‘placeholder’ for the political dignity of his metropolis. However, he agrees to enter parliament and serve until his death as an elected representative, further confirming that the salon in the hotel where he resided was a harbinger and proxy for a legitimate parliamentary forum. Leopold Bloom’s Hungarian origins are evidently a tribute to Griffith’s signature idea. His main occupations, walking around the city and talking to those he meets, also recollect the substitutive, provisional political function such activities serve in the pamphlet, contrary to Jameson’s view of Dublin in the novel as a ‘self-contained’ world. Clearly, Bloom’s Jewish heritage changes the meaning of this narrative reception of Griffith’s proposal. As Ungar points out, Joyce ‘backdates the controversy over Sinn Féin to 1904 in order to involve Bloom’ (2002, 21). One of the Citizen’s companions, John Wyse Nolan, gossips that ‘it was Bloom gave the ideas for Sinn Fein to Griffith to put in his paper’ (436). Chief Clerk for the Crown Solicitor in Dublin Castle Martin Cunningham puts the matter with a rather greater degree of hostility: ‘He’s a perverted jew…from a place in Hungary and it was he drew up all the plans according to the Hungarian system. We know that in the castle’ (438). This association between Bloom and Griffith inversely affirms the value of the latter’s innovations, since those who reject them are promulgating anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. Such a manner of celebrating Griffith may also constitute a critique, given that the newspaperman himself provided a platform for anti-Semitic views and campaigns. Bloom’s actual intervention in nationalist debate rids it of racialist identitarianism, with the argument that ‘a nation is the same people living in the same place’ or also ‘living in different places’ (430), with the criterion for sameness unspecified. When he first thinks of Griffith, he already introduces the motif of Jewishness, praising the journalist’s quip about the Freeman’s Journal as an ‘Ikey touch’ (68). This remark and Bloom’s own background anticipate the speech

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aligning Irish and Jewish dispossession in ‘Aeolus’ (179–181), all elements which, along with those of ‘Cyclops,’ signal an acceptance of Griffith’s proposals that repudiates their essentialist aspect. The most profound and decisive connection between Ulysses and Griffith lies in the rhetorical relationships between the description of Bloom at the end of ‘Cyclops’ and the quotation from Griffith in ‘Calypso’. We watch our protagonist triumph over the nationalist chauvinists in the guise of ‘ben Bloom Elijah’ and ‘amid clouds of angels ascend to the glory of brightness at an angle of fortyfive degrees over Donohoe’s in Little Green Street like a shot off a shovel’ (449). Like the Freeman’s Journal headpiece as mocked by Griffith, this image sketches a physical or natural impossibility in the cityscape, made yet more absurd by normal quotidian detail. Both evoke a desirable political event or transformation that cannot be brought about by the means adopted for its realization. In treating the architecture of the capital in this way, Joyce, like Griffith, foregrounds its condition as a space requiring political restoration. The ‘Elijah’ motif also links the end of ‘Cyclops’ to ‘Wandering Rocks’, where a sense of yearning for a political redemption of the city could not be clearer. In that episode, dominated by the progress through the streets of the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, William Ward, Earl of Dudley, a ship on the Liffey called Elijah passing under the Loopline Bridge is invoked on three occasions, twice including the portentous phrase ‘Elijah is coming’. The Lord Lieutenant’s carriage first appears at a moment when Dilly Dedalus, Stephen’s sister, is trying to coax more money for the starving family from her errant father: ‘He put the other coins in his pocket and started to walk on. The viceregal cavalcade passed, greeted by obsequious policemen, out of Parkgate.—I’m sure you have another shilling, Dilly said’ (306). The first mention of the skiff Elijah occurs at the end of a scene between three of Stephen’s other sisters, sharing a meagre meal provided by charity, and lamenting that they have not managed to gain money from selling books (291). Its effect is to create an impression of despairing expectation for some future transformation in circumstances. The second mention of Elijah’s arrival surfaces just before the character of Joe Kernan ruminates on an historical memory: ‘Down there Emmet was hanged, drawn and quartered. Greasy black rope. Dogs licking the blood off the street when the lord lieutenant’s wife drove by in her noddy’ (308–309). A chain of associations emerges connecting the Dedaluses’ poverty with Emmet’s death as objects of administrative indifference—and as objects of the messianic redemption promised by ‘Elijah’. Although we receive a last

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reminder that ‘Elijah’ is an arbitrary signifier, when a character sees his name ‘announced on the Metropolitan Hall’ (321), the play of references to the Biblical figure positions the city in a mode of abjection and anticipation. The trope of Jewish messianic redemption clearly contrasts with the Christian iconography of Griffith’s Resurrection. Its status as the rhetorical misrecognition of real objects in the cityscape positions the characters in a partly phantasmal space. When, in ‘Eumaeus’, Bloom and Stephen eventually visit the Loopline Bridge (there called by its other name, Butt Bridge, after the leader of the Home Rule Party before Parnell, Isaac Butt), they encounter in the cab shelter a personage reputed but not absolutely certain to be one of the perpetrators of the notorious assassination of the viceroy’s Chief Secretary and Under-Secretary in the Phoenix Park in 1882: ‘the keeper of it said to be the once famous Skin-the-Goat Fitzharris, the Invincible’ (716); ‘the licensee of the place, rumoured to be or have been Fitzharris, the famous Invincible’ (743). Joyce’s attitude to revolutionary violence has been much debated. The extensive focus of Ulysses on this single act of atrocity could signal an aversion to the tactic, emphasized by concentrating on what was before the 1920s a deeply shocking, outlier event in this tradition, or a certain awe at its actuality and audacity as a response to very real injustices. What remains more significant is that the two forces which played the decisive part in the founding of the Free State—Griffith’s revision of the policy on parliamentary participation, and republican physical force—are both subject in the novel to a confusion between reality and fiction, with Bloom misrecognized as the originator of Sinn Féin, and Fitzharris flickering indeterminately before our eyes, himself or no one. The historical developments concerned also displace the novel from the year of its setting, since they belong either to the past or to the future. Joyce often claimed that Ulysses could be used to rebuild Dublin, were it ever to be destroyed. The novel’s relation to the key text in the debate over the city’s future suggests that it grapples as much with the absence of a (political) capital as with the task of imaginative reconstruction.

Notes 1. The much-cited popularisation of this critical theme is Eagleton (1970). 2. For a recent overview of Griffith’s career, see Kenny (2020a). 3. See in particular ‘Home Rule Comes of Age’ (Joyce 2008, 142–144).

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4. See ‘The Mobilization of Popular Politics’ and ‘The Politics of Parnellism’ (Foster 1988, 289–317, 400–428). 5. For an overview of this crisis, see Fitzpatrick (1998, 9–115). 6. See Kenny (2020b). 7. See Kenny (2020a, 171–179).

Works Cited Adorno, Theodor, Walter Benjamin, Ernst Bloch, Bertolt Brecht, and Georg Lukács. 1977. Aesthetics and Politics: The Key Texts of the Classic Debate within German Marxism. Afterword by Fredric Jameson. London: Verso. Benjamin, Walter. 1992. Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn. London: Fontana. Cleary, Joseph. 2021. Modernism, Empire, World Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Eagleton, Terry. 1970. Exiles and Emigrés: Studies in Modern Literature. London: Chatto and Windus. Earls, Maurice. 2021. No Myth, No Nation. Dublin Review of Books. April. https://drb.ie/articles/no-myth-no-nation/. Ellmann, Richard. 1982. James Joyce. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ferriter, Diarmaid. 2015. A Nation and not a Rabble: The Irish Revolution 1913-23. New York: Overlook Press. Fitzpatrick, David. 1998. The Two Irelands, 1912–1939. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Foster, R.F. 1988. Modern Ireland 1600-1972. London: Allen Lane. Griffith, Arthur. 1918. The Resurrection of Hungary: A Parallel for Ireland. Dublin: Whelan and Son. Reprinted 2018 by Franklin Classics. Jameson, Fredric. 2016. The Modernist Papers. London: Verso. Jameson, Fredric. 1982. Ulysses in History. James Joyce and Modern Literature, ed. W.J. McCormack and Alistair Stead. London: Routledge. Joyce, James. 1957. Letters Vol. II. Edited by Richard Ellmann. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Joyce, James. 2000. Ulysses. London: Penguin. Joyce, James. 2008. Occasional, Critical, and Political Writing, ed. Kevin Barry. Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics. Joyce, Stanislaus. 2003. My Brother’s Keeper: James Joyce’s Early Years. Boston: Da Capo Press. Kenny, Colum. 2020a. The Enigma of Arthur Griffith. Newbridge: Merrion Press. Kenny, Colum. 2020b. When Arthur Griffith Met James Joyce. The Irish Times, 10 February. Kersher, R.  Brandon. 2010. The Culture of Joyce’s Ulysses. New  York: Palgrave Macmillan. Kiberd, Declan. 2009. Ulysses and Us: The Art of Everyday Living. London: Faber.

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Lyons, F.S.L. 1960. The Fall of Parnell, 1890–91. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Lyons, F.S.L. 1951. The Irish Parliamentary Party 1890-1910. London: Faber and Faber. Nolan, Emer. 1995. James Joyce and Nationalism. New York: Routledge. Ungar, Andras. 2002. Joyce’s Ulysses as National Epic: Epic Mimesis and the Political History of the Nation State. Gainesville: University of Florida Press. Westphal, Bertrand. 2007. La Géocritique: Réel, fiction, espace. Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit. Wicke, Jennifer. 1993. Modernity Must Advertise: Aura, Desire, and Decolonization in Joyce. James Joyce Quarterly  30/31: 593–613. http://www.jstor.org/ stable/25515761. Moretti, Franco. 1983. Signs Taken for Wonders: On the Sociology of Literary Forms. New York: Knopf Doubleday. MacNeill, Eoin. 2022. The North Began. In The Political Thought of the Irish Revolution, ed. Richard Bourke and Niamh Gallagher. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

PART III

Polycentric Italy

CHAPTER 8

Trieste’s ‘Adventurers of Culture and Life’ Elena Coda

[In Trieste] there is no difference between beliefs, customs, clothing, or the color of one’s skin. […] Here the question is not: which God do you serve? Whether one adores Christ or Mohamed, Jehovah, or the sun, […] —it’s all the same here, because they all serve one and the same God who drives them and inspires them, and that is Profit! Truly, whoever wants to see the real power of gold, should go to some big trading city. He will see how this omnipotent talisman draws people closer to one another, how it makes everything equal, and how every prejudice and every national hatred is silenced before it. […] Eliminate this inclination towards acquisition and profit in the mind of man, and no Columbus will discover the eastcoast of the new world, no Diaz will circumnavigate Africa, and the Strait of Gibraltar will forever separate the Europeans from the Africans. (Kreil 1817, 142–144)1

Following Joseph De Sapio’s intuition that ‘tourists are as much urban actors responsible for understanding and creating the meanings of the city as are the city’s spaces responsible for transmitting signs and codes’ (2014,

E. Coda (*) School of Languages and Cultures, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, USA e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 A. Bhattacharya et al. (eds.), Literary Capitals in the Long Nineteenth Century, Literary Urban Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-13060-1_8

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17), I will start this chapter on Trieste’s cultural identity in the long nineteenth century by following in the footsteps of Joseph Kreil, an Austrian tourist who in 1817 dedicated 60 pages of his travel book to the description of this Adriatic city, situated on the western margin of the Austrian Empire. What makes this text a useful point of entry into the analysis of the complex cultural identity of the city at the beginning of the nineteenth century is the fact that Kreil not only already identified many of the cultural attributes that would come to define Trieste until its annexation by Italy in 1918, but that he also recognized how the intersection of wealth, cultural practices and geopolitical power converged in shaping the identity of the city. In Kreil’s account, Trieste appears as a unique Austrian cosmopolitan border city, whose identity was defined mainly by the unique intersection of Austrian and Italian elements, and where, thanks to its active port, people, languages and goods from all over the world could circulate freely (1817, 141).2 Superimposing the image of the supranational multiethnic Austrian Empire on the city of Trieste, Kreil emphasized the peaceful quality of this city: ‘Isn’t it as if the kingdom of eternal peace had come to earth?’ (1817, 142). For the traveller, there are no doubts that the reason for this blissful state is Trieste’s commercial ethos, epitomized by the Palazzo della Borsa, the stock exchange building, ‘the true heart of this city’ (1817, 132), where business contracts and financial deals with international reach are signed every day. Kreil dedicated many pages to the description of this palace and noted that it also housed Trieste’s elitist cultural and social club, the Casino, which included the highest exponents of Triestine intellectual, financial and governmental class. The location of a cultural club within the walls of the stock exchange should not come as a surprise, because, as Kreil noted, commerce was the ‘omnipotent lever’ (1817, 144) that moved every aspect of Triestine society, also determining its cultural enterprises.3 In the 200 years since Kreil’s description, the city has been the object of cultural, political and sociological analyses that have explored its complex cultural and national identity. In the early nineteenth century, Domenico Rossetti foregrounded the city’s artificial development, noting that Trieste did not grow organically through the centuries, but was instead the product of the will of the Habsburg monarchy, which saw in Trieste’s favourable position on the Adriatic Sea the perfect hub for the establishment of an Austrian port (1874, 41). For Rossetti, this allowed the city to grow financially but it also hindered the development of a homogenous culture.

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At the beginning of the twentieth century, Slataper’s essays on Trieste’s double soul captured the drama of a city split between Austrian and Italian cultural and economic alliances (1909), while Pancrazi was the first to recognize the unique outlook of Triestine authors (1946, 104). In more recent years, Ara and Magris have brought to the fore Trieste’s borderland status, showing how the coexistence of Austrian, German, Italian and Slavic elements questioned the very possibility of constructing a monolithic national or cultural identity. Trieste can be perceived as a microcosm that ‘on a smaller scale, reproduces the modern Babel’ typical of our chaotic, modern human condition (1982, 113). They also drew attention to the fact that the unique cultural and geopolitical situation of Trieste in the long nineteenth century should not be stiffened into a myth that reduces the understanding of Trieste’s complexity into trite images void of historical precision (1982, 5), which could lead to a ‘self-sufficient, narrow-­ minded provincialism’ (Ferrini 2012, 177). Keeping in mind the warning against a simplification of Trieste’s cosmopolitan character and the pivotal role that commerce played in the development of the city, this chapter explores how Trieste’s financial drive, coupled with its mixed national identity and geopolitical situation, shaped the city’s cultural attitudes and pursuits throughout the nineteenth century, making it a unique cultural centre. It also shows how Trieste’s writers, intellectuals and cultural patrons actively fostered a culture that embraced the financial multinational power of the city and nurtured a sense of receptivity towards artistic and literary expressions from other countries and cultures. In this sense, Trieste can be understood as an alternative cultural capital to the established hegemony of Florence or Rome as the Italian cultural hubs of the nineteenth century. A useful concept for this discussion is Marcel Cornis-Pope’s notion of the ‘marginocentric’ city, as defined in his multivolume work on the literary cultures of East Central Europe (2004, 9). Cornis-Pope suggests that to do justice to the complex cultural identity of multiethnic Eastern-­ Central European cities, the most useful approach is one that ‘deemphasizes national boundaries and historical moments, replacing them with crossings, durations, and points of contact between various cultures’ (2004, 4). Furthermore, ‘marginocentric’ cities challenge ‘traditional boundaries between periphery and center’, and undermine the hegemony of established traditional cultural capitals, ‘offering an alternative to their national pull’ (2004, 9). For Cornis-Pope, these cities also share some of the same attributes identified by Salman Rushdie in his reflections on London as a postcolonial metropolis. Quoting from Rushdie’s musings on the

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metropolitan experience, the critic argues that marginocentric cities combine ‘things that seem not to belong together’ and set ‘alongside each other in odd, often raw juxtapositions, all sorts of different bodies of experience to show what frictions and sparks they make’ (Rushdie, cited in Cornis-Pope 2004, 9). The Triestine intellectual Bobi Bazlen, in his essay Intervista su Trieste (Interview on Trieste), noted something similar about his city. Trieste should not be understood as a melting pot in which all differences were absorbed into a homogenous society, but as a ‘sounding board’ in which tensions coexisted and played against each other, producing ‘[a]ttempts, approximations, haphazard figures, God’s unfinished experiments. People with different premises, who must try to reconcile the irreconcilable, which of course they were unable to do, and thus created strange characters, adventurers of culture and life, with all the oddest and most tormented failures that derive from such a background’ (1984, 251). In what follows, I will focus on some of these cultural ‘adventurers’, from the publishers of the journal La Favilla (The Spark) established in 1836, to the businessman Ettore Schmitz, who, under the pen name of Italo Svevo, published his first novel in 1892, to the little-known translator and novelist Luisa Macina Gervasio, who in 1915 wrote the novel Schemagn Israel (‘Hear, O Israel’) under the nom de plume Luigi di San Giusto. These writers, all in their own ways, reflect on what is culturally unique about this cosmopolitan and yet geographically peripheral city, and do so by bringing to the forefront the multifaceted commercial and ethnic identity of the city. The role that translations play in Trieste’s construction of and reflection on its cultural identity will also become apparent. The multicultural discourse that connects the cosmopolitan endeavours initiated by La Favilla in the 1830s to Gervasio’s forgotten novel brings into conversation texts that are not usually read together, and shows the nuances of the multicultural project that was part of Trieste’s identity. At the same time, it also reveals how this ‘enlightened border-crossing transculturalism’ ultimately failed (Pappalardo 2021, 5).

Francesco Dall’Ongaro and Pacifico Valussi’s La Favilla One of the most successful publications in Trieste in the first half of the nineteenth century was La Favilla, published between 1836 and 1846. The paper is a great example of the complex intersection of cultural and financial endeavours that one could find in Trieste at that time. It was

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founded by the Istrian Antonio Madonizza with the financial backing of the Austrian Lloyd, the largest Austro-Hungarian shipping company based in Trieste, while its editors-in-chief, Dall’Ongaro and Valussi, were two young Italian journalists and intellectuals who had moved to Trieste from their native cities in the Italian northeast, attracted by Trieste’s cosmopolitan urban culture and wealth.4 The aim of the publication was already foregrounded in its motto, a verse from Dante’s first Canto of Paradiso: ‘Great fire can follow a small spark’ (1995, Par. 1.34). In the first editorial of the paper, Madonizza explained the choice of the paper’s name: the new journalistic enterprise would maintain the nimble lightness of a little flame, covering an array of diverse subjects: ‘customs, sciences, literatures, arts, theaters, and so on’ (‘Parole dei Compilatori’ 1836, 1). Its purpose was not to weigh down the readers with pedantic analyses, but to spark their curiosity and lead them in many unforeseeable directions: ‘with our articles we do not intend to instruct, judge, investigate; we want to encourage inquiries, offer topics for discussions, stir up one’s intelligence’ (1836, 2). Moreover, while a spark tends to attach itself to seasoned, dry wood, this peculiar spark prefers everything that is new and young: ‘Novelty will be our uniform. We love the screeching sound and turmoil (subbuglio) of fresh wood engulfed by the flame’ (Madonizza 31 July 1836, 2). This last sentence is quite telling: the phrase used to describe the burning wood, ‘the screeching sound and turmoil’, can be easily applied to the urban reality of Trieste where one could hear the many noises of its large port, with all its frenzied activities. Right from the start, the journal establishes itself as a publication that rejects tradition, and embraces instead the modern, loud, energetic soul of this port city. Its articles seek new forms of intellectual transactions, where culture and commerce come together, while providing its readers with a cultural platform from which they can explore and understand their changing society. The difference between Trieste and other urban centres is brought forth in an early article entitled ‘Come si vive a Trieste’ (How One Lives in Trieste, 4 September 1836). The journalist, who signs himself only with the initial Y, describes his interaction with a snobbish Milanese who cannot imagine that anybody would choose to live in what he considers a small provincial place that offers only financial opportunities to a merchant class solely concerned with amassing wealth. The journalist undermines his friend’s misconception of Trieste as a provincial town, by describing the city’s international flair: not only people from all over the world reside permanently here, but the city is also constantly attracting foreign visitors

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who come and go exchanging news and ideas from many other places. To further challenge the provincial stigma attached to Trieste, the writer highlights the open-mindedness of the city, demonstrated by the tolerance that informs its citizens. Not only are all religions accepted in this predominantly secular city, but citizens can continue to preserve traditions and practices from their countries of origin without fear of being ridiculed or ostracized (Y 4 September 1836a, 2).5 Furthermore, the wealthy cosmopolitan city offers something more than tolerance and opportunity, and its port is much more than a receptacle of people and goods. The view of the port with its constant movement of people and merchandise, and that of the open sea filled with large ships and liners, is a source of inspiration for anybody who takes the time to observe it: ‘your imagination gets excited, your soul rises, and your spirit grows proud at the sight of so much human potential and power. And if you hear a carriage pass behind you, you don’t deign to look back at that little vehicle reduced to the shape and size of a child’s toy’ (4 September 1836a, 2). This is the site of a modern ethos that embraces the economic dynamism of the nineteenth century and recognizes in its industrial and financial expressions the spiritual, aesthetic and intellectual stimulus of a new era propelled towards the future. As the writer suggests, there is no turning back towards what is traditional and ordinary. The sight of modern ships travelling great distances on the open sea dwarfs into the size of a child’s toy the carriage that previously would have startled the onlooker. Throughout its run, the paper continued to pay attention to the industrial and technological developments of the city, from the project of a railway line between Vienna and Trieste,6 to the building of larger and more powerful steamships by the Austrian Lloyd, to the various successful manufacturing industries and businesses that produced and sold all sort of high-end goods for a bourgeois class that, as an article from 20 May 1838 asserted, ‘earns well and loves to spend’ (Dall’Ongaro 1838, 184). The financial power of Trieste is also explored in the pages of the paper, where the writers not just emphasize the economic benefits that it entails but also reflect, quite originally, on the poetic and aesthetic value of commerce. In a long article dedicated to the Borsa, the anonymous journalist describes in detail the imposing palace of the stock exchange and corroborates Kreil’s view (albeit without mentioning him) that to the eyes of a foreigner this magnificent building looks like a temple dedicated to the god of profit and speculation (Y 20 November 1836b, 2). The Piazza della Borsa, where businessmen routinely interact, turns into a public

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stage where the onlooker can observe the urgency, suspicion and palpable tension as people gather and talk to each other, seeking deals, loans and favours. Even the language used by traders and businessmen, made up of ‘truncated, dry, broken sentences’, is unique and incomprehensible to the layman: ‘commerce, even more than the sciences and the arts, has created its own […] very special language’, with a ‘monopoly of meaning’ inaccessible to anybody else (20 November 1836b, 2). Yet, the language of bureaucracy and commerce is not something that should be repudiated or belittled. It is a necessary means of expression to achieve all the wonders of Trieste’s financial success, which reaches all continents through the circulation of its wares. Moreover, the description of the wealth gained by Trieste’s entrepreneurial class inspires the author to a flight of the imagination, as he encourages the reader to envision the city slowly covered by a golden shimmer, expanding slowly from the grey humble stones that pave the Piazza della Borsa, to its large palaces, to its beaches, all the way up to the hills surrounding the city with their beautiful villas and vineyards (20 November 1836b, 2–3). The fact that commerce and financial endeavours can provide poetical inspiration is the theme of an 1838 article, aptly entitled ‘Poesia del Commercio’ (Poetry of Commerce), where the journalist wonders why poets and artists are not tapping into the wealth of images, thoughts and ideas that are embedded in the complex drama that makes up commercial activities. Poets have been ignoring ‘how much poetic beauty and splendour there is in commerce, in this universal movement of earthly goods which, through an infinite spiral of barters and purchases, of industriousness and pretence, of gains and losses, riches and miseries, joys and sorrows, gathers, disseminates and sows the riches of one part of the world into another, providing for needs, increasing the comforts, brightening in a thousand ways the boring sterility of life’ (Anon. 16 December 1838, 77). If poets have been ignoring commerce because they deemed it too vulgar, arid and greedy—the author continues—they did not realize that instead it informs all human activities, it is at the core of progress in ‘industry, arts and letters’ (16 December 1838, 77), and is, therefore, an intrinsic part of our humanity.7 The multiethnic identity of the city, and the international quality of its many businesses also influenced the paper’s literary activities. The transactional nature of commerce finds its cultural equivalent in La Favilla’s interest in the literature and cultural production from other countries, becoming thus a cultural hub for the import, translation and

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dissemination of ideas and knowledge from other parts of Europe. As Kirchner Reill noted, commenting on the paper’s multinational cultural vision, ‘Trieste was part of a region where the German, Italian and Slavic nations met. As such, it was the Triestines’ obligation to broadcast information about lands and communities associated with their city, taking an active role in binding Europe’s different nations together’ (2012, 9). Travel reports from different places, including Africa and the Middle East, translations from French, English, German and Serbian, together with literary reviews formed the corpus of the paper’s literary pages. Throughout the years of its publication, the editors favoured contemporary writers, such as Victor Hugo, Lamartine, Dumas, Byron, Dickens and Grillparzer, while also giving space to comparatist articles that focused on the reception of canonical authors such as Dante, Herder, Lessing, Goethe, Schiller and Shakespeare. The interest in translation is also evinced by a series of articles, spearheaded by Caterina Percotto, that focused on the accuracy of Maffei’s Italian translation of Klopstock’s Messiah (3 March 1839, 121–122), and on the essential role that translation played in the cultural identity of the city. Furthermore, thanks to the collaboration of Nicolò Tommaseo, the paper also published a series entitled ‘Studi sugli Slavi’ (Studies on the Slavs), which focused on articles on and translations of Slavic literature, especially popular poetry and proverbs.8 Dall’Ongaro and Valussi’s interest in translations and foreign literature was twofold. On the one hand, they wanted to inform their readers of the complex cultural character of their city and demonstrate that Triestine cultural identity was not dominated by a sense of national belonging but by its multinational bourgeois ethos (Millo 2007, 68). Their focus on translations and foreign literatures also followed a clear literary and cultural approach that criticized the contemporary literary marketplace that allowed France to dictate the reception and the value of a literary work.9 Foreshadowing current debates on the literary success of minor literatures (Casanova 2004), Valussi questioned the authority that France gained as arbiter of literary taste and lamented the fact that texts from different literary traditions were not known directly but always filtered through Parisian translations and reviews. Referring specifically to the case of Italian literature, he noted the absurdity that without France’s seal of approval, Italian texts not only remained unknown abroad, but they were also dismissed in the peninsula (19 August 1843, 304). Critics and publishers should free themselves from the yoke of France’s influence and realise that

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the literatures of Europe are united in a federated republic, that the absolute dominance of one [national literature] over the others is a fiction, that creative geniuses are in every country, and that the task of every literature is to try to improve itself with regard to the language, traditions, dispositions and needs of those to whom it speaks. At the same time, each literature must be in good harmony with foreign literatures, to give them and receive from them nourishment, for in the end the richest literature is the one that gives and receives the most. (19 August 1843, 304)

In a way that recalls Goethe’s concept of Weltliteratur as a network that promoted the movement of ideas between people and nations, where national literature has become an ‘unmeaning term’ (1874, 213), Valussi remarked that a narrow-minded, insular predilection of a singular literary tradition made absolutely no sense in a century when ‘railways, steamships, customs agreements’ facilitated the circulations of goods and ideas: ‘In the century in which the great distances that separated nation from nation were reduced, in which barriers and disparities were demolished, it is certainly not possible that literatures become so inward-looking as to never go out of their own home to travel this world that becomes bigger by getting smaller’ (19 August 1843, 305). For Valussi, the only way to counteract this literary status quo was to encourage accurate translations of the best modern writings that were being produced all over Europe at this time. These books would not only find a secure market in the publishing world, but they would also provide an innovative and beneficial nourishment for the spirit of the readers, who would finally be able to appreciate texts from different literary traditions. Valussi, coming from a multinational city whose foundation and subsequent wealth was based on international commercial and financial trades, understood the transactional value of translations and their cultural currency.10

Italo Svevo’s Una Vita Without knowing it, Valussi predicted the literary destiny of one of Trieste’s greatest writers, Aron Ettore Schmitz, a successful Jewish businessman who wrote under the pen name of Italo Svevo to highlight his mixed Italian and German identity, and who embodied ‘the tolerant, pluralist […] and cosmopolitan’ modern essence of his city (Appiah 2018, 104). Svevo’s first two novels, Una Vita (A Life, 1892) and Senilità (As a

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Man Grows Older, 1898), did not receive any significant critical attention in Italy or abroad when they were first self-published. It was only after the publication of La Coscienza di Zeno (Zeno’s Conscience) in 1923 that Svevo’s opus, thanks to the intercession of James Joyce, gained the critical appreciation it deserved. Joyce introduced Svevo’s work to his French translator, Valéry Larbaud, and to the critic Benjamin Crémieux, who recognized the European breadth of Svevo’s oeuvre, giving his work literary legitimacy within the international world of letters (1926, 23–26).11 Svevo did more than unwittingly confirm the role of French critical authorities in bestowing literary validity on marginal texts that ‘are remote from literary capitals’ (Casanova 2004, 92). Right from his first novel, Una Vita (1892), the author reflected on the role of literature in a time when, as the writers of La Favilla had already observed, financial transactions and commerce should offer their own poetical inspiration. The novel dramatizes the crisis of the individual who is incapable of living in a modern urban environment, while exploring the role of literature and writing at the end of the nineteenth century in Trieste (Lunetta 1972, Curti 1992, Biondi 1991).12 Una Vita tells the story of Alfonso Nitti, a bank clerk who is unable to function in the modern world of Trieste and fantasizes of being able to impose himself as a literary figure through his intellectual work. He also dreams of being able to gain access to the city’s upper class through his courtship of Annetta Maller, the daughter of the director of the bank where he works. However, after seducing the girl, he runs away and, unwilling to confront her family, and embarrassed by having been demoted from his position at the bank, he kills himself. As the protagonist tries to navigate the complex work environment of the bank, incapable of understanding the complexities of the financial institution, he imagines his future literary accomplishments which included the translation of an important German philosophical work and the creation of a groundbreaking philosophical treatise that would have revolutionised Italian philosophy. It is interesting that Svevo introduces here the work of translation as one of Alfonso’s failed intellectual pursuits. Alfonso will never work on the translation, thus renouncing the important role as the mediator of cultures and ideas, which was, as the authors of La Favilla noted, essential to the establishment of an international ‘federated republic of letters’ (Valussi 19 August 1843, 304). Alfonso will also dismiss his philosophical work, of which, Svevo tells us with irony, he wrote only a few meaningless pages. However, throughout the novel Alfonso will continue to believe in his intellectual superiority, as evinced in the letter that

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opens the novel, where he confides his unhappiness in the new environment to his mother: Wouldn't it be better if I came home? I would help you in your work, maybe I would even work in the fields, but then I would read my poets quietly, under the shade of the oak trees, breathing our good, uncorrupted air. […] My sorrow is made worse by the arrogance of my colleagues and my superiors. […] They are all dandies who spend half the day looking at themselves in the mirror. Foolish people! If they gave me a Latin classic, I would be able to comment on it all, while they do not even know its name. (Svevo 2004, 5)

Nitti’s desire for a bucolic escape to his native village, where he can return to a space that is still untouched by modernity, is linked here to a traditional classical culture that he claims he can still access, as opposed to his frivolous colleagues. However, there is no proof within the novel of Alfonso’s Latin abilities, which remain bound to the reading and re-reading of one of his school textbooks, ‘an insignificant pamphlet [trattatello] on rhetoric, containing a small anthology of classic writers’ (2004, 61). Alfonso’s inability to escape literary clichés is further explored in the novel that he attempted to write together with Annetta, Maller’s daughter. The novel, an aggrandized rendition of Alfonso’s life, would tell the story of a young, impoverished nobleman who comes to the city in search of fortune and eventually regains his place in society and is able to marry the daughter of his boss. The banality of the plot, coupled with the stylistic approach of the two writers (Annetta is inspired by romantic feuilletons and Alfonso by more ‘serious’ French naturalism), reveals the fact that their tastes are based on trite conventions (Fava Guzzetta 1994, 158). Traditional narrative can no longer represent the complex financial world of Trieste. Svevo not only thematizes the impasse of the naturalist novel by making Alfonso and Annetta’s literary pursuits fail, but he also undermines naturalist practices in his own writing. Although the novel is constructed as a naturalistic text with detailed and seemingly objective descriptions of characters and settings, the subtle, ironic voice of the author carefully destabilizes such a construction to underscore the unreliability of the main character and at the same time show the limitations of a nineteenth-century narrative model that still believed in its ability to capture the world and the individual in an objective and coherent totality. It is Nitti’s colleague White, a British expatriate who works at the bank as its French correspondent, who oversees the stock exchange transactions

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and embodies the cosmopolitan, multilingual identity of Trieste, who shows sincere intellectual acumen and literary knowledge, thus undermining Alfonso’s statement that his colleagues are all foolish and ignorant: ‘[White] read all the new French novels and spoke of them from particular points of view which made his observations sound original. He did not like most modern novels; he understood, as far as Alfonso could judge, all their merits, but he did not always love them. He found one thing too much or another too little and ended up criticizing them. He offended Alfonso’s fetishism by speaking with contemptuous familiarity of the most famous writers’ (Svevo 2004, 65). White’s originality in his literary analysis and his ability to discern flaws and strengths in contemporary novels are set against Alfonso’s narrow-­ minded devotion for traditional literary authorities. He is unable to free himself from an established canon of classic texts, French naturalism and the authority of famous writers. Alfonso’s inability to transform his urban experiences into a modern narrative form that could allow him to give his experiences some meaning is one of the reasons for his suicide (Minghelli 2016, 100). However, the young Svevo, by constantly undermining Alfonso’s perspective, is already showing in nuce the potential of the great narrative innovations that he will introduce in his last novel, where the protagonist, Zeno Cosini, embraces financial speculations and the uncertainties of the bourse, and thrives within the complex urban milieu of his border city.

Luigi Di San Giusto’s Schemagn Israel If Alfonso fails to capitalize on the urban experiences that the cosmopolitan, wealthy Trieste presents to him, Luigi di San Giusto, nom de plume of Luisa Gervasio, in her little-known novel Schemagn Israel,13 explores the unique cultural perspective that Trieste can offer precisely at the time when World War I is about to change the city forever. The novel, subtitled a ‘story of a Jewish family during the first year of the world war’, was published in 1926, but written between 1914 and 1915, as Italy was about to enter the war to take Trieste and fulfil the irredentist dream of the Italian nationalists. As Gervasio tells us, the aim of the novel is to show the loyalty of the Jewish population to the Italian cause, while at the same time portraying the nuanced loyalties of the Triestines during the first year of the war, thus debunking the myth of a collective Italian nationalist ideal which

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will become the official narrative of Triestine history in the years after the war.14 Although the subtitle focuses the narration on the first year of the war, the book covers a longer period, from 1903 to 1915, allowing Gervasio to recreate the cosmopolitan, wealthy and politically lively environment of the years of Habsburg Trieste. The novel ends abruptly in November 1915, when the author must leave the city. Through the story of the two main characters, the Gentile Luisa Furiani and the Jewish David Levi, the author gives us a more complex portrait of Trieste during a time marked by strong nationalist ideologies. As opposed to many texts written at that time, which embraced tout court the irredentist cause and erased the multinational identity of the city, the novel explores various attitudes towards Austria, Italian nationalism, the Zionist movement and above all towards international socialism. What is particularly interesting for our purpose here is the role that translations and comparatist studies play in exploring Trieste’s changing identity at the eve of World War I. When we meet Luisa Furiani, she is a precocious 13-year-old girl, with literary aspirations, and a strong Italian national identity, forged in the Liceo Femminile, the Italian all-girl high school she attends.15 She lives in the same building as the Levis, and she loves to spend time with David and his family. It is Benedetto Levi, David’s cultured and secular uncle, who at the beginning of the novel teaches the girl a lesson in ethnic and political tolerance—the tolerance that Kreil, Dall’Ongaro and Valussi had identified as one of Trieste’s main characteristics throughout the nineteenth century, but which was being eroded at the beginning of the twentieth century by intransigent nationalist ideologies. To the exuberant declarations of Luisa, that in her new high school Austrian and Slovenian girls are finally in the minority and therefore can be silenced by the Italian majority, Uncle Benedetto responds by reminding her that everybody has the right to self-determination, including the Slavs. For Benedetto, national sentiments do not lead to a vision of supremacy and usurpation of one nation by another, but, on the contrary, he imagines a future of brotherhood and solidarity between nations, clearly embracing Austro-Marxist theories,16 which sought to negotiate internationalist principles with nationalist sentiments: [I]t is very sad for mankind that each nation is not all closed within the borders of one state. Maybe it will be so one day. And then all peoples, free and independent, will gladly bind themselves with other peoples, forming a

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single immense family of all civilized peoples. And then all reasons for hatred and war between nations will cease. But in the meantime, my dear, […] it is absurd to hate each other because one is German and the other Italian. (1927, 5–6)

Reminding her with irony that her mother too is Slovenian, he also points out that ‘we from Trieste are largely descendants of this race’ (7), taking up the concept of openness to other nations that had already been expressed in La Favilla. Years pass, and while Luisa remains in Trieste, perfecting her German and devouring literary texts in different languages, David moves to Innsbruck to study at the university. The Austrian city—and not Florence, the cradle of Italian culture, where many irredentists went to study in those years—became a privileged place for extra-national cultural exchanges. In this international cultural milieu, David is able to discuss his ideas on socialism, nationalism and Jewish identity with students from other nationalities. As David and his friends discuss Zionism and the predicament of Russian and German Jews who are persecuted in a systematic manner, Luisa, from home, translates Heine’s ‘Prinzessin Sabbath’ (Princess Shabbat), the poem that opens Heine’s section ‘Hebräische Melodien’ (Hebrew Melodies) in his Romanzero, published in 1852. The insertion of Heine’s poem at this point of the novel, translated here for the first time into Italian, and produced in its entirety, is an important multidimensional signal. Thematically, Heine’s poem highlights the anti-Semitic prejudices that shape Jewish identity in nineteenth-century Germany and that are discussed by David and his friends. Moreover, through the act of translation, the author shows Luisa’s cultural and intellectual engagement which complements the political conversations that take place among the young university students, from which Luisa is excluded. In this way, the author signals the possibility for women to participate actively in an intellectual multi-national discourse even if they cannot, as women, have easy access to the same public spaces. Thus, the translated poem not only corroborates but also questions the students’ own understandings of Jewish identity and struggles within European society. While the young students, moved by their own ideals, imagine a future where they will be able to change the perception of Judaism through journalism, education and financial treatises that will prove ‘the worth of the Jewish race and its importance in the political economy of a free state’ (78). Luisa, through Heine’s poem, suggests a more problematic

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outcome. The long poem represents the Jewish Shabbat, personified as a beautiful princess who can, for the brief period of the Shabbat, break the spell that an evil witch has cast on the Jewish people, represented here as a prince. During the whole week, the witch’s spell condemns the prince to be a dog, ‘with doggish thoughts’, dragging himself ‘through life’s slop and slime / while urchins mock him’ (translated in Meyer 2020, 210). But on Friday evenings the spell is broken, and the dog becomes a human being able to raise his head and heart high. The whole poem captures the beauty of the liturgy, and its richly symbolic rituals. And yet, after it is over, the prince knows that he will again be transformed into ‘das behaarte Ungeheuer’ (Heine 1852, 205), the hairy monster despised by everybody. The cyclical curse of the prince, repeated Shabbat after Shabbat, has no resolution. As Meyer puts it, ‘there is no redemption; there is no progress. […] History offers him nothing; his future will not be different from his present’ (2020, 218). Thus, Heine’s bitter view of Jewish destiny challenges the idealistic worldview of the young students. Through the insertion of the translated poem, Gervasio, who was herself an accomplished translator, demonstrates the importance of translators as mediators of culture within Trieste.17 Translating signifies not only making literary traditions, unknown texts or writers available to a monolingual culture which would otherwise have no access to them (Adamo 2017, 18), it is also a means of participating in a multicultural world, like the one described in her novel, where Jewish, Italian, Slovenian and German traditions intersect, question and enrich each other. In the letter that Benedetto sends to David with the translation of Heine’s poem, he also tells his nephew that Luisa is becoming recognised as an author of short stories and that she collaborates with the paper La Scintilla (1927, 82). The name of the paper, a synonym of La Favilla, which had ceased publication in 1846, signals Gervasio’s intention to link Luisa’s endeavours with those of the earlier paper: Luisa’s international literary interests and her appreciation for the multiethnic reality of Trieste would have made her indeed the perfect collaborator for the defunct journal. The assassination of Franz Ferdinand, the heir to the Habsburg throne, in Sarajevo in 1914 ends this period of prosperity and will foment strong nationalist ideologies within the city. It will also force the different characters to question their loyalties and their national identity. Alongside Italian irredentism, embraced by Luisa’s younger brother, and internationalist socialism, embraced by David and Luisa, the novel also shows characters who are loyal to Austria. David’s father became an Austrian citizen because

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he believed that it was ethically correct ‘to embrace the nationality of the country where you live and work, and where you expect to die’ (1927, 87). Similarly, Luisa’s father is convinced that Trieste can only survive economically if it is part of Austria: Do you hope that Italy will wage war on Austria? Poor Trieste! It would be ruined! Trieste thrives on commerce, and commerce needs peace. […] The people are indifferent; they want to earn, they want to live; with Austria or Italy, it doesn’t matter. (1927, 102)

These statements clearly indicate the attitude of part of the population, which recognises itself in the Austrian Empire and appreciates the economic opportunities of Habsburg Trieste and fears the personal and economic damage that the war would bring. The declaration of war against Serbia is not presented as a moment of joy and expectation that brings closer Italy’s intervention in the war, the so-called ‘maggio radioso’ (glorious May) embraced by nationalist rhetoric,18 but as a tragedy that will lead to the destruction of the city (1927, 133). The importance of a multiethnic and multicultural view is brought to the fore when David and Luisa find themselves back in Trieste a few months after Italy had declared war. The bustling, multiethnic city described by Kreil, Svevo and the journalists of La Favilla has ceased to exist. The city is a shadow of its former self. The streets and markets are now empty, the port is inactive, most men are at the front; fear, suspicion and poverty are ubiquitous. Reflecting on the momentous events that they are witnessing, David, who has not abandoned his internationalist ideals, remarks to Luisa that only a complex, interdisciplinary work that considers the multifaceted reality of the moment can aspire to capture the horrors of the war. History, philosophy and art must come together in order to attempt to interpret the ‘terrifying tragedy of the world’ (1927, 132) that they are witnessing. In a letter written a few months later from the front, David imagines, after the war, the ‘good they would try to do together, hastening the work of redemption, of human brotherhood’ (1927, 271). At the end of the novel, the concept of redemption, which in the works of those years had been appropriated by nationalist and irredentist ideology, is presented within a project of solidarity between all peoples: ‘Because there must be no more religious hatreds and racial antipathies; not the proud exaltations of one people over another […]. On this path, my dear, we must walk united, and towards this goal’ (1927, 271). David’s

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assertion embraces tout court the multiethnic image of Trieste already observed by Kreil and espoused by La Favilla that tried to bring Europe’s nations together through its multinational cultural efforts. However, we readers will never know if the two young people will be able to realise their humanitarian and cultural dreams, much less if they will survive the conflict, as the author warns us at this point that she will no longer be able to continue ‘this simple and true narrative’ as she must abandon Trieste and with it also ‘her characters’ (1927, 273). The precise moment in which the writer interrupts her text, ‘at noon on November 15 of the year 1915’ (1927, 273), gives the novel real narrative immediacy and allows Gervasio to avoid an ideologically uniform reading of the conflict. Instead of offering the irredentist cliché of Trieste that awaits the Italian ships that would liberate it from Austria and make it Italian,19 the author prefers to conclude the novel with a question that remains unanswered: ‘We no longer lived; we just waited ... For what? No one would have been able to tell’ (1927, 271). Given that it was published in the 1920s during the Fascist regime, the writer could have easily revised and concluded the novel differently, inserting a clear ideological telos into it. The narrative choice of leaving the novel in abeyance allows the author to underscore, at a time when the regime was silencing any dissent and was programmatically erasing Trieste’s multinational voices in favour of a strong sense of italianità, the inherent value of Trieste’s multicultural recent past, and the importance of keeping alive the international project initiated by the promoters of La Favilla. Although Trieste was to remain a bone of contention between different powers over the next several decades, it would never again be a cosmopolitan international cultural and commercial centre on the European stage. And yet, the cultural projects and literary texts that were produced in Trieste in these years are a testament to an alternative non-national possibility based on cultural exchanges and dialogues, which greatly contrasted with the imperialistic and nationalist ideologies that took hold of Italy after World War I.

Notes 1. All translations are mine unless otherwise noted. 2. Trieste was granted the status of free port in 1719. Furthermore, large Austrian investments in its infrastructure, and the issuing of a series of edicts that permitted individuals from ‘any nation, social standing or reli-

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gion’ to settle in the city to do business without any restrictions (Mainati 1818, 142), allowed the city to grow into a large commercial and financial centre. See also Ara and Magris (1982, 18–42). 3. On the history of the Casino and its cultural relevance, see (Cattaruzza (1995, 11–58).  4. On La Favilla and its publishers, see also Kirchner Reill (2011, 3–15). 5. Trieste’s secular outlook can be linked to the city’s predominant business ethos, which replaced religion as the enforcer of public morality. See also Catalan (2011, 69–71). 6. Work on the railway began in 1839. It opened in 1857. 7. The importance of such a statement will be reiterated at the beginning of the twentieth century by Scipio Slataper, who declared in his Letters on Trieste (1909) that culture in Trieste should embrace its commercial soul. See Slataper (2020, 87-94). 8. On the important role of translation in Trieste, see also Adamo (2017) and Campanile (2006). The interest of La Favilla towards Slavic culture was a direct result of Niccolò Tommaseo’s friendship with and influence on the editors. Originally from Dalmatia, Tommaseo was an intellectual, politician and writer who embraced Trieste’s multilingual and multicultural identity. He also translated Slavic songs and ballads, published together in one volume in 1841. See Kirchner Reill (2012, 47–81). 9. Pascale Casanova has reiterated the French authority in the world republic of letters at the time: ‘In France […] the literary domination exerted all over Europe from the eighteenth century onward [was] so uncontested (and indeed uncontestable), that it became the most autonomous literary space of all’ (2004, 87). 10. A similar concern is expressed also by Goethe, whose work Valussi knew well. Goethe envisioned the possibility of a harmonious exchange between national cultures achieved through translations: ‘it is thus necessary to consider each translator as a mediator seeking to promote this universal spiritual commerce and setting himself the task of assisting its progress. Whatever one may say of the inadequacy of translation, this activity remains one of the most essential tasks and one of the worthiest of esteem in the universal market of world trade’ (quoted in Casanova 2004, 14). On the cultural value of translations, see Damrosch (2003). 11. For a detailed analysis of Svevo’s early reception, see Contini (1996, 77–96). 12. Fava Guzzetta (1991, 153–160) was the first critic to reflect on the meta-­ literary concerns of the novel. 13. ‘Schema Israel’ (‘Hear, O Israel’) is the name of a fundamental prayer of the Jewish liturgy. 14. From the beginning of the 1890s, when Jews started to participate more assiduously in all aspects of Trieste’s social, political and economic life, a

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strong anti-Semitic sentiment developed in Trieste, an attitude that the gentile Gervasio, born in 1865, could easily have witnessed (Catalan 2000, 251–300). Gervasio’s choice of San Giusto as her male pseudonym highlights her Triestine identity. San Giusto is the name of the hill in the centre of the old city where both the homonymous cathedral and castle are located. On Trieste’s ‘Italianness’, see Hametz (2005), Todero (2006) and Fabi (1996). 15. On the importance of Trieste’s Liceo Femminile, see De Rosa (2004). 16. Otto Bauer, one of the most important proponents of Austro-Marxism, envisioned the future role of the multinational Habsburg Empire as a federalist structure that ‘regulates matters relevant to all nations and that safeguards the interests shared by all nations’ (Bauer 2000, 259). Every national group within this federated structure would maintain ample autonomy to foster its own cultural and national identity (281). 17. Under her nom de plume, Gervasio translated into Italian the Niebelungenlied (1933), Goethe’s Roman Elegies (1893) and Journey to Italy (1924), James Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans (1901), and Cervantes’s Don Quixote (1912). 18. See the diary of Carmela Rossi Timeus, Attendiamo le navi (Waiting for the Ships, 1934, 56). 19. The myth of Trieste waiting for Italian warships became one of the topoi of unified Italy. See Rossi Timeus (1934).

Works Cited Anon. 1838. Poesia del Commercio. La Favilla 3, 16 December: 77-78. Adamo, Sergia. 2017. ‘At Trieste, in 1872, in a palace with damp statues and deficient hygienic facilities…’: Translation and the Construction of Identities in a Context of Language Plurality and Cultural Diversity. TRANS- Revue de littérature Générale et comparée (21). https://doi.org/10.4000/trans.1436. Appiah, Kwame Anthony. 2018. The Lies That Bind. Rethinking Identity. New York: Liverlight. Ara, Angelo, and Claudio Magris. 1982. Trieste: Un’identità di frontiera. Turin: Einaudi. Bauer, Otto. 2000. The Question of Nationalities and Social Democracy, trans. Joseph O’Donnell. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Bazlen, Roberto. 1984. Scritti. Milan: Adelphi. Biondi, Mario. 1991. Novecento: storie e stili del romanzo in Italia. Firenze: Festina Lente. Campanile, Anna. 2006. The Torn Soul of a City: Trieste as a Center of Polyphonic Culture and Literature. In History of the Literary Cultures of East-Central

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Europe, vol. 2. eds. Marcel Cornis-Pope and John Neubauer, 145-61. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Casanova, Pascale. 2004. The World Republic of Letters, trans. M. B. DeBevoise. Cambridge MA and London: Harvard University Press. Catalan, Tullia. 2000. La comunità ebraica di Trieste (1781- 1914): politica, società, e cultura. Trieste: LINT. Catalan, Tullia. 2011. The Ambivalence of a Port-City. The Jews of Trieste from the 19th to the 20th Century. Quest. Issues in Contemporary Jewish History 10 (2): 69-98. https://www.quest-­cdecjournal.it/ the-­a mbivalence-­o f-­a -­p ort-­c ity-­t he-­j ews-­o f-­t rieste-­f rom-­t he-­1 9th-­t o-­ the-­20th-­century/. Cattaruzza, Marina. 1995. Trieste nell’Ottocento. Le trasformazioni di una società civile. Udine: Del Bianco Editore. Contini, Gabriella. 1996. Svevo. Palermo: Palumbo. Cornis-Pope, Marcel. 2004. Introduction: Representing East-Central Europe’s Marginocentric Cities. In History of the Literary Cultures of East-Central Europe, eds. Marcel Cornis-Pope and John Neubauer, 9-11. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Crémieux, Benjamin. 1926. Italo Svevo. La Navire d’Argent 3 (9), 1 February: 23-26. Curti, Luca. 1992. Svevo e Schopenhauer: rilettura di ‘Una Vita’. Pisa: ETS. Dall’Ongaro, Francesco. 1838. Ideale dell’industria. La Favilla 3, 20 May: 184-85. Damrosch, David. 2003. What Is World Literature. World Literature Today 77 (1): 9-14. Alighieri, Dante. 1995. The Divine Comedy, trans. Allen Mandelbaum. London: Everyman Library. De Rosa, Diana. 2004. Spose, madri e maestre: il Liceo femminile e l'Istituto magistrale G. Carducci di Trieste, 1872-1954. Udine: Del Bianco. De Sapio, Joseph. 2014. Modernity and Meaning in Victorian London Tourist Views of the Imperial Capital. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Fabi, Lucio. 1996. Trieste 1914-1915. Una città in guerra. Trieste: MGS Press. Fava Guzzetta, Lia. 1991. Il primo romanzo di Svevo. Una scrittura della scissione e dell’assenza. Messina-Florence: D’Anna. Fava Guzzetta, Lia. 1994. Tra ipotetiche naturalistiche e istanze metadiscorsive: il primo romanzo: Una vita. In Italo Svevo: scrittore europeo: atti del convegno internazionale, eds. Norberto Cacciaglia e Lia Fava Guzzetta, 153-60. Florence: Olschki. Ferrini, Cinzia. 2012. Per una filosofia hegeliana degli spazi naturali e umani: l’anomalia paradigmatica del ‘caso’ Trieste. In Civiltà del mare e navigazioni interculturali: Sponde d'Europa e L'‘Isola’ Trieste, ed. Cinzia Ferrini et  al., 176-87. Trieste: EUT. http://hdl.handle.net/10077/8079.

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Goethe, J.  Wolfgang von, Oxenford, J., Soret, F.  Jacob, Eckermann, J.  Peter. 1874. Conversations of Goethe with Eckermann and Soret, trans. John Oxenford. London: G. Bell & Sons. Hametz, Maura. 2005. Making Trieste Italian, 1918-1954. [London]: The Royal Historical Society. Heine, Heinrich. 1852. Prinzessin Sabbath. In Romanzero. Hamburg: Hoffmann und Campe. Kirchner Reill, Dominique. 2011. A Poet’s Struggle for a New Adriaticism in the Nineteenth Century. Austrian History Yearbook 42: 3-15. Kirchner Reill, Dominique 2012. Nationalists Who Feared the Nation: Adriatic Multi-Nationalism in Habsburg Dalmatia, Trieste, and Venice. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press. Kreil, Joseph. 1817. Mnemosyne. Ein Tagebuch, geführt auf einer Reise durch das lombardisch-venetianische Königreich, Illyrien, Tyrol und Salzburg, 1815 und 1816. Leipzig: Hartleben. Lunetta, Mario. 1972. Invito alla lettura di Italo Svevo. Milano: Mursia. Madonizza, Antonio. 1836. Parole dei compilatori. La Favilla 1, 31 July. Mainati, Giuseppe. 1818. Croniche ossia memorie storiche sacro-profane di Trieste cominciando dall’XI secolo sino ai nostri giorni: coll’aggiunta della relazione dei Vescovi dal primo sino al decimo secolo, vol. 4. Venice: Picotti. Meyer, Michael. 2020. The Imagined Jew: Heinrich Heine’s ‘Prinzessin Sabbath’. In History and Literature: New Readings of Jewish Texts in Honor of Arnold J. Band, ed. David C. Jacobson, William Cutter, and Michael L. Satlow, 209-22. Providence: Brown Judaic Studies. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctvzpv540.23. Millo, Anna. 2007. Trieste, 1830–70: From Cosmopolitanism to the Nation. In Different Paths to the Nation, Regional and National Identities in Central Europe and Italy, 1830-70, ed. Laurence Cole, 60-81. New York: Palgrave. Minghelli, Giuliana. 2016. In the Shadow of the Mammoth: Italo Svevo and the Emergence of Modernism. Toronto: Toronto University Press. Pancrazi, Pietro. 1946. Scrittori d'oggi, vol. 2. Bari: Laterza. Pappalardo, Salvatore. 2021. Modernism in Trieste. The Habsburg Mediterranean and the Literary Invention of Europe, 1870-1945. London: Bloomsbury. Percotto, Caterina. 1839. Lettera al Compilatore. La Favilla 3, 3 March: 121-122. Rossetti, Domenico. 1874. Sette lettere inedite di argomento municipale scritte negli anni 1815-1819. Trieste: Tipografia del Lloyd Austro-Ungarico. Rossi Timeus, Carmela. 1934. Attendiamo le navi. Diario di una giovinetta triestina 1914-1918. Bologna: Cappelli. San Giusto, Luigi di. 1927. Schemagn Israel! Storia d'una famiglia ebrea durante il primo anno della Guerra mondiale. Turin: Petrini. Slataper, Scipio. 2020. Letters on Trieste. In My Karst and My City: And Other Essays, ed. Elena Coda, trans. Nicholas Benson, 87-94. Toronto: Toronto University Press.

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Svevo, Italo. 2004. Una Vita. In Romanzi e Continuazioni, ed. Nunzia Palmieri and Fabio Vittorini, 3-386. Milan: Mondadori. Todero, Roberto. 2006. Dalla Galizia all'Isonzo: storia e storie dei soldati triestini nella grande guerra. Udine: Gaspari. Valussi, Pacifico. 1843. Gallofagi e Gallomani. La Favilla 7, 19 August: 304-08. Y. 1836a. Come si vive a Trieste. La Favilla 1, 4 September: 1-2. Y. 1836b. La Borsa di Trieste. La Favilla 1, 20 November: 1-3.

CHAPTER 9

Untimely, Modern City: Literary Interventions on Florence as an Intellectual Capital at the Turn of the Century Laura Scuriatti

‘Ducie [Mina Loy] says that Florence is all wealth & gaiety—tea-dances & jazz at every corner— & everything very Chicago. You might like it again. It sounds to be like a delicious confusion of epochs.1 Carl Van Vechten to Mabel Dodge Luhan (Kellner 1987, 32–33) Florence loses itself to-day in dusty boulevards and smart beaux quartiers, such as Napoleon III and Baron Haussmann were to set the fashion of to a too medieval Europe – with the effect of some precious page of antique text

I would like to thank Egidio Marzona for making his library and archive on Futurism available to me when it was impossible to travel anywhere; Roger Conover, Mina Loy’s editor and literary executor, for permission to quote from Mina Loy’s texts; Edward M. Burns and the Van Vechten Trust for permission to quote from Carl Van Vechten’s letters.

L. Scuriatti (*) Bard College Berlin, Berlin, Germany e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 A. Bhattacharya et al. (eds.), Literary Capitals in the Long Nineteenth Century, Literary Urban Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-13060-1_9

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swallowed up in a marginal commentary that smacks of the style of the newspaper.2 Henry James (1995a, 239) Firenze intellettualmente e moralmente attaccata alle sue glorie passate era per lui [Marinetti] più importante che non Mosca, Berlino, Vienna o Londra. [Florence, intellectually and morally attached to its past glories, was much more important for him [Marinetti] then Moscow, Berlin, Vienna or London] Alberto Viviani (1933, 27)

Florence’s role as a political and cultural capital changed, surged and waned many times throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: from being a provincial town famous for its mediaeval and Renaissance heritage, it was the capital of Tuscany, an Italian region which belonged to the Austrian Empire until 1859; it became part of the Kingdom of Italy in 1861, and was its provisional capital between 1865 and 1871. Consequently, the city underwent a fast cycle of modernisation that affected the town’s urban structure and infrastructure; because of its new political status, it also took on a considerable role within the distinctly polycentric Italian literary and cultural field. Both Italians and foreigners were forced to rethink the fundamental aspects of the city’s symbolic and political identity, initiating a process of transformation which continued well into the new century. The debates about the modernisation of Florence, which also involved the large expatriate community, were very polarised: for some, the main concern was whether the city of the present could match its previous glory (or a fantasy of that glory) and whether the Florentine Renaissance heritage could be suitably preserved; others questioned the premise that Florence’s self-understanding should be exclusively determined by its past, pushing not only for a modernisation of the town’s architecture and urban structure but also for a new Italian and European identity for the city.3 These debates were waged very vocally in the pages of local newspapers and newly founded literary magazines, such as Il Marzocco, La Voce and Lacerba—which very soon achieved a broad circulation nationwide—and at times they extended to the pages of English, German and French newspapers.4 The terms of these debates about modernisation mirrored the tension between the dominant bourgeois aesthetics and the radical innovations of the emerging avant-garde movements; they also relied on the

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intersection of local, national and international temporal paradigms for the understanding of the city’s cultural and political roles both within Italy and in a wider transnational context—paradigms that displayed paradoxical characteristics, as the epigraphs to this chapter exemplify. In the first quotation, by the American writer and photographer Carl Van Vechten, Mina Loy (Ducie) sees Florence in the 1920s as a city that finally entered modernity after World War I—whereby modernity signifies here a pleasant and somewhat disconcerting confusion of places and times, which makes the odd comparison between Chicago and Florence appear tenable. Henry James’s scathing assessment of Florence in the 1870s expresses a snobbish contempt for the renovation of the city centre, compared here to the devastations of Paris by Baron Haussmann and ascribed to a general European disregard for its mediaeval heritage. Finally, Alberto Viviani, who briefly participated in the Florentine branch of Futurism, retrospectively argued in the 1930s that it was precisely the city’s lingering mediaeval and Renaissance identity that constituted a challenge for Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s project of rejuvenation of Italian culture in the 1910s. All three epigraphs rely on unlikely comparisons between Florence and cities which ostensibly have little in common with the Tuscan capital. Florence emerges here as a multitude of ‘realemes’5 constituted by temporally and spatially dislocated stratified literary representations which are interventions onto the fabrics of the city itself: they paradoxically endow it with a modern Italian identity partially conceived through the lens of an international understanding of its role during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance as the source of European culture and modernity. This chapter analyses the temporal and spatial aspects of representations of the city at the turn of the century and in the first decades of the twentieth century in the memoirs of Mabel Dodge Luhan and Alberto Viviani, in essays and articles by Ardengo Soffici and Italo Tavolato, and in some Florentine texts by Mina Loy. It considers this literary output in the context of the contemporary projects of cultural and literary renewal in the city, focusing especially on the tensions between present and past, and between local identity and international outreach, between nationalism and cosmopolitanism. Thus, the chapter reflects on Florence as a cultural capital within the polycentric panorama of Italian literature and culture—a capital, however, that paradoxically maintained its provincial identity: while being home to a host of important literary journals, for example, Florence was never fully a literary capital as outlined in Pascale Casanova’s The World Republic of Letters (2004), precisely because of the specific polycentrism of

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the Italian literary field, with Milan, Turin, Naples and Rome as other important centres; moreover, as Stefano Evangelista’s chapter in this volume shows for the case of Rome, the process of nationalisation that inflected and influenced Florentine culture at the turn of the century went hand in hand with a process of internationalisation. In turn, these conflicting forces became intertwined with different notions of modernity, ultimately producing unstable paradigms of the modern.



Florence’s Untimely Modernity

The local, national and international debates about the city’s historical role tended to produce the image of an untimely city—never modern enough for some, too modern for others, where the wrong past was celebrated, or where the past was generally revered too much, or not enough, or partaking of a wrong type of modernity: wrong because still too anchored in the past. Or, again, where modernity was simply an import that did not match the nature of the local people.6 The concept of untimeliness, which was at the centre of Nietzsche’s early reflections on modernity, can signify ‘unmodern’, ‘out of place or dislocated in the temporal sense’, ‘not appropriate to the times’ or ‘unfashionable’; it also implies a temporal disjunction that highlights some paradoxical aspects within projects involving modernisation based on ideologies of progress. In Nietzsche’s works, most prominently in his Unzeitgemässe Betrachtungen (Untimely Meditations, published between 1873 and 1876), the concept of unzeitgemäss takes on a productive or positive connotation, whereas the texts discussed here perceive the temporal disjunction embodied by Florence’s present as problematic.7 Two fundamental issues are at stake here: the first is the tension between the different temporalities which inflected the perception and representation of the city; the second is the conflict between the role and participation of the city in the forging of a new, modern Italian identity within a broader European context. Linked to the latter was also the desire to continue thinking of Florence as a transnational place that belonged to the world as the cradle of humanism and the perceived universal values of Renaissance art—a timeless capital, so to say. The ‘delicious confusion of epochs’ that Carl Van Vechten praised in 1920s Florence informed also the work of Gertrude Stein, who decided to have her radically experimental literary portrait of the American heiress, salonnière and Florentine resident Mabel Dodge—A Portrait of Mabel Dodge at the Villa

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Curonia—privately printed in 1912 with a flowery cover that was reminiscent of the aesthetics of the arts and crafts movement and their recuperation of mediaeval motifs.8 Parallel to the temporal (con)fusion that marks the representations of modern Florence is a tension concerning its geopolitical role and identity in the region and the nation—between toscanità and italianità.9 From the middle of the nineteenth century onwards, however, the international context increasingly playedan important part in the definition of the city, due to the presence of a large expatriate community and to the efforts of young local intellectuals, who wanted to extricate Florence from its alleged provinciality and ‘passéism’.10 Discussing Florence’s modernity, however, requires some preliminary considerations. Florence’s urban structure and population, both in socio-economic and quantitative terms, was not comparable to the typical modern metropolises in turn-of-the-century Europe. From the second half of the nineteenth century, Florence was, however, a town with a growing population (Adamson 1993, 37–39; Cerasi 1996), which underwent major urban restructuring; this involved the demolition of its mediaeval walls, the ancient market and the Jewish ghetto (known as dado) in the very centre of the city, and of the mediaeval houses, the small fishing docks and berths, the channels and the little bays along the river Arno, to make room for the Lungarni embankments. These changes left a major mark both on the urban spaces and in the minds of its inhabitants.11 According to the critics, the city’s ancient and mediaeval roots lay in these places and their genius loci,12 but it was precisely the ‘picturesqueness’ of Florence’s urban landscape that had to partially make way for a cityscape which uniformly adhered to the newly conceived national and bourgeois style visible in other Italian cities after the unification of the country (Cerasi 2001, 317; Cerasi 1996). Both the (unhealthy) mediaeval central quarters occupied by the poor and Florence’s links to the idyllic surrounding countryside pointed to the city’s roots in the past—they expressed the picturesque character of the city and were appealing to those who saw in the city the source of Europe’s aesthetic tradition and liberal politics. Several Florentine intellectuals, including Guido Carocci, historian and director of the Museum of San Marco, and Guido Biagi, prefect of the Libreria Laurenziana, created in 1900 the Associazione per la difesa di Firenze antica (Association for the Protection of Ancient Florence), with the aim of organising and expanding the opposition against the new urban plans and of finding a middle ground between the modern needs of the city and the pedagogical and

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historical value of its ancient structure and buildings (Cerasi 1996, 892). The appeal of ‘local colour’, Cerasi shows, became more significant in the new century, giving rise to a national and local debate concerning the tension between modern and anti-modern, national and local identity; this tension erupted also around the toponymy of the city, which saw, after the unification of Italy, the old local street names substituted by the names of the ‘fathers of the nation’, as, for example, the heroes of the Risorgimento, or the new king (1996, 890 and 899).13 Through a slow but steady process, Florence built its new local, national and international identity by appropriating selected moments in its history: the Middle Ages, the Renaissance or a fusion of the two (Cerasi 2001, 317–29; Brilli 2010, 13–17). It was again Henry James, who, in 1899, twenty-five years after writing the comment quoted in the epigraph, described the city’s process of change and the attitude of the different communities of residents concerning the ‘“improvement”, the rectification of Florence’ as the ‘so terribly actual Florentine question […], a battle-ground, today, in many journals, with all Italy practically pulling on one side and all England, America and Germany pulling on the other’ (James 1995b, 71);14 this picture of two neatly distinct and monolithic camps was conveniently biased but it served, in James’s article, to reflect on the problematic attitude which prompted foreigners to ‘persuade the Italians that they mayn’t do as they like with their own’ and to ‘convince them [the Italians] that what is their own is, by an ingenious logic, much rather ours’ (1995b, 71). The latter comment brings us, of course, to the very political question of a transnational fantasy of Renaissance humanism as the basis of Western modernity, which Jakob Burkhardt helped solidify with his groundbreaking work Die Kultur der Renaissance in Italien (1860; translated into English as The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy). James’s remarks suggest that the new national claims to Florence should weigh less than those of the international community of cognoscenti who could determine and lay claim to Florence’s true identity. The description of the two hostile forces in James’s article reveals a deeply imperialistic attitude at the basis of the claims of culture and history, and also exposes the potential dangers of a superficially cosmopolitan attitude. The scepticism towards the new status and role assigned to Florence was perhaps not without grounds. Florence was not a ‘natural’ capital but was provisionally designated for purely practical and geopolitical reasons,15 so that its (national) identity had to be created anew. The city had to make room for a relatively large number of state bureaucrats—new inhabitants

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who were foreign to the social fabrics of the town—and its image and urban infrastructure had to be modified to fit the new conditions. Some of the modernising measures that occurred in Florence and the ensuing debates are of course similar and comparable to those generally undergone by European cities in the nineteenth century (Schiavo 2004, 32); however, the particular case of Florence created among its inhabitants a marked sense of disruption and intrusion of the new, which Attilio Brilli qualifies as a double trauma: the trauma of becoming the capital and of being despoiled of this status over a short period of time (2010, xiv).16 In this sense, Florence’s case resonates with the troubled status of capitals like Calcutta and Helsinki, discussed in this volume—cities in which the administrative identity to some extent clashed with the reality of the life of parts of the population. Within the Florentine context, in the first two decades of the twentieth century the conflict between past and present, or past and future, I would argue, takes the form of a critique of modernity that sees modernity—and especially bourgeois modernity—as untimely, that is, inopportune and paradoxically unsuited not only to the future but also to the present. In other words, the authors I consider in this chapter rethink the modern face of Florence not simply as negative because modern, but as negative because wrongly modern. The different representations of the Tuscan capital serve therefore as background for a broader evaluation of the problematic aspects of modern life and of the aesthetic strategies meant to capture them.

Mabel Dodge’s Deadly Re-Enactment of the Renaissance In the section ‘European Experiences’ of her autobiography Intimate Memories, Mabel Dodge retrospectively presents the experience of rich expatriates in Florence as an anti-modern performance lacking originality: ‘The only people who counted, in the Florentine world, were those who resembled works of art of a bygone day, so that everyone did his best, often unconsciously, to revert. Everybody looked like somebody of the past or some painting of the past. The farther past, the better too’ (1999, 79).17 Dodge herself heavily participated in this re-enactment of a confused notion of the past, as she and her husband, the Boston architect Edwin Dodge, bought and renovated the Villa Curonia in Arcetri, a former Medici villa where they resided between 1905 and 1912; they set out

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to creatively restore its Renaissance splendour both indoors and outdoors, adding furniture, tapestry and accessories from various historical periods (Everett 1996, 31–33): ‘[t]he values of life [in Florence] were centred in the perpetuity of the grand epochs, and a scrap of genuine primitive painting on a worm-eaten board, found in a dingy, cavernous cellar in Siena or Perugia, meant more to me and my Florentine friends than the tallest skyscraper on earth’ (Dodge Luhan 1999, 99). In Dodge’s account, Florence is temporally and geographically expanded, metonymically standing for a vague notion of early modern Italy. From a position of extreme privilege and wealth, Mabel Dodge conceived of her Florence-based re-­ enactment of the past simultaneously as a revival and renewal, both individual and historical. Arriving in Florence from the United States as a young widow with a small child to escape the consequences of a love affair in her hometown, Dodge recreated herself by marrying the architect Edwin Dodge, met on the ship to Europe, and by buying a Medici villa. She draped herself with robes and turbans, creating a character that would fit the real and imagined history of the villa (Barolini 2006, 137).18 As Lois P. Rudnick puts it, Dodge ‘recreated herself as a one-woman metaphor for the decline, fall, and potential regeneration of American civilisation. The writing of her memoirs epitomised her life’s calling: the search for and creation of her identity’ (1982, 51). Florence was the first step in a lifelong process of self-creation, and ‘the means of giving form to her anomic American energies by appropriating a ready-made past’ (Rudnick 1982, 52). Dodge thought of her own re-enactment of the past as the ‘creation of a great work of art’, and as a means to restore Florence—a city that she thought was inhabited by ‘deaf and dumb, half-dead people’ (1999, 95)— to its former glory, curing it of its ugly modernity. Reviving the Renaissance, as Dodge explained to her friend, the theatre director Gordon Craig, was to cause ‘the beginning of another renaissance’ for the city, which, in Dodge’s fantastic plan, would be inhabited only by people acting out their own past, so that they would finally ‘be ashamed to continue living in the ugliness of industrialism after days’ (1999, 95). Repetition as rebirth for Dodge is not only the content of the Renaissance but also, performatively, the medicine that will cure Florence. The ‘renaissance’ in Dodge’s letter can mean both the period and style in art history, or simply the notion of rebirth: Dodge is not concerned with philological or historical accuracy, but she is interested in the act of repeating, and in the Renaissance or renaissance as repetition itself. The prefix ‘re-’, in Dodge’s double project

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of revival and rebirth implies the paradox of a renewal and creation as repetition of the old, or even as return to the old.19 Thus, Mabel Dodge’s reflections on the expatriate experience of Florence point to an immersion in a present which is simultaneously a fantastic version of an irretrievable past and an embryonic version of the radically new, whose essence consists in its ability to re-enact. Dodge’s modernity consisted in performing Renaissance aesthetic models, and the role of the art patron: We saw each other continually, Loeser and Edwin and Acton and I and others. We were always talking trecento, quattrocento, cinquecento, or discussing values—(Berenson’s ‘tactile values’), lines, dimensions, or nuances in knowing phrases. Everybody in Florence was like that. The life was built up around the production of death. (1999, 95)20

In Dodge’s decadent and anti-modern(ist) fantasy, renewal and revival produce the opposite of what they are supposed to achieve; re-enactment is not a renewing force, but it nourishes itself on death and creates a present inhabited by the dead, suggesting a close link to the Renaissance melancholy of Lorenzo de’ Medici’s carnival poem ‘Canzona di Bacco’ (1490?) or to Pater’s interpretation of Leonardo’s Mona Lisa as a vampiric form drawing its appeal from an ungraspable and remote past (Pater 2005, 67–86). The spectre of the past—this deadly presence that haunts Dodge’s encounters with the city—is therefore simultaneously the solution to and the problem of Florence’s modernity. In a striking passage describing her walks in Oltrarno, the area between the Ponte Vecchio and Palazzo Pitti— then a working-class district—Dodge imagines seeing the embodied portraits in the gallery at Palazzo Pitti walking out of the museum and staring at her; she also confesses treating her Florentine acquaintances and even herself as historical portraits, to be looked at and experienced as if in a museum: ‘[t]he only way I was able to live was vicariously—imagining myself into other forms than my own. The only thing I simply could not do was to imagine the future. I could imagine the past, and imagine myself into the present’ (1999, 100). In Dodge’s continuous acts of self-­ recreation, Florence becomes a perfect projection surface for the tension between individual past and present, as well as between older and newer conceptions of culture. The haunting effect of the past experienced by Dodge produces a jarring and stunted temporality, in which the future cannot be imagined. This vision strikingly echoes Antonio Gramsci’s diagnosis of the cultural

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crisis of the interwar years as a historical moment in which ‘the old is dying and the new cannot be born’ (quoted in Adamson 1993, 263). Florence seems to create a loop in which present and past continuously revert to one another and modify one another; a recursive process that foresees neither linear progression nor dramatic rupture.

Modern But/Because International It is precisely this recursive temporality and its deadly aura that the young Florentine intellectuals denounced. In his polemic article ‘Contro Firenze’ (Against Florence), published in 1913  in Lacerba, Giovanni Papini famously declared Florence ‘the spiritual centre of Italy’ and claimed that it was inhabited by diverging forces: on the one hand were the young avant-garde artists, who brought about cultural renewal, for example through founding important magazines which achieved national circulation; on the other hand were the older intellectuals and the foreign tourists, who supported a musealisation of the city and the commercialisation of the past (1913, 285).21 Similarly to Marinetti’s 1910 pamphlet ‘Contro Venezia passatista’ (Against Passatist Venice), Papini drew here on the recurrent trope of the equivalence between museum and mausoleum (Sherman and Rogoff 1994, xii and 123–142). On the pages of Lacerba, various authors denounced the effects of tourism on the city in terms of the contradictions brought about by a turn to the modern which was reflected in the city’s infrastructure for tourists and a simultaneous appeal to the simplified picturesqueness of the city’s past.22 Papini, however, saw tourism mostly as an anti-modern force. In ‘Contro Firenze’, he projected like Dodge a deadly aura onto the Tuscan capital: for him, the cult of the past stunted any vital impulses in the city, and, paradoxically, it even perverted its own historical identity, which he thought was embodied by the Renaissance spirit of innovation. The economy of contemporary Florence, Papini deplored, was exclusively based on services and was therefore ‘parasitic’: everybody was a servant, participating in a wholesale of the city as a relic of the past for the antiquarian taste of the foreigners, as opposed to the entrepreneurial and trading spirit of sixteenth-century Florentine citizens who would make money abroad and invest it to innovate at home (1913, 286). In 1915, he associated the anti-modernity and the sleepiness of the ‘era Umbertina’ (the period that corresponds to the reign of King Umberto I, between 1878 and 1900) to the stasis and the anti-modern worldview brought to Florence by the tourists and their antiquarian

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interests (1915, 57–59). It is of course ironic that Papini should condemn as anti-modern the very worldview that was at the heart of one of the most modern and ever-growing industries of industrial capitalism—the third sector and, in particular, tourism. On the other hand, for Papini Florence also possessed a vital modern culture, represented by the magazines Leonardo, Il Marzocco, Il Regno, and La Voce: for him, they constituted a collective and modern cultural achievement, because they promoted modern Italian culture, instigated a dialogue with Europe and mediated foreign literature (1915, 58). The magazines allowed him to see Florence as the ‘young city’ that could be compared not simply to Paris, but specifically to the rive gauche in Paris, for its concentration of young, avant-garde intellectuals and petites revues. Indeed, the magazine Lacerba, co-founded by Papini and Ardengo Soffici, was particularly active in the creation of a European literary network including a privileged exchange with French literature.23 Florence’s modernity, for Papini, consisted after all in the ability of its young intellectuals to achieve a balance between the regional, the national, the European and international identities: We are Tuscan by birth but we are, culturally and spiritually, Europeans, good Europeans! Never provincial, by no means. [...] We are men who worked and are working with all their strength to rejuvenate and renovate Italian brains and to give the country a new art and true poetry and a more modern conception of life. (Papini 1915, 59)24

Therefore, the international aspects of Florentine life mean different types of modernity: on the one hand, the presence and influence of the foreign tourists and expatriates are associated with a conservative, anti-­ modern and false perception of the city, modifying its present reality from the point of view of the past; on the other hand, the Florentine intellectuals’ investment in the dialogue with and mediation of European culture was considered to be a sign of true modernity.25 The latter attitude was not just a matter of taste, but had a political connotation linked to the perceived relative failure of the ideals of the Risorgimento, which promised a fully united Italy with a great destiny as a major political agent in Europe, as Franco Baldasso suggests (2018, 42). The literary critic Emilio Cecchi, a friend of Papini and Soffici, offered a very different account of the city’s modernity and its relationship with its international community. In ‘Tre volti di Firenze’ (Three Faces of

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Florence), Cecchi argued that it was precisely the influence of the foreign community that turned Florence into a modern European cultural centre in the early twentieth century. Cecchi admitted that the large foreign population constituted a somewhat disquieting presence for the city’s Italian inhabitants; however, he argued that it was only due to this presence that an institution like the Gabinetto Scientifico Letterario G. P. Vieusseux, an international circulating library and reading room in the centre of Florence, could have been created. For Cecchi, the Gabinetto Vieusseux, opened in 1820, was unique also because it was a meeting space for the different communities, and its cultural function and impact could be compared only to the London Library, founded by Thomas Carlyle in 1841 (1985, 106). Founded by Giovan Pietro Vieusseux, a merchant from Geneva, and modelled on the reading rooms of the eighteenth century, the Gabinetto counted circa 150,000 subscriptions between 1820 and 1926, including intellectuals, artists, writers and politicians from all over the world.26 Cecchi saw the diverse cultural environment of Florence as a fertile ground also for the flourishing of the new magazines with national and international outreach; among them were La Voce, which included a publishing house and a gallery—a format imitated by the Berlin-based magazine Der Sturm (1985, 107)—and the established monthly review Antologia, co-­ founded by Vieusseux and Gino Capponi, which was modelled on the Edinburgh Review (Adamson 1993, 28). For Cecchi, the visual arts shared a similar pattern of modernisation through cultural exchange via the work of Florentine and American collectors like Leo and Gertrude Stein, Charles Loeser, the art collections of the Galleria Fiorentina d’Arte Moderna and of the Fabbri, Sforni and Magnelli families: they featured paintings by Renoir, Cézanne, Van Gogh, Picasso and African art. For this reason, Cecchi stated, ‘Florence was probably the only Italian city (and, except for Paris, one of the few in the whole world), where, before World War I, Cimabue and Giotto happily lived within the same city walls with Renoir and Cézanne’.27 The opportunities offered by these intersections of ancient and modern may have, on the one hand, displaced the local painterly style embodied by Giovanni Fattori and the Macchiaioli, whose subject matter was rural culture and the Tuscan countryside, but it may also have prompted, via the mediation of the long-­ time Florence resident Bernard Berenson, the reassessment of early Renaissance painters such as Piero della Francesca and Andrea Mantegna as sources for theories of contemporary art, such as Roger Fry and Clive Bell’s theory of Post-Impressionism in 1910.28

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Cafés and Trams: The Futurists’ Modern(ist) Florence The conflict between tradition and modernity exploded in the literary representations of Florence associated with Futurism. In the magazine Lacerba, Italo Tavolato and Ardengo Soffici painted city portraits marked by the modernity of street lights, transport and cafés. Cafés and trams epitomise in these writings the transformation of the city into an international place of exchange, indeed, almost a modernist metropolis on a smaller scale. It must be admitted that one hundred years after the publication of these articles, Florence still fails to look like a modern metropolis: the Futurists created a modernist Florence that only partially existed, intervening in the city landscape through their narratives. In Tavolato’s ‘Elogio del caffè’ (In Praise of the Café), the café is seen as a new and hybrid space, partaking of the domesticity of the countryside and of the political potential of the public square, without adhering to the ideology of either—the countryside being the embodiment and source of a traditional and anti-modern world order, and the square being the home of ‘charlatans and socialists’ (Tavolato 1914, 87). For Tavolato, the café is a space of exchange and confrontation, but also the space of modernity, where everything is human-made, including the light, the heat and the wind (all produced by machines): for this reason, the café seems to project a godlike image of human beings and to be the perfect meeting point for avant-garde intellectuals bent on challenging the bourgeois order and renewing the world. From a literary perspective, however, Tavolato’s style is less indebted to the modernist prose of Marinetti than it is reminiscent of the Decadent pomposity of Gabriele D’Annunzio: this text, therefore, shares the untimeliness and temporal tension of previously discussed narratives about Florence’s modernity. In 1915, Ardengo Soffici made Tavolato’s praise more explicit and put the Caffè Paszkowski at the centre of his modern vision of the Tuscan capital (Soffici 1915b, 75). In his column ‘Taccuino’ (Notepad), Soffici tells of a phantasmagoria of a modern city, made up of fragments of objects, flashes of light, and geometries of lights and colours, which become visible in the café. It is the atmosphere of the café that allows Soffici to perceive the world as modern: Enchanted, I live for one minute in this fantasmagoria, I try to prolong and take this illuminated pause into normal life. A truth surrounds me and

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almost scares me. I think: so, the world can be seen completely differently from how it usually looks. Reality is not what we see daily with our eyes, it is not that which habit, stultifying our senses, has forced us to get used to: a spectacle without emotions, produced for the sake of everybody’s utilitarian peace of mind.29

As Ernesto Livorni concisely summarises, cafés were crucial for the Futurists, and in fact they were the subject of numerous paintings, compositions and manifestos of the group, so that their works and aesthetics, as in the case of other avant-garde groups, cannot be separated from the café (2017). The Caffè Paszkowski was situated in the newly refurbished Piazza Vittorio Emanuele (now Piazza della Repubblica), opposite one other famous café of the Florentine avant-garde, the café Reininghaus, or Caffè Giubbe Rosse, both of which were also well attended by international tourists.30 The Caffè Paszkowski was a caffè concerto, that is, an Italian version of the music hall and the café-chantant: as Marinetti argues in his manifesto ‘Il teatro di varietà’, published in 1913  in Lacerba and, in English, in the Daily Mail, this new form was modern because it challenged traditional theatre, mixing various media such as dance, singing and circus-like theatricals, relying on popular comedy, vulgarity, commercial spectacle and multiple and exaggerated sensory stimulation (Marinetti 2009, 163–64).31 Most importantly, for Marinetti the variety theatre constituted an anti-bourgeois alternative to theatre, because it relied on the audience’s collaboration, doing away with the fourth wall and with the silence of well-behaved spectators (2009, 165). The audience was encouraged to participate vociferously, their bodies and movements becoming part of the spectacle (2009, 165–166). Its modernity consisted also in its anti-romantic, anti-idealistic, anti-academic and anti-realistic stance, which produced a fast, electrifying show, resembling life in a modern city: for Marinetti, this was the ideal platform for a radical destruction and recreation of theatre (2009, 169–172). For Soffici, however, Florence is modern not just because of its cafés, but in itself: in ‘Simultaneità liriche  - Sera Fiorentina’ (Lyrical Simultaneities - Florentine Evening), the city is presented as a maze-like network of olfactory and visual traces of women that stimulate all of the five senses and are made visible by the concerted action of modern city infrastructures like gaslights, cars, trams and even royal carriages: organic and inorganic matter are therefore fused in the modern city (1915a, 107). Soffici’s account is aligned with the descriptions of the modern city as a

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source for the overexposure to sensory stimuli that we find, for example, in Georg Simmel’s 1903 essay ‘The Metropolis and Mental Life’ (1950) and in Charles Baudelaire’s 1863 study The Painter of Modern Life (1995), but creates a fantasy of a modern metropolis that aspires to fulfil the tenets of Futurist aesthetics—a fantasy that not even London, possibly the most modern city in Europe at the time, could match in the eyes of Marinetti,32 a fantasy, moreover, that the British-born poet Mina Loy, whose accounts of Florence’s modernity were much more sceptical and complicated, will satirise in her playlets ‘CittàBapini’ and ‘Collision’ (Loy 1982, 78–80). These are satirical portraits of Giovanni Papini’s and the Futurists’ modern city, seen as a product of the narcissistic projections of their modernist masculinity (Scuriatti 2019, 33–35).

Interruption, Circularity, Repetition: Mina Loy’s Florentine Temporalities Mina Loy lived in Florence between 1906 and 1916, initially with her husband and children, and then as a single mother with three children. She lived in Oltrarno, on via dei Bardi and then on the Costa San Giorgio, near the Ponte Vecchio and the Palazzo Pitti, an affordable working-class neighbourhood. She participated in the intellectual life of the city by joining both the circle around Mabel Dodge and the Futurists at the Giubbe Rosse and wrote poems, satirical prose pieces and playlets about the city, feminism, Futurism and the Futurists. Loy’s Florentine texts suggest that the city represented a challenge for her, perhaps in terms not dissimilar to the Futurists’: this is especially the case in ‘CittàBapini’, a playlet in three short scenes, where an abstract, personified city and its river are depicted as the sparring partner and distorting mirror of the aggressive and narcissistic artist—‘the greenish man’, a caricature of Papini. The confrontation between the two starts with a blank stare and then the artist’s smile addressed to the city, which provoke a stare and roaring laughter as a reply, in a crescendo of aggression: the artist is more than once swallowed and spat out by the city, while he tries to transform it into an emanation of himself, simultaneously denying feeling at home in it. Apart from satirising the Futurists’ idolization of the city, and perhaps emphasising the irony of an aesthetic of modernity rooted in a town famous for its antiquarian atmosphere and museums, Loy’s playlet depicts the difficulty of representing a city: ‘CittàBapini’

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thematises that an individual’s self-conception is inextricably linked to their lived environment, but shows that an individual’s embodied experience of the city makes it difficult to extrapolate an objective reality of the place, raising the question of point of view. As in other works on Florence, Loy decides here against overdetermination, choosing general and abstract words like ‘the river’ and ‘the city’, and refusing to characterise Florence through its famous monuments. We see similar strategies in the group of three poems entitled ‘Italian Pictures’ (‘July in Vallombrosa’, ‘The Costa San Giorgio’ and ‘Costa Magic’, 1914) and the satire ‘Summer Night in a Florentine Slum’.33 In ‘July in Vallombrosa’, the speaking ‘I’ observes the patients in an institution which could be a sanatorium or a clinic run by nuns in the idyllic village of Vallombrosa in Tuscany, commenting on the invalidism which seems to be a condition typical of Italy and of the experience of expatriates in Italy; the other two poems depict the misery, exoticism, sensuality, sensory richness and patriarchal qualities of street life in the city, probably around Loy’s own home. ‘Costa Magic’, in particular, focuses on an episode in which a sick girl named Cesira, at the beck of her father’s patriarchal rule, is driven to the countryside, in order to be diagnosed and cured of her disease—phthisis—by being brought into contact with an old tree. Illness and disease are also at the centre of the prose piece ‘Summer Night in a Florentine Slum’, in which an observer, identified as English at the very end, leans out of the window and watches life going by on the streets near the Ponte Vecchio and in the houses of the neighbours, inhabited by people sick with several conditions caused mainly by poverty and patriarchal oppression. Tara Prescott and Linda Kinnahan agree that Loy in these poems plays with the tropes of distance: in the first two poems, the protagonists observe from the distance, or from positions of power and through spaces of mediation, such as the windows of a home or the identification with Englishness. The poems’ speaking voices identify their own distance from their objects of observation, making sure that the first person singular and plural (in one case identified as ‘we English’) are always clearly opposed to a third person plural (Kinnahan, n.d.-a, n.p.; Prescott 2017, 14–19). Here too, scholars agree, Loy creates an alternative, reluctant Baedeker, by refusing to name any monuments or familiar tourist sites, and by focusing instead on the everyday, and on the relationship between a privileged and foreign observer and the production of a fascinating and partially abject object (Kinnahan, n.d.-a, n.p. and n.d.-b, n.p.; Prescott 2017, 16-17; Bozhkova

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2019). The city portrayed by Loy therefore consists of an urban space which is entirely made up of personal relations—especially relationships of power and gender. I am interested in the temporality of Loy’s poems, as her texts create poetic objects that participate in the untimeliness and problematic temporality identified above. In an undated letter from Florence to Mabel Dodge, probably penned in 1914, Loy outlined the fundamental tension between tradition and modernity, between a situation of dormant stasis and radical change: It (Futurism) survives as a political party—Italy requires it—but Italy wont [sic] be half as delightfully human when it gets a modern move on it—one’s almost inclined to hope its apathy will survive all shaking—although personally—I am indebted to M. [Marinetti] for twenty years added to my life from mere contact with his exuberant vitality. (Loy n.d.)

However, in another letter to Dodge, written in February of 1914, Loy expressed her scepticism towards the various projects of modernisation and the tense intellectual environment in the city: ‘Craig is up in arms— and there is every semblance of an explosive atmosphere here—only if you stop for a moment you find there is nothing to explode’ (Loy 1914). This tension informs the poems ‘Italian Pictures’, especially through the tropes of disease and sickness. In ‘July in Vallombrosa’, Loy’s usage of ‘invalidism’ with reference to British expats recalls the description of the sleepy ‘Firenze umbertina’ by Papini, as well as the Futurists’ attacks on Italian bourgeois society. Although the poem presents invalidism as a contemptible condition, the last stanza posits the sick and the connected institutions as a transformative force: But all this moribund stuff Is not wasted For there is always Nature So its expensive upkeep Goes to support The loves Of head waiters (Loy 1997, 10)

The last stanza is marked by a vitalism and a sense of fertile transformation which, however, in labelling the sick as ‘moribund stuff’, refuses to see them as persons. The conflict between life and death embodied by

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disease, which the Futurists denounced as the mark of decadence, creates in this poem the occasion for vitality and a space for eros and seduction, albeit within the parameters of tourism (‘the loves  /  Of head waiters’), thus endowing the poem with a circular but forward-looking temporality which integrates the tropes of decadence and modernity, rather than rejecting them. The overwhelming presence of rhetorical figures of repetition, such as alliteration, assonance and anaphora, which are associated to the themes of illness and/as paralysis in the poem, create an atmosphere of suspended temporality. This strategy is evident in the opening stanza, where the repetition of the sibilant ‘s’ and the vowel ‘i’ dictate the rhythm of the sounds: Old lady sitting still Pine trees standing quite still Sisters of mercy   whispering Oust the Dryad (Loy 1997, 10)

The last but one stanza in the poem is dedicated to the description of a temporality marked by desire and repetition: the essence of time, in this institution, seems to be indeed the infinite repetition of its basic units, that is perceived as loss of desire and vitality, and expressed through the figures of consonance, with the recurrence of the liquid consonants ‘w’ and ‘l’: The old lady has a daughter Who has been spent In chasing moments from one room to another When the essence of an hour Was in its passing With the passionate breath Of the bronchitis-kettle And her last little lust Lost itself in a saucer of gruel (Loy 1997, 10)

As we have seen, the last stanza resolves the implied stasis through a reference to the circular temporality of rebirth. On the contrary, in the third poem of the sequence, ‘Costa Magic’, circularity is an omen of death: Cesira, the sick girl who lives under the iron patriarchal rule of her father, and whose desires are thwarted by him, is brought from home to the magic tree in the countryside and back.

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Knowing she has to die We drive home To wait She certainly does in time It is unnatural in a Father Bewitching a daughter Whose hair down covers her thighs (Loy 1997, 14)

The poem opens and closes with the presence of the abusive father, and features numerous verbs in gerund, including the verb ‘bewitching’ in the last line: while the first feature emphasises circularity, the use of gerunds suggests a process that is potentially repetitive and never-ending. The city is obliterated and anonymised in the description of the journey to the tree: ‘Fields and houses / Pass    like the pulling out / Of sweetmeat ribbon / From a rascal’s mouth / Till / A wheel in a rut / Jerks back my girl on the padding / And the hedges into the sky’ (13). This is a city of sounds, feelings, superstition, and abuse. The poem refuses to qualify the urban space through naming monuments or famous places, reducing it to a landscape of noises which interrupt the narrative of the speaking voice. Figures of interruption connect this poem with the middle one in the sequence, ‘Costa San Giorgio’, in which an observer, who identifies as English from the first line, describes the view out on a Florentine square with a market frequented by the poor. The observer describes women surrounded by their (too many) children, a consumptive beggar, street urchins stalking a maimed cat with the intention of beating it up, an orange seller, a barber shop with its patriarchal atmosphere, and then turns to reflect on the home and its false security and respectability. The poem displays a fragmented and modernist structure, with its many intruding voices, the succession of impressions and urban sounds, the experimental use of typography and the exposure of the gendered metaphors of buying and selling (Goody 2007, 43–45; Prescott 2017, 23–24). The Florence that emerges here is therefore modernist, but also a typically nineteenth-­ century urban space, inhabited mainly by a rough and deprived population bent on the satisfaction of basic needs (Bàrberi Squarotti 2012, 26). I read the interrupted and the circular temporalities of these poems as a structural and formal comment on the difficulty of writing Florence and its untimely modernity: refusing to make use of the familiar tropes associated with representations of the city, Loy’s texts nevertheless propose a city which partakes of modernist experiments but displays the

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characteristics of anti-modern forces—those of Decadent aesthetics, and, most of all, those of patriarchy. As I have shown in this chapter, the tension between past and present (and future) informs both the literary representations of Florence and the way in which the city was built, experienced and perceived by its inhabitants, administrators and visitors, who struggled with Florence’s many faces and temporalities as a regional, national and cultural capital.

Notes 1. Carl Van Vechten’s letter to Mabel Dodge Sterne, 18 June 1920 (Kellner 1987, 32–33). 2. James’s essay ‘The Autumn in Florence’ was originally published unsigned in The Nation, xviii (January 1874), pp. 6–7, then reprinted in Transatlantic Sketches, 1875 (James 1995a, 238-246). 3. See Cerasi (1996) and Brilli (2010, 32–38). Brilli discusses the debates and initiatives against the works of modernisation and urban demolition involving, among others, Vernon Lee, Janet Ross, Giuseppe Verdi, Giosuè Carducci, Camillo Boito, Charles Loeser, the photographer Vittorio Alinari, Sir Lawrence Alma Tadema, Sir Edward Pointer and numerous European royalty. See also Billiani and Evangelista (2013) and Evangelista (2014). 4. See Adamson (1993, 27–37). See also Bortolotto et al. (2018). 5. Realemes are, according to Itamar Even-Zohar’s definition, codified and crystallised ‘items of cultural repertoire, the repertoire of realia’ in a verbal utterance that refer to ‘“items of reality” (such as persons and natural phenomena, voices and furniture)’ which are ‘“there” in the outside world’ (1990, 209–10). Bertrand Westphal relies on the concept of the realeme to analyse the construction of possible worlds in literature (2011, 95). 6. According to Stefano Evangelista, one prominent example of the latter is the writer Ouida, pseudonym of Maria Louise Ramé (2014, 146). 7. Friedrich Nietzsche, Unzeitgemässe Betrachtungen (Untimely Meditations, 1873–76). Daniel Breazeale shows that for Nietzsche the adjective had a rather positive connotation: it denoted cultural phenomena that went beyond the ephemerality of fashion and public taste, and a philosophical approach which, attempting to achieve cultural renewal, demanded an evaluation ‘of the present from the standpoints of both the past and the future’ (Breazeale 1997, xlv–xlvii). 8. This unexpected juxtaposition was a crucial aspect of Stein’s method of portrayal: it mirrored not only the erratic arrangement of styles and furni-

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ture at the Villa Curonia but also Dodge’s own performances of different historical periods through fashion and style (Rudnick 1982, 58). 9. That is, Tuscan and Italian identity. See Adamson (1993, 92) and Cerasi (1996). 10. ‘Passéism’, or ‘passatismo’, a derogatory term, profusely applied by the Futurists to the cult of tradition and the past which they thought characterised Italian culture. 11. For the political impact of the works of urban and economic modernisation of the city, see Adamson 1993, 49–51. 12. See Adamson (1993, 38–39), Brilli (2010, 26–34), and Cerasi (1996). Among the critics were Henry James, Vernon Lee and Janet Ross. 13. This process affected city centres throughout the whole country. 14. James’s essay ‘Two Old Houses and Three Young Women’ was originally published in The Independent 1(1), September 1899, 2406-2412 (James 1995b, 61–71). 15. This was due to a convention stipulated between the Kingdom of Italy and the French Empire in 1864. 16. Brilli explains that, once the capital was transferred to Rome in 1871, 50,000 people suddenly left Florence (2010, 21). 17. Dodge took on the surname Luhan after marrying Tony Luhan in 1923. 18. In the chapter ‘Mabel Dodge Luhan: In Search of a Personal South’ (2006, 131–179), Barolini shows that the Dodges created a myth around their house: ‘To enhance the villa’s pedigree, the Dodges claimed that some of the facade could be attributed to Raphael, and Brunelleschi was said to have designed the cortile that Edwin successfully excavated from its encrustation of ugly brick and plaster. He also added a loggia and the ninety-foot great room where, Mabel reported, Bernard Berenson stood on the steps leading into it and exclaimed, “Ah! No one can build rooms like this any more!”’. 19. On the theoretical implications of the prefix ‘re-’ in contemporary literary criticism, see Holzhey and Wedemeyer (2019, i-xv). 20. The persons mentioned by Dodge are her husband Edwin Dodge, the American collector Charles Alexander Loeser, and the British historian, scholar and aesthete Harold Acton (Sir Harold Mario Mitchell Acton). In 1928, Charles Loeser donated his collection of Renaissance art to the Florence City Council on the condition that it would be installed in the Palazzo Vecchio, in order to restore its historical aspect. 21. The article was a report on the ‘Grande Serata Futurista’ (Great Futurist Evening), held at the Teatro Verdi in Florence on 12 December 1913. 22. For a denunciation of the commodification of Florence’s city centre on Lacerba, see Scarpelli (1915, 118–120). 23. For an example of this mediation, see Baldasso (2018, 33).

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24. My translation. ‘Qui non c’è ombra di regionalismo. Noi siamo toscani di nascita ma siamo, per cultura e spirito e ingegno, europei, buoni europei! Provinciali mai e in nessun tempo e modo. Italiani, semmai, per necessità, in tempi di crisi e di pericolo come son questi. Uomini che hanno lavorato e lavorano in tutti i modi e con tutte le forze per rinnovare e svecchiare i cervelli italiani e per dare alla patria un’arte nuova e una vera poesia e una più moderna concezione della vita.’ 25. Eric Bulson notes that the internationalist outlook as a sign of modernity became a feature of Marinetti’s and many other influential magazines in Italy until the advent of Fascism, but was cultivated already at the turn of the century in the magazine Poesia (2017, 121–22). 26. https://www.vieusseux.it/cronologia-­d el-­g abinetto-­v ieusseux/il-­ vieusseux-­firenze-­1820-­1870.html. A list of the most important subscribers can be found in the digital archive of the Gabinetto Vieusseux at https://www.vieusseux.it/archivio-­s torico/il-­l ibro-­d ei-­s oci-­d el-­ gabinetto-­vieusseux.html 27. My translation. ‘Probabilmente Firenze fu l’unica città italiana (ed eccettuando Parigi, delle poche in tutto il mondo) dove avanti la prima guerra, dentro alla stessa cerchia, Cimabue e Giotto convivessero con Renoir e Cézanne’ (Cecchi 1985, 106). 28. Berenson and Fry were close friends and among the founders of the Burlington Magazine. On Post-Impressionism, see Bell (1924) and Fry (1920). 29. My translation. ‘Incantato, vivo un minuto in questa fantasmagoria, cerco di prolungare questa sosta illuminata nella vita corrente. Una verità che mi sovvolge tutto e quasi mi fa paura. Rifletto: dunque il mondo può esser visto in un modo del tutto diverso dall’usuale. La realtà non è quale si presenta quotidianamente ai nostri occhi se non perché una lunga abitudine smussando i nostri sensi li ha fatti adattare ad uno spettacolo privo di emozioni, fatto per la tranquillità utilitaria di tutti’ (Soffici 1915b, 75). 30. Papini and Soffici used to meet in both cafés, and the famous literary journal Solaria was founded at the Caffè Paszkowski. The Futurists used to meet in the Giubbe Rosse, which in the years 1913 to 1915 had become ‘so distinct and prominent that […] Bruno Migliorini coined the adjective “giubberossisti” to refer to its regulars’ (Livorni 2017, 159). See also Viviani (1933, 21–32). 31. Reprinted in a shorter version in the Daily Mail on 21 November 1913, under the title ‘The Meaning of the Music Hall’. 32. See White (2017, 64). 33. The sequence ‘Italian Pictures’ was published in The Trend, 8(2), November 1914; ‘Summer Night in a Florentine Slum’ was first published in Loy (1982, 81–83).

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Works Cited Adamson, Walter L. 1993. Avant-Garde Florence. From Modernism to Fascism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Baldasso, Franco. 2018. Rinnovamento culturale e peso del passato. Lacerba e il Futurismo. In Sistema periodico, ed. Francesco Bortolotto et  al., 31-57. Bologna: Pendragon. Bàrberi Squarotti, Giorgio. 2012. Volti e risvolti della città. In La città e l’esperienza del moderno, ed. Mario Barenghi, Giuseppe Langella and Gianni Turchetta, vol. 1, 19-42. Pisa: ETS. Barolini, Helen. 2006. The Other Side: Six American Women and the Lure of Italy. New York: Fordham University Press. Baudelaire, Charles. 1995. The Painter of Modern Life, ed. and trans. Jonathan Mayne, 2nd edition. London: Phaidon. Bell, Clive. 1924. Art. London: Chatto & Windus. Billiani, Francesca and Stefano Evangelista. 2013. Carlo Placci and Vernon Lee: The Aesthetics and Ethics of Cosmopolitanism in Fin-de-Siècle Florence. Comparative Critical Studies 10 (2): 141-161. Bortolotto, Francesco, Eleonora Fuochi, Davide Paone and Federica Parodi (eds.). 2018. Sistema periodico. Il secolo interminabile delle riviste. Bologna: Pendragon. Bozhkova, Yasna. 2019. Cross-cultural Baedeker: Mina Loy’s Cosmopolitan Modernism. E-rea. Revue électronique d’études sur le monde anglophone, 16 (2). https://doi.org/10.4000/erea.7368. Breazeale, Daniel. 1997. Note on the Text. In Friedrich Nietzsche. Untimely Meditations, ed. Daniel Breazeale, trans. R. J. Hollingdale, xliv-xlvii. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Brilli, Attilio. 2010. Il viaggio della capitale. Torino, Firenze, Roma dopo l’Unità d’Italia. Turin: UTET. Bru, Sasha, Luca Somigli and Bart van den Bossche (eds.). 2017. Futurism: A Microhistory. Cambridge: Legenda. Bulson, Eric. 2017. Little Magazine, World Form. New  York: Columbia University Press. Casanova, Pascale. 2004. The World Republic of Letters, trans. M. B. DeBevoise. Cambridge MA and London: Harvard University Press. Cecchi, Emilio. 1985. Tre volti di Firenze. In Fiorentinità e altri saggi, ed. Margherita Ghilardi with an introduction by Mario Luzi, 103-114. Florence: Sansoni Editore. Cerasi, Laura. 1996. Dalla nazionalizzazione alla ricerca di identità. La città nella cultura fiorentina dei primi del Novecento. Studi Storici 37 (3): 889-928. Cerasi, Laura. 2001. Fiorentinità. Percorsi di un’ideologia identitaria fra Otto e Novecento. Studi Novecenteschi 28 (62): 311-343.

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Dodge Luhan, Mabel. 1999. Intimate Memories. The Autobiography of Mabel Dodge Luhan, ed. Lois Palken Rudnick. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. Evangelista, Stefano. 2014. Vernon Lee, Ouida e i luoghi del cosmopolitismo fiorentino. In Violet del Palmerino. Aspetti della cultura cosmopolita nel salotto di Vernon Lee, ed. Serena Cenni, Sophie Geoffroy and Elisa Bizzotto, 139-150. Florence: Edizioni dell’Assemblea. Even-Zohar, Itamar. 1990. Polysystem Studies. Poetics Today 11 (1): 1-268. Everett, Patricia R. 1996. A History of Having a Great Many Times not Continued to Be Friends. The Correspondence between Mabel Dodge and Gertrude Stein, 1911-1934, 31-33. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. Fry, Roger. 1920. Vision and Design. London: Chatto & Windus. Goody, Alex. 2007. Modernist Articulations. A Cultural Study of Djuna Barnes, Mina Loy and Gertrude Stein. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Holzhey, Christoph and Arnd Wedemeyer. 2019. Preface. In Re-. An Errant Glossary, ed. Christoph Holzhey and Arnd Wedemeyer, i-xv. Berlin: ICI. https://doi.org10.25620/ci-15. James, Henry. 1995a. The Autumn in Florence. Italian Hours, ed. John Auchard, 238-246. London: Penguin. James, Henry. 1995b. Two Old Houses and Three Young Women. Italian Hours, ed. John Auchard, 61-71. London: Penguin. Kellner, Bruce (ed.). 1987. Letters of Carl Van Vechten. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Kinnahan, Linda. n.d.-a. Firenze is a Woman. Fifth Tour. Mina Loy. Navigating the Avant-garde. https://mina-­loy.com/chapters/italy-­italian-­baedeker/ 6-­poetic-­baedeker. Kinnahan, Linda. n.d.-b. Mapping Florence. First Tour: Loy at Home. Mina Loy. Navigating the Avant-garde. https://mina-­loy.com/chapters/italy-­italian-­ baedeker/02-­oltrarno-­costa/. Livorni, Ernesto. 2017. The Café. Sites of Futurist Propaganda. In Futurism: A Microhistory, ed. Sasha Bru, Luca Somigli and Bart van den Bossche, 151-166. Cambridge: Legenda. Loy, Mina. 1914. Letter to Mabel Dodge. Feb 1914, from 54 Costa San Giorgio Florence. Mabel Dodge Luhan Papers, YCAL MSS 196 Box 24 Folder 664, Beinecke Rare Books and Manuscripts Library, New Haven. Loy, Mina. 1982. The Last Lunar Baedeker, ed. Roger Conover with a note by Jonathan Williams. Asheville: The Jargon Society. Loy, Mina. 1997. The Lost Lunar Baedeker, ed. Roger Conover. Manchester: Carcanet. Loy, Mina. n.d. Letter to Mabel Dodge. Mabel Dodge Luhan Papers, YCAL MSS 196 Box 24 Folder 665, Beinecke Rare Books and Manuscripts Library, New Haven.

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Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso. 2009. Il teatro di varietà. In Manifesti Futuristi, ed. Guido Davico Bonino, 163-172. Milan: BUR. Papini, Giovanni. 1913. Contro Firenze. Lacerba 1 (24), 15 December: 284-286. Papini, Giovanni. 1915. Fiorentinità. Lacerba 8 (3), 21 February 1915: 57-59. Pater, Walter. 2005. The Renaissance. Studies in Art and Poetry. London: Dover. Prescott, Tara. 2017. Poetic Salvage: Reading Mina Loy. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press. Rudnick, Lois P. 1982. Radical Visions of Art and Self in the 20th Century: Mabel Dodge and Gertrude Stein. Modern Language Studies 12 (4): 51- 63. Scarpelli, Filippo. 1915. Il cuore di Firenze, ahi. Lacerba 3 (15), 10 April: 118-120. Schiavo, Flavia. 2004. Parigi, Barcellona, Firenze: Forma e racconto. Dalla città ottocentesca a quella contemporanea. Palermo: Sellerio. Scuriatti, Laura. 2019. Mina Loy’s Critical Modernism. Gainesville: University Press of Florida. Sherman, Daniel and Irit Rogoff (eds.). 1994. Museum Culture. Histories, Discourses, Spectacles. London: Routledge. Simmel, Georg. 1950. The Metropolis and Mental Life. In The Sociology of Georg Simmel, ed. and trans. Kurt Wolff, 409-424. Glencoe, IL: Free Press. Soffici, Ardengo. 1915a. Simultaneità liriche. Lacerba 3 (14), 3 April: 107. Soffici, Ardengo. 1915b. Taccuino. Lacerba 3 (1), 7 March: 75. Tavolato, Italo. 1914. Elogio del caffè. Lacerba 2 (6), 15 March: 87. Viviani, Alberto. 1933. Giubbe Rosse. 1913-1914-1915. Florence: Barbera. Westphal, Bertrand. 2011. Geocriticism. Real and Fictional Spaces, trans. Robert T. Tally. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. White, John J. 2017. London. In Futurism: A Microhistory, ed. Sasha Bru, Luca Somigli, and Bart van den Bossche, 59-68. Cambridge: Legenda.

CHAPTER 10

From World Capital to National Capital: Literary Periodicals and the Construction of Modern Rome Stefano Evangelista

How can a city that for centuries thought of itself as the capital of the world (caput mundi) be considered an ‘other’ capital of the nineteenth century? In order to answer this question, I will examine the role played by literary periodicals in shaping Rome’s identity as the capital of the Italian Kingdom in the last three decades of the nineteenth century. As a newly constituted nation, Italy was in search of its own distinctive literary identity—something that would smooth over the entrenched cultural divides within its fragmented geographical territory and make it unique among other nations, enabling it to emancipate itself from its peripheral status on the world stage. As debates about the new cultural and political identity of the nation took hold of the public sphere, the mythic ‘Eternal City’, so long cut off from modernity, entered the competitive mechanisms of world literary space as described by Pascale Casanova in The

S. Evangelista (*) Trinity College, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 A. Bhattacharya et al. (eds.), Literary Capitals in the Long Nineteenth Century, Literary Urban Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-13060-1_10

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World Republic of Letters (2004, 82–125). The three most important Roman literary periodicals of those years—Fanfulla della Domenica (1879–1919), Cronaca Bizantina (1881–1886) and Il Convito (1895–1907)—had a determining influence on the intertwined processes of representation and construction of the city as cultural capital of Italy and as a location of literary modernity.1 The transformation of Rome into a modern European literary capital involved overlapping cultural, social and material dimensions. The journals shed light on the dialogue between urban space and literary space that took place as Rome attempted to embrace its new identity, and on the tensions between nationalism and cosmopolitanism created by this process.

Making a Capital First of all, it will be useful to provide some historical background. As is well known, since the Middle Ages and up to and including most of the nineteenth century, Rome and its surrounding region were ruled by the Popes, who embodied an idea of government that became increasingly anachronistic in the era of modern nation-states. As the project of Italian national unification known as the ‘Risorgimento’ gathered momentum from the mid-nineteenth century, it became clear that the annexation of Rome would be a fundamental step towards its final goal. After a series of wars, insurrections and political struggles, the new Italian Kingdom officially came into being in 1861. Its first capital city was Turin, home of the Savoy dynasty who became, by extension, the country’s royal family. In 1865, the capital was moved to the more centrally located and culturally prestigious Florence. Rome took over six years later, in 1871, following the city’s fall to the Italian army the previous year. The adoption of Rome as capital had great symbolic importance for the Italian Kingdom: in particular, the city’s classical heritage conferred a form of political and cultural legitimacy on the new state by means of which Italy could appear to itself and others as an established entity, with institutions and traditions that stretched long back into the past, rather than a newcomer on the world stage. Grand though the symbolism of classical Rome was (as the Fascists were to realise fully in the 1920s and 1930s), the embodied reality of the city was far more problematic. In the 1870s, Rome was a relatively depopulated city of roughly 220,000 inhabitants, with little or no productive economy and very poor infrastructure that was limited to the railway station and some public libraries and museums. The

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pre-industrial urban fabric of the city had, in other words, largely been spared from the activity of rationalisation and updating of social spaces undergone earlier in the century by many other European centres of comparable size (Benevolo 1992, 9). The architects of the new Italian state therefore immediately set on a grand programme of modernisation, which included the construction of the riverbanks (lungotevere), ministries, barracks, prisons, markets and abattoirs, as well as extensive demolitions of buildings that were deemed antiquated, clearing of archaeological areas and construction of modern apartment blocks. The restructuring of Rome can be seen to embody the same bourgeois compromise that had inspired Haussmann’s Parisian grands travaux, which had just come to an end. The continuity between the histories of urban planning in the two cities is underscored by the fact that the fall of Napoleon III provided the Italian government with the right opportunity to break into Rome, which had been under the protection of the French monarchy (Benevolo 1992, 100). However, the French urban model also reached Rome as filtered through the intermediate space of Turin, home to the Italian royals: architect Gaetano Koch’s extensive interventions, in particular, gave parts of Rome a somewhat Piedmontese look, which aimed to create a neoclassical style that fitted modern bourgeois life. Building on these different models, the massive process of urban restructuring in Rome occurred in step with a radical change in the social fabric of the city: after the unification, Rome became a centre of immigration from other parts of the country, especially the impoverished South, and modernised its antiquated economy by accommodating the bureaucratic apparatus of the nation-state in newly built ministries and other government offices, expanding the infrastructure that catered for a new middle class. This process of massive restructuring had to contend with the material and symbolic presences of Rome’s uniquely multilayered past. In his analysis of the post-unitarian modernisation of Rome’s urban space, architectural historian Leonardo Benevolo has compared the city’s make-up to ‘an illegible hieroglyph’, on which different planners projected their own personal fantasies (1992, 97).2 The same dialectic between illegibility and interpretative freedom applied to attempts to use the symbolic space of the city in the construction of a modern national culture. The question was how best to reconcile the different historical identities of the city: its past as world capital, first of the Roman Empire and then of the Catholic Church; its present reality as an antiquated provincial capital; its envisaged future as capital of a modern nation. Rome’s history created a special

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challenge when it came to navigating the local and the global. While, in a comparable setting of a newly unified nation, a capital such as Berlin measured its modernity and symbolic power by charting its progress towards becoming a Weltstadt or world city, in Rome the move from national to international space was reversed: the universal symbolism attached to the city needed to be downsized, as it were, in order to fit the narrower political, social and cultural fabric of the nation. A comparison between two French novels set in Rome can help us to visualise the evolving negotiation of Italian and universal identities in the course of the nineteenth century. In Madame de Staël’s Corinne (1869), Rome is a landscape of monuments and ruins—a spectacle of the universal history of humankind that unfolds on the page as the eponymous heroine takes the English visitor Lord Nevil on a comprehensive tour of the city that stretches across several chapters. De Staël characterises Rome as ‘l’asile des exilés du monde’ (the refuge for the world’s exiles) (1869, 67), and in her novel the city itself exists in a state of exile, awkwardly inhabiting a physical space that no longer fits its present reality. On his first arrival, Lord Nevil tellingly feels that even modern Italians are fundamentally foreign to this city in which they move ‘comme des pélerins qui se reposent auprès des ruines’ (like pilgrims who take a rest among the ruins) (1869, 19). At the other end of the century, Paul Bourget’s Cosmopolis (1892; 1894) still portrays Rome, now capital of united Italy, as made up of a ‘mosaïque humaine’ (human mosaic) of different nationalities rather than setting it in relation to the space of the nation or to Italian culture (1894, 40). As his dedication to the Roman salonnier Giuseppe Primoli spells out, Bourget was well aware of the existence of a local society ‘between the Quirinal and the Vatican’, which possessed its own distinctive history and character, but he decided to leave that out of his fictional edifice in order to use the city as the perfect neutral ground for his international plot (1894, i).3 The universal symbolism of Rome that de Staël read in a melancholy or uncanny key becomes, in Bourget, a foil for a debased modern form of cosmopolitanism, entirely based on materialism and consumption, as practised by an ethically shallow international set that spends its life in voluntary exile, moving from one fashionable city to the next. As these two successful novels circulated internationally, in the original French and multiple translations, both Corinne and Cosmopolis contributed to a discursive process of construction of the city space in which, as Bertrand Westphal lays out in his geocritical model, literary representations work alongside actual geographical spaces and interventions in urban

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planning (2011, 76–77). Nor was this process of construction restricted to the works of these two French authors:4 in the course of the nineteenth century, Rome served as a meaningful location or had a strong biographical connection to a number of major European and American authors, from Goethe to P.B. Shelley, Nikolai Gogol, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Emile Zola. Through their writings and social connections, Rome came to occupy the space of world literature more extensively than that of domestic, Italian literature; at least, it would be fair to say that no Italian writer achieved international recognition as the ‘bard’ of nineteenth-­century Rome in the way that Dickens did for London, Theodor Fontane for Berlin or Dostoevsky for St Petersburg—with the possible exception of the dialect poet Giuseppe Gioachino Belli, whose sonnets on ‘lower-class’ life are written in a local idiom that resists standard Italian as much as translation. With the unification and the relocation of the capital, the rich literary tradition represented by foreign writers of symbolically projecting Rome onto an international plane was an element of prestige for Italian literature; but the process of national unity also necessarily required reclaiming the symbolic space of Rome as central to a modern national literary culture. This is where literary periodicals came to play a central role. In a classic study, Benedict Anderson has persuasively argued that the synchronicity of the periodical medium, which gave readers access to the same items of news and texts (e.g. serialised novels) at the same time, helped to foster the feeling of ‘imagined political community’ that forms the basis for the modern nation (1991, 6). In the case of Italy, this process entailed reversing a long history of fragmentation and regionalisation caused by centuries of political division. Several Italian cities—notably Milan, Turin, Florence and Naples—had in the course of time developed their own distinctive literary cultures supported by local periodicals that sustained their status as regional capitals within the larger linguistic and cultural space of the Peninsula. With the end of the Pontifical State, characterised as that was by high levels of censorship, Rome experienced a boom in periodical publishing which established its distinctive identity within this fragmented national landscape and, at the same time, created the conditions for ‘imagining’ the nation, as described by Anderson, from the point of view of its new symbolic centre. This process occurred in tandem with the radical remodelling of urban space that aimed to transform the city into a modern capital. In this key period of transition, Roman literary periodicals worked in competition

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with the journals produced in other Italian cities;5 at the same time, they also entered the field of international competition that Casanova terms ‘world literary space’, where they not only profited from Rome’s existing cosmopolitan connections but also strove to create a strong voice for Italian writers and readers as active agents in the production of literary modernity. This dual process of nationalisation and internationalisation (which, pace Anderson, must be understood as intertwined) comprised two steps: importing foreign literary tendencies from abroad in order to modernise domestic practices and institutions that were perceived as outdated; and helping the city—and, by extension, the nation—to develop an individual literary culture, competitive on the world stage, that it would be able to export internationally.

Fanfulla della Domenica: Networking the New Capital Chronologically, the first literary journal of post-unification Rome was Fanfulla della Domenica (The Sunday Fanfulla), which started appearing in July 1879 as the Sunday supplement of the daily Fanfulla. It soon became a leading Italian literary review and was the first periodical to be distributed throughout the entire national territory, thereby claiming the symbolic status of the new capital in relation to the changing literary space of the nation. The opening issue proclaimed the strictly apolitical character of the journal which, it pledged, would exclusively be guided by the principle of freedom (‘Libertà piena’) in its coverage of literature and art (Anon. 1879, n.p.). Arising out of the Risorgimento, a time characterised by the constant intrusion of politics into the sphere of culture, the literary organ of the new capital now inaugurated a new phase in the cultural life of the nation marked by the emancipation from politics, where literature could be judged purely on aesthetic merit (in the local Roman context, the great outstanding political question related to the territorial claims of the church, which would only be settled in 1929). However, the difficulty of enforcing this strict separation between literature and (nationalist) politics was already in evidence in an open letter to the founder of Fanfulla della Domenica from the eminent critic Francesco De Sanctis, also published in the inaugural issue. Here De Sanctis endorsed the journal’s apolitical programme but, at the same time, argued that just as culture had helped to create national unity (‘l’unità della patria’), the task of culture was now to

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redeem Italy from the state of decadence in which it had languished for centuries (De Sanctis 1879, n.p.).6 This rhetoric of patriotism, so widespread during the Risorgimento years, frequently made its way into articles and reviews printed in Fanfulla della Domenica, interfering with its stated commitment to aesthetic autonomy and sometimes introducing elements of cultural nationalism. Nonetheless, from its very early days, Fanfulla della Domenica devoted considerable attention to foreign literatures, especially French literature: it aimed to make Italian readers more cosmopolitan in their tastes while, at the same time, networking Italian literature and criticism into international space. The journal was guided by internationally oriented editors such as Luigi Capuana (a key mediator of French Naturalism and theorist of the Italian verismo, the country’s leading realist school) and Anglophile critic and translator Enrico Nencioni. A notable foreign presence was the Swiss critic and writer Edouard Rod, who in the mid-1880s acted as a de facto Paris correspondent for the journal, providing articles on French literary trends such as Naturalist theatre, Parnassianism and pessimism, and contemporary writers (Bourget, the Goncourt brothers, Huysmans, Pierre Loti, Maupassant, Zola). Fanfulla della Domenica used Rod’s connections in Paris, where he was close to Naturalist circles and, from 1884, directed the literary periodical Revue contemporaine, in order to build a bridge to France by means of which the journal turned Rome into a privileged entry point of foreign literatures into Italy. The dialogue with Paris contributed to portraying Rome as a literary capital that was now potentially an exporter, as well as an importer, of literary trends and ideas. This new relationship included elements of competition, as can be seen from a polemic that took place in 1884 over the allegedly biased French reception of the emerging Italian writer Edmondo De Amicis, in which Rod himself was involved as the main culprit (Rod 1884a; Anon. 1884; Rod 1884b). While France was the journal’s main intellectual partner, Fanfulla della Domenica was also notable for paying considerable attention to English literature, a field with which Italian readers were still relatively little acquainted but that was attracting ever more interest. Here the journal relied not only on the established authority of Nencioni but also on a number of cosmopolitan, mostly young English women, including Vernon Lee, A. Mary F. Robinson, Linda Villari and Helen Zimmern. Some of them wrote as London correspondents, contributing to the impression of spatial networking between Rome and other European capitals. The English list was notable for being made up of dynamic writers close to the

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artistically progressive milieu of aestheticism—Lee in particular had already built a strong profile as a skilled cultural mediator with a wide expertise ranging from music to literature and aesthetics, and in writing for Fanfulla della Domenica she cemented her transcultural position with articles on both English literature (Walter Pater) and Italian literature (Marco Pratesi) (Lee 1885a; Lee 1885b). The Nencioni-Lee axis also points to the fact that the journal was shifting the focus of Anglo-Italian literary relations from Florence—which was home to the largest and most rooted English ‘colony’ in Italy and had traditionally been the main entry point of English culture—to Rome. Indeed, the Fanfulla itself was originally founded in Florence during the city’s short stint as capital and then transferred to Rome in 1871; a similar fate befell to the highbrow monthly Nuova Antologia, established in Florence in 1866 and then moved to Rome in 1878. This process of spatial restructuring of the national periodical press was more than just symbolic: as the new centre, Rome now had to make room for an internal migration of established and aspiring members of the culture industry who converged there from different parts of the country and who had a strong impact on the social fabric of the city. One of the newly relocated writers who was particularly attentive to the capital’s social and physical changes was the Neapolitan Matilde Serao. Serao started her collaboration with Fanfulla della Domenica as Milan correspondent but moved to Rome in 1882 in order to deepen her ties with local journals and newspapers. She would vividly capture the mixture of opportunities and tensions generated by the transformation of the new capital in her novel La Conquista di Roma (The Conquest of Rome, 1885), written from the point of view of a provincial lawyer from the South who finds himself catapulted to Rome as a Member of Parliament (see Gisolfi 1960, 22–43).7 Serao’s successful career within the Roman periodical press, where she established a strong profile in the 1880s, would earn her international recognition as an Italian follower of Naturalism, especially thanks to her novel Il Ventre di Napoli (The Belly of Naples, 1884) and as an interesting and often challenging thinker on women’s issues. Indeed, in Fanfulla della Domenica many of her articles are focused on gender. Her contributions show that, together with the English writers mentioned earlier, one of the most noteworthy achievements of the journal was to create a space within the new capital for women as producers of culture.

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Cronaca Bizantina: The Worldly City Even more closely bound with the changing identity of Rome was the shorter-lived fortnightly Cronaca Bizantina (Byzantine Chronicle), founded in 1881 by Angelo Sommaruga—a daring and in many ways brilliant literary entrepreneur. Printed on high-quality paper and sporting coloured covers with liberty style ornamentations, it came into being as an expensive, arty and polemical competitor to the tamer and more old-­ fashioned Fanfulla della Domenica. Cronaca Bizantina targeted an Italian urban bourgeoisie which was cosmopolitan in taste and literary outlook. A lead article by the critic Edoardo Scarfoglio, one of the most representative voices of the journal and future husband of Matilde Serao, looked back to Rome’s historical heritage in order to qualify the cosmopolitan ethos of the present: In art, as in all things in life, there must be a continuous activity of importation and exportation: if the last citizens of the Roman Republic had not studied in the Greek gymnasia, Latin art, which was already decaying together with the Latin language, would not have gathered that miraculous momentum that pushed it so far forwards; and, without Provencal influences, who knows how much longer our literature would have taken to free itself from the yoke of dialects. The circulation of artistic criteria and artistic products and the free exchange of ideas are therefore two necessities of human life, like the circulation of currencies and free trade; but in order for the equilibrium to last, all interested parties must accept and honestly put into practice these two rules of modern commerce.8 (1882, 1)

Scarfoglio reminds readers of republican Rome’s opening to Greek culture in order to argue that Italy and Rome should be as hospitable to foreign influences as possible. His argument on the importation and exportation of literature borrows an image of literary circulation as free trade that Goethe used in his definitions of Weltliteratur.9 It therefore implicitly sees the future of the new capital, which was then bent on modernising its anachronistic pre-capitalist economy, unfold within the networks of world commerce. In this same article, in which he surveys the modern state of the novel, Scarfoglio accuses France of having closed its borders to foreign influences for most of the nineteenth century, establishing a one-sided system of exchange that contravenes the rules of world literature. He also accuses modern Italian writers of looking only to France for literary models imported to Italy by way of Milan—the most

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established publishing centre in the country, which Scarfoglio blames for spreading a washed-out form of French Romanticism exclusively driven by commercial interests. Instead of focusing exclusively on French language and literature, he wants Italians to learn English, German, Russian and even Sanskrit, and to undertake a serious study of their own older literature in order to become true innovators in the novel form domestically and, by extension, internationally. Tendentious though it undoubtedly is, Scarfoglio’s critique exemplifies the journal’s focus on establishing Rome as an independent literary space. Sommaruga later explained that Cronaca Bizantina was the product of an ambitious dream of his youth: ‘to make Rome, which had become capital little more than ten years earlier, into Italy’s most important literary centre, the point where the various literary and artistic tendencies would meet and develop’ (1941, 25).10 This dynamic new space would create new opportunities for modern Italian literature, perceived by many to lag behind other European nations. The question of how the capital should feature within the new national literature was also something that Cronaca Bizantina attempted to tackle. Giulio Salvadori, another of the journal’s lead critics, complained that, twelve years after the King’s troops’ first arrival into the city, Italian writers still seemed unable to write about Rome in a way that approximated the achievements of foreign authors such as Goethe, Hippolyte Taine and Stendhal (1882, 5–6). The making of Rome within national literature, as much as its making as the centre of modern Italian publishing, was thus still very much an unfinished project on the perhaps impossible road towards a new national identity. Cronaca Bizantina embodied this transitional state of the new capital, caught between the burden of its long history and the buzz of the new. The very title of the journal captured this sense of ambivalence. The adjective ‘Byzantine’ came from a verse by Giosuè Carducci, one of the foremost poets of the age and the ‘star’ contributor to Cronaca Bizantina, who had used it in his poem ‘Per Vincenzo Caldesi, otto mesi dopo la sua morte’ (For Vincenzo Caldesi, Eight Months after His Death) in order to satirise the inadequacy of Rome as a modern capital: Impronta Italia dimandava Roma, Bisanzio essi le han dato. (Carducci 1968, 462–63) (Unprepared Italy demanded Rome, Byzantium instead she was given)

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Printed on the title page of every issue, these lines configured Rome in relation neither to other European capitals nor to its own imperial past. Instead, they pointed to Rome’s inability to fulfil the expectations of a modern nation-state, registering a sense of disappointment felt by many Italian intellectuals. Byzantium evoked connotations of cultural prestige but also of esotericism and corruption (the latter are captured in the English adjective ‘byzantine’, defined by the OED as ‘intricate, complicated’). At the turn of the century, Byzantium would attract renewed scholarly attention, especially in France, and provide a foil for the corruption of the modern metropolis in the novels of Jean Lombard and Paul Adam. But the writers that gravitated around Cronaca Bizantina in the early 1880s were ahead of their French counterparts in seizing on the myth of Byzantium to characterise their own historical and geographical present. There was of course a close historical relationship between Rome and Byzantium for, in the fourth century AD, the latter took over as capital of the Roman Empire and then of the Eastern Roman Empire, in its new identity as Constantinople or Nova Roma. In this sense, Rome and Byzantium were mythic doubles, halves of a disappeared whole. The ambivalent myth of Byzantium thus came back to haunt the temporal and spatial identities of modern Rome as portrayed by Cronaca Bizantina. It encouraged readers to view the city as inherently anachronistic—as resisting the version of modernity embodied by European metropoles such as Paris, Berlin and London, and indeed complicating the binary relationship between modernity and decadence. The connection with Byzantium also oriented the cosmopolitan identity of the new capital towards the Mediterranean and the East rather than Europe and the North, gesturing towards a different set of international relations for Italian culture. In the pages of Cronaca Bizantina, the decadent cosmopolitanism of the new capital was best reflected in the habits of its fashionable society, to which it paid considerable attention in the form of the many sketches of contemporary Roman life and, in general, by the anecdotal content of much of the writing. From April 1882, a feature titled ‘La Vita di Roma’ regularly provided gossipy news about the comings and goings of aristocrats, foreign diplomats, artists, celebrities and members of the international high society. The seriousness with which Cronaca Bizantina took the ephemeral is testified by the fact that it directed to it some of its best talent, such as Matilde Serao, who was in charge of a regular column on Roman salons. Readers were invited to step into this world of leisure and

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sophisticated consumption, magnified by the many adverts that gave Cronaca Bizantina a flavour of ‘American’ commercial publishing that was entirely new to Italy at this time (Francesco Flora, quoted in Sommaruga 1941, 33). The result was that the image of Rome it projected was not that of a political centre but of a worldly city: a spectacular, theatrical space devoted to pleasure, advertisement and self-display.

Il Convito: Aestheticism and Nationalist Myth Launched in 1895, Il Convito took over the aestheticising mission of Cronaca Bizantina ten years after the latter’s demise. Adolfo De Bosis’s beautifully produced magazine, which, in fact, was something halfway between a magazine and a book, was Rome’s unique contribution to the fin-de-siècle international vogue for little magazines represented by London’s Yellow Book (1894–1896), Paris’s La Revue blanche (1889–1903) and Vienna’s Ver Sacrum (1898–1903). Like those, Il Convito staged a close dialogue between verbal and visual cultures. De Bosis’s plan was to bring out twelve issues in the course of one year (1895–1896) but, in the event, the twelve issues of Il Convito came out irregularly over a period of twelve years, ending in 1907. The anonymous ‘Proemio’ or aesthetic manifesto that opened the first number set out the journal’s mission of cultural regeneration: It seems, indeed, that Italy is again witnessing those dark times when, from far-away shores, the Barbarians came to plague a land that had itself grown out of foreign dust and, in their ruinous charge, tore down all the simulacra of Beauty and erased all the ancient traces of Thought. But we believe that the barbarism of today is worse or at least viler because, unlike the one of yore, it does not even claim the grandeur of blind and irresistible violence. The barbarism of today achieves the same effects because it tears down and obliterates, but it does so not like a storm of lightning and thunder, but rather like a slow muddy river into which a thousand putrid canals discharge their waters. And, as a supreme outrage, this river has its main source in Rome: in this third Rome that ought to have represented to the world ‘the Love of Latin blood and Latin earth’ and ought to have radiated from its summit the marvellous light of the newest Ideal.11 (Anon. 1895, 4)

Il Convito marks the culmination of the journey to aesthetic autonomy first undertaken by Fanfulla della Domenica. However, in the pages of this later review the literary space of the new capital, far from being completely

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detached from politics, becomes saturated with the rhetoric of nationalism. Italy, mythically described as the ‘privileged land’ of art (Anon. 1895, 4),12 is now seen as debased by the vulgarity of the liberal middle class that dominates its taste and cultural production. In order to rescue the country from the tragic destiny to which it has fallen prey, the ‘Proemio’ sets up a programme of ‘militant’ aestheticism that is explicitly characterised as ‘virile’ (Anon. 1895, 3): this gendered reappropriation of literary space rewrites the feminised, hospitable aestheticism of Fanfulla della Domenica into a field governed by the masculine laws of violence and physical strength. Il Convito made a strong effort to centralise the literary culture of the united nation in the new capital: both its nationalist myth and Italy’s alleged modern downfall are firmly rooted in Rome. Rome is celebrated as the home of a classical tradition that was exported all over the ancient world and that came back to dominate European culture in the Renaissance, when, in the pompous mythic idiom of the ‘Proemio’, ‘the unearthed Laocoon was taken in procession through the papal streets thick with people, carried religiously like the body of a proto-martyr discovered in the Catacombs’ (Anon. 1895, 6).13 However, just as Rome was once the source of an invigorating cult of beauty, it has now become the very centre of the debased modernity (the ‘muddy river’) that the journal attacks. The ‘third Rome’ has so far betrayed its historical destiny of carrying on the Latin tradition of cultural dominance. It follows that the entire project of building a post-unitarian national culture centred in Rome, which ought to have brought prestige to the city and the nation, has turned into its opposite: ‘a tragic farce’ (Anon. 1895, 5).14 In order to bring home its iconoclastic intent, the ‘Proemio’ ends with an apotheosis of the emperor Nero, generally identified with the worst amoral excesses of the Roman Empire, now rehabilitated as an ideal artist and model of the radical aestheticism espoused by the journal. The chief responsibility for the fall of modern Rome rests with what the journal calls ‘the barbarism of today’. As deployed by Il Convito, barbarism is a complex concept that designates the debased cultural habits of the present, identified with the changes to the social and, as we shall see, architectural fabric of Rome made in order to suit the demands of the new urban middle class. Barbarism is thus also identified with the networks of free-trade capitalism that Scarfoglio had associated with the international circulation of literature in Cronaca Bizantina. But the connotations of the term’s original Greek usage to distance oneself from foreigners, that is, those who did not speak the Greek language, are far from lost. In the post-­ unitarian Roman press, including Cronaca Bizantina, it was relatively

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common to refer ironically to the massive influx of foreign tourists as a modern barbarian invasion; but in Il Convito the images of barbarism take on an openly xenophobic and confrontational character aimed at defending the sanctity, as it were, of Rome from modern profanations and, by extension, at policing the boundaries of the new national culture as envisaged by the journal. Particularly contested in this respect was the issue of Italy’s Latin heritage. Since the beginning of the 1890s, French critics of literary cosmopolitanism and then the école romane had been arguing more and more vocally that French literature should go back to its native Latin roots, and, by a related process, they proclaimed French literature as the rightful and natural inheritor of the Latin tradition. By appropriating the ‘Latin spirit’ in the service of Italian cultural nationalism, Il Convito put Italy into an open competition with France, casting the latter in the role of barbarian other from the historically privileged point of view of the old imperial capital. Indeed, the myth of Rome’s imperial past fuelled very modern fantasies of world domination as Italy joined in the European powers’ colonial scramble: in the first issue of Il Convito, a travel piece by Scarfoglio on East Africa extended the symbolic space of modern Italian letters to the very territory that was the object of Italy’s nascent imperialist ambitions (Scarfoglio 1895). The key agent in the creation of this nationalist myth was Gabriele D’Annunzio, thought to be the anonymous author of the ‘Proemio’ (see Greene 2016, 547), and whose voice and personality dominated the pages of Il Convito. In fact, the three Roman periodicals analysed here chart the rise of D’Annunzio from emerging provincial author in Fanfulla della Domenica, which opened the doors of the capital to him with a eulogistic review of his first poetry collection, to ‘enfant gâté [and] young Bonaparte of Italian literature’ in Cronaca Bizantina (Sommaruga 1941, 119),15 to the role of prophet of an Italian literary renaissance in Il Convito. A French translation of D’Annunzio’s Decadent Roman novel Il Piacere (The Child of Pleasure, 1889) was serialised in Revue de Paris in 1894–1895, attracting considerable attention in the French capital and prompting the powerful French critic Eugène-Melchior de Vogüé to see D’Annunzio as the chief representative of a ‘renaissance latine’ capable of overturning the international vogue for ‘northern’ literatures coming from Scandinavia, Russia and Britain (1895).16 Il Convito arises from and reflects this recently acquired consecration, which marked the start of D’Annunzio’s international fame: the notices on foreign literature included in the opening number gave prominence to the news of D’Annunzio’s French success and of ongoing

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German translations, contributing to the impression that the Italian writer was on his way to ‘conquering’ Europe and that the one-­sided literary traffic bemoaned by Scarfoglio in Cronaca Bizantina was finally being balanced out: the new Rome was becoming a centre for the exportation of literature. The opening number also featured the first instalment of D’Annunzio’s new novel Le Vergini delle Rocce (The Virgins of the Rocks), serialised in Il Convito over the following months, in which a young protagonist who embodies the virile genius idealistically set out in the ‘Proemio’ looks for a bride to bear him a son who would one day become the new ‘Re di Roma’ (king of Rome), that is, whose destiny would be to redeem the nation from its spiritual decline. Unlike Il Piacere, which is set in the cosmopolitan salons of fashionable contemporary Rome that D’Annunzio knew well from his gossipy contributions to Cronaca Bizantina, Le Vergini delle Rocce develops within a claustrophobically rural setting in D’Annunzio’s native Abruzzi. However, Rome is an absent presence throughout the later novel in the guise of a fallen ideal: the city has been debased—its historical destiny betrayed—by the ascent of the bourgeoisie and the political system of liberal democracy from which the protagonist flees mentally and physically. D’Annunzio explicitly maps the spiritual decay of Rome onto the post-1871 urban landscape, which has fallen victim to ‘the active zeal of destroyers and builders’ driven by easy profit (1889, 54).17 In this vulnerable phase of transition, the city has been hit by a ‘blast of barbarism’, which takes the form of a concerted act of profanation of the past. The most poignant symbol of the new destruction of Rome is the felling of the gigantic cypresses of the Villa Ludovisi which ‘had once spread the solemnity of their ancient mystery over the Olympian head of Goethe’ (1889, 55).18 The transformation of Rome into a modern capital is thus an ecological disaster as much as a fatal blow to its artistic heritage: The battle for gain was being fought with unbridled, implacable violence. The arms used were the pickaxe, the trowel, and bad faith. And from week to week, with almost chimerical rapidity, enormous empty cages, pierced with rectangular holes, their artificial cornices coated with shameful stucco, were rising on foundations filled with heaps of ruins. A species of huge ­whitish tumour was rising out of the side of the ancient city and sucking away its life. (1889, 56)19

The ancient fabric of the city, pregnant with the memories of times when Rome had no rivals and no equals in the world, is replaced by stucco—the

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symbol of the philistine universal ideal of modernity embraced by the Italian Kingdom, bent on erasing the city’s distinctive identity in order to transform it into a bland modern European capital. For D’Annunzio, the lack of respect for the heritage of the city bespeaks the failure of the national project as embodied by modern Italian statesmen, politicians and leaders of the culture industry. D’Annunzio’s vision of the symbolic space of the capital is permeated by a sentiment of nostalgia that is a key component of the nationalist myth that emerges in the pages of Il Convito.

Conclusion In the decades that immediately followed the Italian unification, the periodicals that established themselves in Rome engaged in a complex effort to reclaim, rebuild and negotiate the literary space of the new capital. What was at stake was how to construct a distinctive identity for modern Italian literature, centred in Rome, and how to establish its relative position within a closely networked world literary system. The Roman press elevated new Italian authors to national and international fame; it provided, in turn, satirical and glamorous portraits of a fast-changing city that fascinated Italian readers, and it built bridges with foreign cultures in order to create a larger horizon of expectations for Italian literary culture. The negotiations of the symbolic space of Italian literature became intertwined with the debate over the physical space of the eternal city as it transitioned towards its new identity as modern national capital—a debate in which writers played a major role. In her analysis of the close relationship between the conquest of political freedom and the construction of literary space, Casanova sees these twin processes as typically marked by a tendency for literature to constitute itself ‘as a distinct world in opposition to the nation and nationalism’ (2004, 86). The Roman example partly bears out this model: the plea for aesthetic freedom espoused by Fanfulla della Domenica would be strengthened by Cronaca Bizantina and then further radicalised by Il Convito. However, this last journal in particular also shows that, in fact, in Italy the discourse of aesthetic autonomy openly fostered a form of cultural nationalism that manifested itself as a drive to compete with other nations, notably France, and that lampooned the social and cultural ideals of the liberal bourgeoisie. In this fluid field, Rome provided a pliable myth capable of generating conflicting sentiments that went from cynicism to nostalgia, and from cosmopolitanism to Italian cultural supremacy.

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Notes 1. The three titles, respectively, translate as ‘The Sunday Fanfulla’, ‘Byzantine Chronicle’ and ‘The Banquet’. Fanfulla was the name of a patriotic Italian soldier who featured in Massimo D’Azeglio’s historical novels. 2. ‘Il disegno di Roma era un geroglifico illeggibile, su cui era anche troppo facile innestare le fantasie personali di ciascuno.’ 3. ‘[C]ette société si locale, si traditionnelle, qui s’agite entre le Quirinal et le Vatican’. The Quirinal and the Vatican are two of the famous seven hills of Rome but here they also symbolise the city’s torn condition between religious and political authorities, being, respectively, the seat of the Italian king and of the Pope. 4. For a comprehensive study of Rome as a setting for nineteenth-century French novels, see Grau (2017). 5. On the relation between the journals analysed in this article and the Milanese periodical press, see Greene (2016). 6. The founder of the Fanfulla, Ferdinando Martini, would go on to found, in 1882, the journal’s competitor La domenica letteraria, also based in Rome. 7. In 1886, Serao would return to Naples, where she edited Il Corriere di Napoli together with her husband Edoardo Scarfoglio. 8. ‘In arte, come in tutte quante le cose della vita, è necessario un movimento continuo d’importazione e di esportazione: se gli ultimi cittadini della repubblica romana non avessero studiato nei ginnasi greci, l’arte latina già decadente con la lingua latina non avrebbe preso quel nuovo slancio miracoloso che la spinse tanto innanzi; e, senza le influenze provenzali, chissà quanto più avrebbe stentato la nostra letteratura a liberarsi dalle pastoie dialettali. La circolazione dei criterii e dei prodotti artistici e il libero scambio del pensiero sono dunque due necessità della vita umana, come la circolazione monetaria e il libero scambio delle merci; ma perché l’equilibrio duri, tutte le parti interessate debbono accettare e attuare francamente questi due canoni del commercio moderno’. My translation. All translations in the article are mine unless otherwise specified. 9. See, for instance, Goethe’s introduction to the German translation (1830) of Carlyle’s life of Schiller (1825), anthologised in Strich (1949, 351). 10. ‘[F]are di Roma, che da poco piú di dieci anni era diventata capitale, il centro letterario piú importante d’Italia, il punto d’incontro e sviluppo delle varie tendenze letterarie ed artistiche’. 11. ‘Sembra, in verità, che ricorrano per l’Italia i tempi oscuri in cui vennero da contrade remotissime i Barbari a travagliare un suolo che pure era cresciuto con la polvere degli estranei e nella corsa ruinosa abbatterono tutti i simulacri della Bellezza e cancellarono tutti i vestigi del Pensiero. Ma la presente

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barbarie è, secondo noi, peggiore o almeno più vile; perché non ha neppure, come l’antica, la grandiosità delle violenze cieche e irresistibili. Essa consegue i medesimi effetti perché abbatte e cancella, ma non come un tonante e lampeggiante uragano, sì bene come un tardo fiume fangoso in cui si scarichino mille canali putridi. E per colmo di onta questo fiume ha in Roma la sua sorgente massima: in questa terza Roma che doveva rappresentare in faccia al mondo ‘l’Amore indomato del sangue latino alla terra latina’ e raggiare dalle sue sommità la luce meravigliosa di un Ideale novissimo’. 12. ‘[T]erra privilegiata’. 13. ‘[I]l Laocoonte dissepolto fu portato in processione per le vie papali tra il denso popolo religiosamente come il corpo di un Protomartire rinvenuto nelle Catacombe’. 14. ‘[U]na farsa tragica’. 15. ‘[I]l D’Annunzio […] era l’enfant gâté di tutti, e veniva chiamato il giovane Bonaparte della letteratura italiana’. 16. De Vogüé took his idea from a recent ‘patriotic’ article, as he says: see Lemaître (1894). 17. ‘[L]’operosità dei distruttori e dei costruttori’. 18. ‘[V]ento di barbarie’; ‘i quali un giorno avevano sparsa la solennità del loro antico mistero sul capo olimpico del Goethe’. 19. ‘La lotta per il guadagno era combattuta con un accanimento implacabile, senza alcun freno. Il piccone, la cazzuola e la mala fede erano le armi. E, da una settimana all’altra, con una rapidità quasi chimerica, sorgevano su le fondamenta riempite di macerie le gabbie enormi e vacue, crivellate di buchi rettangolari, sormontate da cornicioni posticci, incrostate di stucchi obbrobriosi. Una specie d’immenso tumore biancastro sporgeva dal fianco della vecchia Urbe e ne assorbiva la vita.’

Works Cited Anon. 1879. Patti chiari, amici cari. Fanfulla della Domenica 1 (1), 27 July: n.p. Anon. 1884. Bricciche. Fanfulla della Domenica 6 (19), 11 May: n.p. Anon. 1895. Proemio. Il Convito 1: 3-7. Anderson, Benedict. 1991. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London and New York: Verso. Benevolo, Leonardo. 1992. Roma dal 1870 al 1990. Bari: Laterza. Bourget, Paul. 1894. Cosmopolis. Paris: Alphonse Lemerre. Carducci, Giosuè. 1968. Tutte le poesie. Milan: Bietti. Casanova, Pascale. 2004. The World Republic of Letters, trans. M. B. DeBevoise. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press.

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D’Annunzio, Gabriele. 1889. The Virgins of the Rocks, trans. Agatha Hughes. London: Heinemann. De Sanctis, Francesco. 1879. [Letter to Ferdinando Martini, 23 July 1879]. Fanfulla della Domenica 1 (1), 27 July: n.p. Gisolfi, Anthony M. 1960. Matilde Serao’s Conquest of Rome (1882-1886). Italica 37 (1): 22-43. Grau, Donatien. 2017. Le roman romain: généalogie d’un genre français. Paris: Belles Lettres. Greene, Vivien, 2016. Bizantium and Emporium: Fine Secolo Magazines in Rome and Milan. In The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines, vol. 3, ed. Peter Brooker et  al., 536-59. Oxford and New  York: Oxford University Press. Lee, Vernon. 1885a. La morale nell’estetica: Appunti sul nuovo libro di Walter Pater. Fanfulla della Domenica 7 (19), 10 May: n.p. Lee, Vernon. 1885b. Un italiano dalla natura nordica: A proposito delle novelle di Marco Pratesi. Fanfulla della Domenica 7 (26), 28 June : n.p. Lemaître, Jules. 1894. De l’influence récente des littératures du nord. Revue des Deux Mondes 126, 15 December: 847-72. Rod, Edouard. 1884a. Un littérateur italien: M. Edmondo De Amicis. Revue des deux mondes 62 (4), 15 April: 922-34. Rod, Edouard. 1884b. Polemiche. Fanfulla della Domenica 6 (21), 25 May: n.p. Giulio, Salvadori. 1882. Roma. Cronaca Bizantina 2 (11), 1 June: 5-6. Scarfoglio, Edoardo. 1882. Novelle nuove. Cronaca Bizantina 2 (3), 16 August: 1-2. Scarfoglio, Edoardo. 1895. Itinerario. Verso i paesi d’Etiopia. Il Convito 1: 45-68. Sommaruga, Angelo. 1941. Cronaca Bizantina (1881-1885): Note e ricordi. [Milan]: Mondadori. Staël, Madame De. 1869. Corinne: ou l’Italie. Paris: Firmin Didot Frères. Strich, Fritz. 1949. Goethe and World Literature, trans. C.  A. Sym. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Vogüé, Eugène-Melchior de. 1895. La Renaissance latine. Gabriel D’Annunzio: Poèmes et romans. Revue des Deux Mondes 127, 1 January: 187-206. Westphal, Bertrand. 2011. Geocriticism: Real and Fictional Spaces, trans. Robert T. Tally Jr. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Index1

A Abaffy, Lajos, 129 Åbo, see Turku Abruzzi, 247 Act of Union, 167 Acton, Harold Mario Mitchell, 215, 227n20 Adamson, Walter, 211, 216, 218 Adorno, Theodor, 166 Adriatic Sea, 186 Aesop, 68–70 Aestheticism, 240, 244–248 Albers, Anni, 66 Alexander I, Tsar, 146, 150 Algiers, 50 Allied Powers (World War I), 158 Ameel, Lieven, 7, 147–149, 151 American Confederacy, 171 Amoy, see Xiamen Anacreon, 135

Ancient Monuments Bill, 39 Anderson, Benedict, 6, 78, 149, 237, 238 Anglo-Irish treaty, 170, 173 Anti-Dreyfusards, 171 Antisemitism, 93 Antologia, 218 Anzeigen, 130 Ara, Angelo, 187 Argentina, 10, 15, 87–89, 91, 93, 95, 96, 101, 105, 106, 108n3 Argentine positivist school, 96 Argerich, Antonio, 92 Arno, River, 211 Art deco, 38, 87 Aryanism, 159 Aurora, 124, 130–134 Ausgleich, see Compromise of 1867 Austria, 122, 152, 176, 197, 199–201 Austrian Empire, see Habsburg

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 A. Bhattacharya et al. (eds.), Literary Capitals in the Long Nineteenth Century, Literary Urban Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-13060-1

253

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INDEX

Austro-Hungarian Empire, see Habsburg Austro-Marxism, 197, 203n16 Axel Waldemar Gallén, see Gallen-­ Kallela, Akseli B Babel, 187 Bajza, József, 132 Balázs, Béla, 139 Baldasso, Franco, 217 Balog, István, 128 Balogh, Pál Almási, 131 Balogh, Sámuel, 131 Baltic states, 145 Bandyopadhyay, Bhabanicharan, 55n14 Banerjee, Mamata, 31 Banerjee, Sumanta, 3, 4 Barcelona, 87 Barlow, Tani E., 82n5 Barry, John, 34 Basu, Priyanka, 3 Baudelaire, Charles, 140, 221 Bauer, Otto, 203n16 Bayreuth, 11, 126 Bazlen, Bobi, 188 Beckman, Ericka, 93, 108n1 Beecroft, Alexander, 6 Belgrade, 123, 128, 139 Bell, Clive, 218 Bella Otero, La, 104, 105 Belli, Giuseppe Gioachino, 237 Ben, Pablo, 109n9 Benevolo, Leonardo, 235 Bengal, 33, 34, 36, 38, 40, 48, 49, 54n3, 55n16, 56n28 Bengal Renaissance, 32, 54n3, 54n4, 55n14 Benjamin, Walter, 11, 166 Benois, Nikolai, 151

Berenson, Bernard, 215, 218, 227n18, 228n28 Berlin, 10, 109n9, 127, 147, 157, 158, 208, 236, 237, 243 Bernolák, Anton, 123 Berzsenyi, Dániel, 118 Betsky, Aaron, 89, 94, 109n5 Bhabha, Homi K., 6 Bhattacharya, Arunima, 3, 5, 13, 108n1 Biagi, Guido, 211 Biswas, Adrish, 3 Black Hole incident, 55n17 Black Hole Monument, 39, 50, 55n17 Bloch, Ernst, 166 Bobrikov, Nikolay, 146 Boehmer, Elleke, 16 Bogotá, 87 Bohemia, 152 Bose, Raktima, 31 Bosse, Harriet, 155 Botana, Natalio R., 91 Bothnia, Gulf of, 156 Bourdieu, Pierre, 11, 24 Bourget, Paul, 236, 239 Boym, Svetlana, 40, 52, 53 Brasov, 120 Bratislava, 123, 134 Breazeale, Daniel, 226n7 Brilli, Attilio, 212, 213, 226n3, 227n16 British Empire, 2, 10, 36, 38, 45, 53, 62 Bruges, 21 Brunelleschi, Filippo, 227n18 Brussels, 11, 16, 151 Buda, 120, 122–127, 133, 137 See also Budapest Budapest, 4, 9, 10, 12, 16–19, 22, 24, 117–140, 168, 176 Buenos Aires, 4, 9, 10, 12, 15, 16, 23, 24, 87–108

 INDEX 

Bullock, Philip Ross, 17, 18, 159 Bulson, Eric, 228n25 Burkhardt, Jakob, 212 Busteed, Henry Elmsley, 42, 43, 55n17 Byzantium, 22, 242, 243 C Caffé Paszkowski (Florence), 219, 220, 228n30 Cahill, Ann J., 100 Calcutta, 2–5, 7, 9, 10, 12–14, 19, 23, 24n1, 31–53, 53n1, 53n2, 55n16, 56n28, 213 See also Kolkata Calcutta Handbooks, 3, 5, 13, 14, 19, 23, 32, 35–40, 42–53 Calcutta Historical Society, 33, 42 Cambaceres, Eugenio, 15, 90, 92, 98–101, 107 Campaña del Desierto (Desert Campaign), 91 Cané, Miguel, 15, 90, 96–99, 107 Canton, see Guangzhou Capital capital city, 10, 15–18, 22, 32, 34, 35, 38, 43, 53, 145, 147, 234 colonial capital, 2, 3, 13, 14, 31–53 cultural capital, 2, 5, 9, 14, 16, 20, 21, 62, 67–75, 78–81, 119, 126, 139, 159, 187, 208, 209, 226, 234 economic capital, 19, 21 flow of capital, 3 informal capital, 17, 24, 117–140 literary capital, 1–24, 194, 209, 234, 239 shadow capital, 11 symbolic capital, 11, 12, 21, 119 world capital, 22, 233–248

255

Capitalism, 23, 62, 66, 78, 88, 166, 167, 217, 245 imperial capitalism, 2 Capponi, Gino, 218 Capuana, Luigi, 239 Caput mundi, 233 Caracas, 87 Carcalechi, Zaharia, 132 Carducci, Giosuè, 242 Caribbean, 82n5, 108n2 Carlyle, Thomas, 218, 249n9 Carocci, Guido, 211 Carpathian basin, 138 Casanova, Pascale, 11, 23, 24, 121, 151, 192, 194, 202n9, 202n10, 209, 233, 238, 248 Castle Theatre (Budapest), 127 Catholic Church, 22, 235 Catholic Emancipation, 169 Catholicism, 108 Cecchi, Emilio, 217, 218, 228n27 Chakrabarty, Dipesh, 47, 56n23 Chashisu Meiyue Tongjizhuan, see Chinese Monthly Magazine (Chashisu Meiyue Tongjizhuan) Chatterjee, Partha, 40–42, 47, 56n23 Cheah, Pheng, 14, 64–66 Chicago, 207, 209 China, 10, 13, 14, 62–64, 66–70, 72, 74–81, 81n2, 82n3, 82n5, 83n8 Chinese Monthly Magazine (Chashisu Meiyue Tongjizhuan), 68, 83n8 Chopin, Fryderyk, 152 Chusmería, 96 Ciaravolo, Massimo, 148, 149 Cicero, Marcus Tullius, 70 Circulation, 2, 6, 7, 14, 35, 54n12, 64, 68, 78, 79, 89, 91, 139, 146, 174, 191, 193, 208, 216, 241, 245 Cityness, 8

256 

INDEX

Cityscape, 33, 50, 87, 149, 174, 178, 179, 211 Class, 20, 41, 91, 93, 96, 98, 99, 102, 105, 109n9, 121, 123, 128, 148, 149, 170, 171, 186, 189–191, 194, 235, 245 Club del Progreso (Buenos Aires), 90, 98 Coda, Elena, 19, 20 Colonialism colonial heritage, 4, 36 colonial network, 64, 80, 82n5 domestic colonialism, 91 Colonisation, 13, 15, 61, 62, 80, 82n5, 84n10 Colón Theatre (Buenos Aires), 90, 98–100 Commodification, 227n22 Compromise of 1867, 18, 139, 168 Conover, Roger, 207 Consecration, 246 Conservative Republic, 91 See also Argentina Convention for the Extension of Hong Kong Territory, 81n2 Convention of Peking, 81n2 Convito, Il, 22, 234, 244–248 Copenhagen, 157, 158 Core, 2, 3, 7, 9, 126, 131, 168, 191 Cornis-Pope, Marcel, 9, 117, 119, 187, 188 Cosmopolitanism, 6, 17, 18, 20, 119, 121, 125, 135, 138, 140, 147, 159, 209, 234, 236, 243, 246, 248 Cotton, Harry Evan Auguste, 34, 38, 42, 43, 52, 53, 54n10, 55n17, 57n32 Craig, Gordon, 214, 223 Crémieux, Benjamin, 194 Criollo, 15, 88, 91, 96–99, 101, 108n2, 109n4

Croatia, 122 Cronaca Bizantina, 22, 234, 241–248 Cultural identity, 186–188, 192 Cultural value, 202n10 Curzon, George Nathaniel, 13, 35, 39, 40, 42, 54n7, 55n17 Czuczor, Gergely, 136 D Daily Mail, 220 Dall’Ongaro, Francesco, 188–193, 197 D’Annunzio, Gabriele, 170, 219, 246–248 Dante, Alighieri, 189, 192 Danube, River, 120 Davies, Dominic, 5, 16 da Vinci, Leonardo, 215 Mona Lisa, 215 Deák, Ferenc, 18, 137, 176, 177 De Amicis, Edmondo, 239 De Bosis, Adolfo, 244 Deb, Raja Binaya Krishna, 41 Decadence, 21, 22, 93, 148, 224, 239, 243 Defoe, Daniel, 125 Degeneration theory, 107 Delhi, 13, 33–36, 40, 53 Della Francesca, Piero, 218 de’ Medici, Lorenzo, 215 Denmark, 145 Der Sturm, 218 De Sanctis, Francesco, 238, 239 De Sapio, Joseph, 185 Desert Campaign, see Campaña del Desierto (Desert Campaign) De Valera, Eamon, 170 Dickens, Charles, 192, 237 Diet of Porvoo, 150 Di San Giusto, Luigi, see Macina Gervasio, Luisa

 INDEX 

Dodge Luhan, Mabel, 207, 209, 210, 213–216, 221, 223, 227n8, 227n17, 227n18, 227n20 Dodge, Edwin, 213–215, 227n20 Dongxiyangkao Meiyue Tongjizhuan, see Eastern Western Monthly Magazine (Dongxiyangkao Meiyue Tongjizhuan), 83n8 Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 147, 237 Doyle, Arthur Conan, 2 Drag, 101–106 Dresden, 155 Dubai, 24 Dublin, 4, 9, 10, 12, 18–20, 165–179 Dvořák, Antonín, 152 E Earls, Maurice, 170 East Asia, 61–81 Eastern Western Monthly Magazine (Dongxiyangkao Meiyue Tongjizhuan), 67, 83n8 East India Company (EIC), 38 Eastwick, Edward Backhouse, 33, 45–51, 54n5, 56n24, 56n25 Echeverría, Esteban, 100 Edelman, Lee, 99 Edinburgh Review, 218 Edkins, Joseph, 84n16 Edo, see Tokyo Ellmann, Richard, 168, 170 Empire, 2, 4, 6, 13, 14, 17, 19, 23, 32, 33, 35, 36, 38, 41, 45, 49–53, 55n12, 61–63, 74, 120–126 Engel, Carl Ludvig, 146, 150, 151 England, 71, 96, 157, 175, 177, 212 Enlightenment, 121, 125, 126, 135 Entrepột, 14, 18–20, 23, 62, 65, 68, 77, 78, 146

257

Erotic, 15, 16, 91, 93, 95–97, 100, 102, 104, 106, 107, 109n10 erotic crisis, 95 erotic dissidence, 102 eroticise, 94 eroticised spaces, 102 erotic limits, 106 erotic minority, 104 erotic outsiders, 107 erotic stimulation, 95 erotic withdrawal, 95 homoerotic, 102 Estonia, 145 Eternal City, see Rome Europe, 10, 12, 37, 45, 54n12, 62, 68, 74, 78, 82n5, 92, 93, 109n6, 145, 154, 155, 192, 193, 202n9, 207, 211, 214, 217, 221, 243, 247 Euterpe, 154, 155, 157 Evangelista, Stefano, 22, 23, 210 Evening Telegraph, 174 Even-Zohar, Itamar, 226n5 Exposition Universelle, 146, 152 Expressionist literature, 166 F Fanfulla della Domenica, 22, 234, 238–241, 244–246, 248 Farah, Nuruddin, 64 Fascism, 228n25 Fattori, Giovanni, 218 Favilla, La, 20, 188–194, 198–201, 202n8 Feilden, Bernard, 31 Fenian Brotherhood, 172 Field, 7, 9–12, 24, 48, 85, 92, 123, 124, 195, 208, 210, 238, 239, 245, 248 Finch, Jason, 7, 8

258 

INDEX

Finland, 145–147, 149, 150, 152–154, 158, 160n1, 160n4 See also Grand Duchy of Finland Finnish Literature Society, 149 Finnish National Theatre (Helsinki), 151, 154, 156–158 Firminger, Walter Kelly, 34, 41–43, 53, 55n17, 57n32 Flânerie, 104 Flora, Francesco, 244 Florence, 9, 10, 12, 20, 21, 23, 24, 187, 198, 208–226, 227n21, 234, 237, 240 Fontane, Theodor, 237 Foochow, 68, 72 Fort William, 38, 56n28 Foucault, Michel, 97, 99, 101 France, 21, 105, 109n6, 158, 192, 202n9, 239, 241, 243, 246, 248 Franco-Prussian War, 21 Franz Ferdinand, Archduke, 199 Fray Mocho, 90, 102 Freeman’s Journal, 174, 177, 178 French Revolution, 11 Fry, Roger, 218, 228n28 Futurism, 21, 209, 219, 221, 223 G Gabinetto Scientifico Letterario G. P. Vieusseux (Florence), 218 Gallen-Kallela, Akseli, 152 Galleria Fiorentina d’Arte Moderna, 218 Gems From Near and Afar (Haaji Gwunzan, Xia’er Guanzhen), 13, 14, 23, 61–81, 81n1 Gender, 88–91, 93, 96, 102, 106, 107, 109n10, 110n12, 223, 240 Generation of 1880 (Argentina), 88, 91, 92 Geneva, 218

Geocriticism, 11 Geopolitical, 33, 159, 186, 187, 211, 212 Ghosh, Anindita, 55n14 Giubbe Rosse (Florence), 220, 221, 228n30 Globalisation, 14, 64, 65 Global literary space, 10, 12 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 19, 20, 23, 127, 135, 136, 192, 193, 202n10, 237, 241, 247, 249n9 Gogarty, Oliver St John, 171 Gogol, Nikolai, 237 Goncourt brothers, 239 Gonne, Maud, 172 González Castillo, José, 110n12 Gorky, Maksim, 155 Gramsci, Antonio, 215 Grand Duchy of Finland, 11, 17, 145 See also Finland Great Britain, 71, 72, 75, 91, 158 Griffith, Arthur, 18, 19, 167–179 Grimley, Daniel M., 155–158 Gripenberg, Bertel, 155 Guangzhou, 68, 72, 76, 77, 83n8 Guégan, Xavier, 50 Guerrero, Javier, 105 Gützlaff, Karl Friedrich August, 83n8 H Haaji Gwunzan, see Gems From Near and Afar (Haaji Gwunzan, Xia’er Guanzhen) Habsburg, 10, 17, 118, 123, 128, 132, 133, 139, 152, 186, 197, 199, 200, 208 Empire, 10, 19 (see also Austrian Empire; Austro-­ Hungarian Empire) monarchy, 17, 186 Trieste, 197, 200

 INDEX 

Halaburda, Carlos Gustavo, 15, 16, 88 Halberstam, Jack, 93 Hamburg, 147 Hämeenlinna, 152 Hamulják, Martin, 133 Hannikainen, Pietari, 160n4 Harder, Hans, 3 Harootunian, Harry, 14 Hasznos Mulatságok, 136 Hauptmann, Georg, 155 Haussmann, Georges-Eugène, 207, 209, 235 Havana, 87 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 237 Heath, Deana, 41 Heine, Heinrich, 198, 199 Helgesson, Stefan, 6, 7 Helsingfors, see Helsinki Helsinki, 4, 9, 11, 12, 17–19, 22, 145, 213 Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra, 152 Hepokoski, James, 153 Herder, Johann Gottfried, 192 Heritage, 4, 16, 18, 31, 32, 35, 38–42, 45, 51–53, 54n4, 125, 153, 177, 208, 209, 234, 246–248 Heterogeneity, 5, 18 Heteronormativity, 89, 91, 108 He Tianhu, 84n15 Hibbitt, Richard, 11, 21, 108n1 Hicken, Glen, 34, 37, 51 Hidalgo y Costilla, Miguel, 108n2 Hillier, Charles Batten, 67, 79 Hindu, 31 Hofmannsthal, Hugo von, 18, 157 Holwell, John Zephaniah, 50, 56n28 Holwell Monument, see Black Hole Monument Homer, 135 Homosexuality, 104, 109n9

259

Hong Kong, 5, 6, 9, 10, 12, 14, 17, 19, 61–81, 81n1, 81n2, 82n4, 82n5, 83–84n10, 84n21 Hong Kong Daily Press, 80 Hong Xiuquan, 82n3 Hooghly, River, 31 Horace, 125 Horváth, János, 67, 80, 134, 140n1 Huang Sheng, 67, 80 Humanism, 21, 210, 212 Hungarian Academy of Sciences, 129, 130 Hungarian Scholarly Society, see Hungarian Academy of Sciences Hungary, 17, 118, 120, 122, 123, 129, 165–179 Hutom Pyanchar Naksha, 3 Huysmans, Joris-Karl, 94, 239 Hybridity, 17, 146, 153, 159 I Ibsen, Henrik, 155 Identity, 2, 4, 6, 15, 20, 22, 32, 80, 81, 92, 96, 98, 99, 108, 108n2, 109n10, 110n12, 121, 122, 131, 139, 147, 149, 151, 152, 154, 156, 157, 159, 167, 176, 186–188, 191, 193, 196–199, 203n14, 203n16, 208–214, 216, 217, 233–237, 241–243, 248 Imagined community, 6, 78, 149 Impartiality, 9 Imperial Academy of the Arts (Saint Petersburg), 151 Imperialism, 3, 12, 13, 31, 52, 201 imperial capitals, 7, 32, 127, 165, 246 imperial centre, 62, 165 imperialist capitalist system, 3 imperialistic, 201, 212 imperial language, 6 imperial nostalgia, 53

260 

INDEX

Independence, 10, 12, 13, 15, 17, 108n2, 146, 157 India, 3, 4, 13, 31, 32, 35–40, 42, 45, 48, 49, 51, 53–54n2, 54n6, 56n20, 56n27 Industrialism, 214 Ingold, Tim, 66 Internationalisation, 210, 238 Intertextuality, 42–44 Ireland, 18, 167, 168, 171, 172, 175, 176 Irish Free State, 167, 170, 179 Irish Independent, 175 Irish Republican Army, 169 Irish Times, 174 Irredentism, 199 Ishida Yasuo, 82n4 Italy, 12, 19, 20, 22, 23, 109n4, 186, 194, 196, 200, 201, 203n19, 208, 209, 212, 214, 217, 222, 223, 228n25, 233, 234, 236, 237, 239–242, 244–246, 248 Iturbide, Agustín de, 108n2 J Jakarta, 75 Jalkanen, Huugo, 157 James, Henry, 208, 209, 212 Jameson, Fredric, 165–169, 177 Jansson, Tove, 153 Japan, 63, 68, 69, 71, 74, 79, 82n4, 82n5 Järnefelt, Aino, 152 Järnefelt, Arvid, 154, 156 Jiang Dunfu, 84n16 Jingbao, 67, 78 Jin Yufu, 63 Joan of Arc, Saint, 70 Josef, Franz, 175, 176 Journalism, 12, 15, 62, 63, 69, 79, 80, 130, 167, 198

Joyce, James, 12, 18, 19, 24, 165, 167–171, 176–179 Joyce, John Stanislaus, 170 Judaism, 198 Judson, Pieter, 17, 118, 121 Jünger, Johann Friedrich, 134 K Kalikata Kamalaya, 41, 55n14 Karelia, 152, 157 Kármán, József, 129, 130, 137 Kazinczy, Ferenc, 118, 134, 135 Kinnahan, Linda, 222 Kipling, Rudyard, 4 Kisfaludy, Károly, 130, 131, 134, 136 Kivi, Aleksis, 160n4 Kleines Theater (Berlin), 155 Kleist, Bernd Heinrich Wilhelm von, 130 Klopstock, Friedrich Gottlieb, 192 Knudsen, Poul, 157 Koch, Gaetano, 235 Kölcsey, Ferenc, 132, 135 Kolkata, 3–5, 7, 9, 10, 12, 13, 24n1, 31–53, 53n1, 213 See also Calcutta Kollár, Ján, 124–126, 133, 138 Kopf, David, 54n3 Koskenniemi, Veikko Antero, 147, 148 Kosofsky Sedgwick, Eve, 106 Kotzebue, August von, 127, 128, 134 Krafft-Ebing, Richard von, 97 Kreil, Joseph, 185, 186, 190, 197, 200, 201 L Lacerba, 208, 216, 217, 219, 220 Laera, Alejandra, 88, 98 Laitinen, Kai, 160n4

 INDEX 

Lappeenranta, 160n4 Laqueur, Thomas, 48 Larbaud, Valéry, 194 Latin America, 10, 88, 89, 101, 108n2 Laurentian Library (Florence), 211 Law 1420 (Argentina), 91 Lee, Vernon, 226n3, 239, 240 Legge, James, 67, 79, 80 Leonardo, 217 Libreria Laurenziana, see Laurentian Library (Florence) Lima, 87 Limerick, 171 Link, Daniel, 106 Lin Wenzhong, 76 Lin Zexu, see Lin Wenzhong Literariness, see World literariness Literary cartography, 8, 9, 19, 24 Literary identity, 233 Literary system, 100, 167, 248 Loeser, Charles Alexander, 215, 218, 226n3, 227n20 London, 2, 10, 37, 44, 165, 166, 173, 187, 208, 221, 237, 239, 243, 244 London Library, 218 London Missionary Society (LMS), 67, 68, 70–73, 75–77, 79, 83n8, 83n9, 84n16 Lönnrot, Elias, 146 López, Lucio Vicente, 95 Loti, Pierre, 239 Loy, Mina, 21, 24, 207, 209, 221–226, 228n33 Ludmer, Josefina, 92 Lukács, Georg, 166 Lukács, György, 139 Luo Sen, 63, 71 Lybeck, Mikael, 155 Lyons, Francis Stewart Leland, 169 Lyttleton, George, 125 Lyytikäinen, Pirjo, 148, 157

261

M Macau, 82n5, 83n8 Macchiaioli, 218 Macina Gervasio, Luisa, 20, 188, 196–201 MacNeill, Eoin, 169 Madonizza, Antonio, 189 Madrid, 87, 105 Maeterlinck, Maurice, 18, 155, 156 Magarasević, Georgije, 132 Magris, Claudio, 187 Magyar Kurir, 136 Magyar Tudós Társaság, see Hungarian Scholarly Society Mahler, Gustav, 139 Malacca, 67, 83n8 Mann, Thomas, 166 Mansilla, Lucio Victorio, 95 Mantegna, Andrea, 218 Marginocentric city, 187 Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso, 21, 208, 209, 216, 219–221, 223, 228n25 Mármol, José, 100 Marmontel, Jean-François, 125 Martel, Julián, see Miró, José María Marxism, see Austro-Marxism Marzocco, Il, 208, 217 Marzona, Egidio, 207 Materialism, 236 Matica Srpska, 132, 134, 137 Matsuura, Akira, 63 Maupassant, Guy de, 239 Medhurst, Walter Henry, 67, 75 Meissner, August, 130 Melbourne, 11, 71 Metropolis, 8, 62, 65, 139, 177, 187, 211, 219, 221, 243 Mexico City, 87 Mignolo, Walter, 78 Migration, 63, 92, 240 Milan, 210, 237, 240, 241 Milne, William, 83n8

262 

INDEX

Milton, John, 70, 82n4, 84n15 Miró, José María, 15, 90, 92, 93, 95, 107 Mitchel, John, 171 Mitchell, Edmund, 33, 38, 43, 47 Mitre, Bartolomé, 98 Modernisation, 3, 16, 22, 32, 41, 55n12, 56n23, 78, 88, 90, 101, 108n1, 121, 123, 126, 138, 208, 210, 218, 223, 226n3, 227n11, 235 Modernism, 12, 18, 157, 165–167 Modernity, 4, 11–14, 16, 20–23, 32, 41, 47, 54–55n12, 64, 71, 76, 78, 88, 95, 106, 122, 126, 132, 139, 140, 156, 159, 166, 167, 195, 209–215, 217, 219–221, 223–225, 228n25, 233, 234, 236, 238, 243, 245, 248 colonial modernity, 32, 33, 47, 54n4, 56n23 Molloy, Sylvia, 88, 101 Morrison, Robert, 83n8 Mo, Timothy, 64 Mukherjee, Abir, 3, 4 Mukherjee, Priyanath, 2 Mukherjee, Upamanyu Pablo, 2 Multilingualism, 118, 124, 125, 131, 133, 134, 137, 138, 147 Muñoz, José Esteban, 96 Murray, John, 33, 45, 50, 53, 54n6, 57n29 Museum of San Marco, 211 Mušicki, Lukijan, 134, 135 Mutiny Memorial, 40 N Nación, La, 92 Naipaul, V.S., 64 Naksha, 3 Naples, 210, 237, 249n7

Napoleon III, Emperor, 21, 207, 235 Narbal, Carlos, 96–98 National Autonomist Party (Argentina), 91 National culture, 12, 152, 202n10, 235, 245, 246 Nationalisation, 210, 238 Nationalism, 18, 20, 22–24, 56n27, 88, 124, 147, 148, 151, 154, 159, 168, 174, 197, 198, 209, 234, 239, 245, 246, 248 Nationhood, 97, 121 Nativism, 90 Naturalism, 15, 88, 92, 98, 101, 148, 155, 156, 195, 196, 239, 240 Nawab of Bengal, 49, 56n28 Neimann, Walter, 159 Nencioni, Enrico, 239 Neubauer, John, 9, 117, 118, 139, 140n1 Newell, Herbert Andrews, 34, 55n17 New Spain, 108n2 New Territories, 81n2 Nicholas II, Tsar, 146 Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, 21, 210, 226n7 Ningbo, 68, 72 Nodal point, 9 See also Node Node cultural node, 139 literary node, 117, 138 See also Nodal point Nolan, Emer, 168 Norman, John Paxton, 48 Norway, 145 Nouzeilles, Gabriela, 88, 96, 98, 109n6 Novine Serbske, 128, 132 Nuova Antologia, 240 Nurmio, Heikki, 158

 INDEX 

O Obradović, Dositej, 125, 137 O’Connell, Daniel, 169, 174 October Revolution, 146 O’Donnell, Frank Hugh, 171 Oltrarno (Florence), 215, 221 Opium Wars, 76, 80, 81n2, 82n5, 83n8, 84n10 Opondo, Sam Okoth, 5 Otherness, 8, 15, 24, 89, 96, 100 Ouida, see Ramé, Maria Louise Oulu, 147 Oxford, 80, 96, 174 P Pancrazi, Pietro, 187 Papini, Giovanni, 21, 216, 217, 221, 223, 228n30 Paris, 10, 11, 18, 23, 24, 87, 120, 127, 146, 151, 152, 165, 172, 209, 217, 218, 239, 243, 244 Parnell, Charles Stewart, 169, 172–175, 179 Patagonia, 91 Pater, Walter, 215, 240 Paul, Adolf, 154 Pavlovic, Teodor, 137 Percotto, Caterina, 192 Performance, 3, 106, 107, 126–129, 134, 139, 149, 154, 156, 159, 160n2, 213, 227n8 Peripherality, 7, 8, 11, 24 See also Periphery; Semi-periphery Periphery, 3, 7, 9, 12, 88, 187 Perry expeditions, 63, 69, 71, 82n4, 82n5 Perry, Matthew, 63, 82n4 Pest, 18, 120, 124, 126–128, 130, 132, 134, 168, 175, 177 See also Budapest Pest-Buda, see Budapest

263

Pest-Budáról, 136 Pierce, Joseph M., 101 Piketty, Thomas, 12, 13 Podestá, Manuel, 92 Podmaniczky, Anna, 129 Pollock, Sheldon, 6 Polycentrism, 209 Pope, Alexander, 125, 249n3 Port Philip (Melbourne), 71 Postcolonial, 3, 5, 12, 43, 63, 78, 81, 82n5, 165, 187 postcolonial city, 17, 4; postcolonial legacy, 39; postcolonial topography, 44; postcolonial urban planning, 5 postcolonial literature, 11, 14, 64, 65; postcolonial theory, 167; postcolonial world literature, 64 postcoloniality, 159 Post-Impressionism, 218 Pozsony, see Bratislava Pratesi, Marco, 240 Pratt, Mary Louise, 14 Preciado, Paul B., 89, 106 Pre-Raphaelites, 155 Prescott, Tara, 222, 225 Pressburg, see Bratislava Primoli, Giuseppe, 236 Princesa de Borbón, La, 104, 110n12 Procopé, Hjalmar, 155 Production, 4, 6, 7, 10, 14, 18, 42, 62, 89, 90, 97, 100, 117–119, 121, 123, 133, 138–140, 149, 151, 154–159, 174, 191, 215, 222, 238, 245 Profit, 72, 185, 190, 247 Progress, 13, 15, 33, 39, 40, 43, 52, 55n12, 75, 78, 87, 88, 95, 106, 178, 191, 199, 202n10, 210, 236 Provinciality, 211 Pu Songling, 70

264 

INDEX

Q Queer force, 15, 16, 24, 89 Queerness, 89, 90, 99, 107 Quesada, Vicente, 95 R Racism, 88, 99, 109n4 Radits, Dusán, 141n10 Raic, Jovan, 128 Ramé, Maria Louise, 226n6 Raphael, 227n18 Rauma, 147 Ray, Durgacharan, 41 Raynal, Abbot, 130 Realeme, 209, 226n5 Realism, 156, 175 Reception, 6, 7, 81, 89, 95, 139, 154, 159, 177, 192, 202n11, 239 Regno, Il, 217 Reill, Dominique, 192 Reinhardt, Max, 155, 158 Renaissance, 20, 21, 208–210, 212–216, 218, 227n20, 245, 246 Representation, 4, 5, 7, 8, 13, 16, 18, 32, 49, 51, 93, 99–101, 103, 107, 135, 148, 149, 152, 209–211, 213, 219, 225, 226, 234, 236 Republicanism, 172, 174 Restructuring, 211, 235, 240 Révai, Miklós, 124 Revue blanche, La, 244 Revue contemporaine, 239 Risorgimento, 20, 212, 217, 234, 238, 239 Robinson, Agnes Mary Frances, 239 Roca, Julio Argentino, 91, 98 Rod, Edouard, 239 Roman Empire, 22, 235, 243, 245 Romania, 120, 139

Romanticism, 137 national Romanticism, 119, 121, 130, 132, 146, 149 Romantic nationalism, 17, 122, 153, 157 Rome, 9, 10, 12, 20–24, 187, 210, 227n16, 233–248 Rooney, William, 170 Rosaldo, Renato, 52 Rosas, Juan Manuel de, 96 Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, 140 Rossetti, Domenico, 186 Rossi, Riikka, 148 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 125 Royal Dublin University, 170 Rudnick, Lois Palken, 214, 227n8 Runeberg, Johan Ludvig, 153 Rushdie, Salman, 187, 188 Russia, 152, 158, 246 Russian Empire, 11, 17, 145, 158 Russification, 146 S Šafarík, Pavel, 125 Sághy, Ferenc, 124 Said, Edward, 78 Saint Petersburg, see St. Petersburg Salmela, Marku, 7 Salvadori, Giulio, 242 Salzburg Festival, 157 Santiago de Chile, 87 Sarajevo, 199 Sarmiento, Domingo Faustino, 91, 98 Savoy dynasty, 234 Scandinavia, 246 Scarfoglio, Edoardo, 241, 242, 245–247, 249n7 Schmitz, Ettore, 20, 188, 193–196, 200 Schoolfield, George C., 160n1, 160n4 Scintilla, La, 199

 INDEX 

Scuriatti, Laura, 20, 21, 108n1, 221 Secondariness, 8 Semi-periphery, 2, 3, 7, 9 Senate Square (Helsinki), 150 Serao, Matilde, 240, 241, 243, 249n7 Serbia, 129, 133, 136, 139, 200 Serbske Letopisi, 132 Sexuality, 88, 89, 93, 95, 97, 99, 102, 107 Shakespeare, William, 127, 158, 174, 192 Shanghai, 67–69, 72, 82n4 Shaw, George Bernard, 155 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 237 Shen Guowei, 63 Siam, 67 Sibelius, Jean, 18, 24, 145, 160n3 Simonetto, Patricio, 108n1, 108n3 Simpson, James, 31, 32, 38 Sinha, Pradip, 54n9 Sinn, Elizabeth, 63 Sinn Féin, 169, 172, 173, 175, 177, 179 Sinthomosexuality, 99 Siraj-ud-Dowlah, 49, 56n28 Slataper, Scipio, 187, 202n7 Slavonia, 122 Smetana, Bedřich, 152 Social Darwinism, 88, 96 Society of Swedish Literature, 149 Soffici, Ardengo, 209, 217, 219, 220, 228n29, 228n30 Soft power, 13, 14, 23, 80 Soiza Reilly, Juan José de, 15, 90, 102, 104–107, 110n12 Solaric, Pavle, 137 Sommaruga, Angelo, 241, 242, 244, 246 South Asia, 31, 54n11, 56n23, 73 Southeast Asia, 73, 82n5, 83n8 Staël, Madame de (Anne-Louise-­ Germaine), 121, 236

265

Status, 2, 3, 8, 11, 13, 17–21, 23, 55n19, 75, 78, 89, 96, 119–121, 138–140, 145–147, 153, 176, 179, 187, 193, 201n2, 208, 212, 213, 237, 238 Stein, Gertrude, 210, 218, 226n8 Stein, Leo, 218 Stendhal, 242 Stephens, James, 172, 173 Stockholm, 147, 155–157 Stoler, Ann Laura, 42 St. Petersburg, 147, 150, 151, 237 Strauss, Richard, 155 Strindberg, August, 18, 147, 155 Subjectivity, 64, 65, 93, 105 Suez Canal, 37 Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seura, see Finnish Literature Society Surowiecki, Lorenz, 125 Svenska litteratursällskapet i Finland, see Society of Swedish Literature Svevo, Italo, see Schmitz, Ettore Swadeshi movement, 33 Sweden, 17, 145, 151, 156 Swedish Theatre (Helsinki), 151, 154–159 Sydney, 75 Symbolism, 38, 39, 148, 155, 158, 234, 236 Nordic Symbolism, 18, 155 Széchényi, Ferenc, 129 Széchenyi, István, 129 T Taine, Hippolyte, 242 Taiping Rebellion, 63, 68, 69, 82n3, 84n10 Taiping Tianguo, see Taiping Rebellion Tally, Robert T. (Jr.), 8, 19 Tao De-min, 63 Tatra mountains, 125

266 

INDEX

Tavolato, Italo, 209, 219 Tekelianum, 132 Tekeli, Sava, 129, 132 Teleki, József, 129 Teleki, László, 130 Temporality, 64, 66, 210, 215, 216, 221–226 Thames, River, 31 Theatre, 9, 16–18, 98–100, 104, 107, 110n12, 118, 119, 126–129, 134, 138, 139, 146, 151, 160n2, 160n4, 214, 220, 239 Tian Yuqing, 63 Tipu Sultan, 38 Toal, Catherine, 18, 19 Toftegaard Pedersen, Arne, 148, 149 Tokyo, 82n4 Toldy, Ferenc, 130–132, 136 Tommaseo, Nicolò, 192, 202n8 Tompkins, Avery, 109n7 Topelius, Zachris, 148 Transculturalism, 188 Transgender, 109n7, 109n10 Translation, 17, 20, 23, 34, 36, 69, 70, 73, 81n1, 82n4, 84n11, 84n13, 84n15, 84n17, 108n2, 121, 122, 125, 130, 132–136, 139, 140, 155–157, 159, 160n3, 188, 191–194, 197–199, 202n8, 202n10, 228n24, 228n29, 236, 237, 246, 247, 249n8 Transnational (literary field), 6, 10, 12 Transylvania, 122 Treaty of Nanking, 81n2 Trend, 38, 155, 239 Trieste, 6, 9, 10, 12, 19, 20, 24, 128, 134, 170, 185–201 Trnava, 120 Tsang, Michael, 5, 13, 14, 24 Tudományos Gyűjtemény, 130–132, 134–136 Turgenev, Ivan, 140

Turin, 20, 210, 234, 235, 237 Turku, 146 Tuscany, 208, 222 Tyson, G. W., 34, 55n17 U Uchida Keiichi, 63 Ulster Unionists, 169 Umberto I, King, 216 Ungar, Andras, 168, 171, 177 United Irishman, 167, 170, 171 United States (US), 69, 71, 82n5, 214 Universal Circulating Herald, 80 University of Buda, 120 University of Buenos Aires, 91 Untimeliness, 210, 219, 223 Uránia, 130 Urbanisation, 2, 3, 35, 139 Urbanity, 40 Urquiza, Justo José de, 98 V Vallombrosa, 222, 223 Valussi, Pacifico, 188–193, 197, 202n10 Van Vechten, Carl, 207, 209, 210 Varga, Zsuzsanna, 17, 122, 132 Vazsonyi, Nicholas, 126 Verlaine, Paul, 140 Vernacular, 3, 5–7, 14, 24, 35, 41, 53n1, 70, 124–126, 133 Ver Sacrum, 244 Verseghy, Ferenc, 124 Veyga, Francisco de, 104, 105, 110n12 Vienna, 17, 118, 126, 127, 136, 139, 165, 168, 175, 190, 208, 244 Villa Ludovisi (Rome), 247 Villari, Linda, 239

 INDEX 

Viñas, David, 88, 89, 91, 93, 98, 100, 109n4 Violence, 5, 16, 49, 51, 56n27, 65, 100, 179, 244, 245, 247 Virág, Benedek, 134, 138 Virgil, 125 Vitkovics, Mihály, 17, 24, 119, 127–129, 133–139, 141n10 Viviani, Alberto, 208, 209, 228n30 Voce, La, 208, 217, 218 Vogüé, Eugène-Melchior de, 246 Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet), 125 Vörösmarty, Mihály, 132, 136 Vujić, Joakim, 128, 129 W Wade, Thomas Francis, 71 Wagner, Richard, 155 Wallaszky, Pál, 118 Wallerstein, Immanuel, 7 Wang Tao, 80 Wang Zhongmin, 63 Ward, William, 178 Weltliteratur, 19, 23, 193, 241 West, 63, 68, 70, 72, 74–76, 84n12, 150 West Bengal, 31, 39, 53n2 Westphal, Bertrand, 8, 19, 168, 226n5, 236 Wilde, José Antonio, 95 Wilde, Oscar, 155, 158 Wirth-Nesher, Hana, 8, 9 Wong Tin, 63, 73, 75

267

Worlding, see World-weaving World literariness, 1, 3, 4, 7, 12, 23 World literary space, 22–24, 233, 238 World-making, see World-weaving World-system, 2, 5, 7, 12, 62, 65 World War I, 11, 12, 19, 20, 196, 197, 201, 209, 218 World-weaving, 14, 17, 61–81 X Xia’er Guanzhen, see Gems From Near and Afar (Haaji Gwunzan, Xia’er Guanzhen) Xiamen, 68, 72 Y Yan Yugeng, 71 Yeats, William Butler, 170 Yellow Book, 244 Yellow River, 75 Ying Wa College, 67, 79, 80, 83n8 Z Zhao Xifang, 63, 71, 80 Zhongwai Xinwen Qiribao, 63 Zhou Weichi, 84n13 Zimmern, Helen, 239 Zionism, 20, 198 Zola, Émile, 88, 101, 237, 239 Zora, 133