Introduction

Today, ‘literary citizenship’ is a term used in media, online fora, professional and academic circles to describe and encourage writers’ active contributions to and promotion of literary culture and community. Furthermore, it has been applied to reading and writing in general, or more specifically to describe a work’s or writer’s inclusion in a literary community after crossing linguistic or national boundaries.1 See for instance L. A. May, The Write Crowd. Literary Citizenship and the Writing Life (New York, NY, London, 2015); R. McGill and A. Babyn, ‘Teaching Critical Literary Citizenship’, The Writer’s Notebook (February 2019), <www.awpwriter.org/magazine_media/writers_notebook_view/311> (accessed 23 February 2023); M. Santana, ‘Mapping National Literatures: Some Observations on Contemporary Hispanism’, in B. Epps and L. F. Cifuentes (eds), Spain Beyond Spain: Modernity, Literary History, and National Identity (Cranbury, NJ, 2005) pp. 109–25, at p. 120. In the present volume we adapt this term to our own ends, that is, to highlight literary agency and the historicity of the local and border-crossing, social and empowering aspects of literature, used in the broadest sense of the word. We take the term ‘literary citizenship’ as a general frame for our historical investigations into the engagements with books and prints in Scandinavia, particularly Norway and Denmark, by readers, writers and publishers in the long eighteenth century. We seek to trace the establishment and productive interactions between the widening ‘republic of letters’ and ‘the republic’, so to speak – between the transnational communities of readers, writers and producers of publications on the one hand and society and the state in general on the other.

We start by evoking the major transitions beginning in the early sixteenth century, highlighting changes of literary language (Latin to vernacu­lar), media technology (manuscripts and orality to printed books and periodicals), religion (Catholic to Protestant) and politics (shifting unions and degrees of autonomy). We then go on to explore the continued overlapping existence of these new and old phenomena as well as the impact the changes had on the expansion of the public sphere, reading materials and practices that resulted in an Enlightenment with Scandinavian traits. By examining multiple historical and transnational practices of writing, publishing, importing, translating, circulating, reading and interpreting texts, we aim to show how these practices have been involved in fostering individual as well as collective identities and agencies within, across and beyond national, linguistic and medial borders and communities.

Hence, rather than focus only on canonical works and genres, and their dissemination, we investigate print that has been available to different readerships and used and read for sociability and belonging, instruction, entertainment or self-improvement, profit or charity, spiritual awakening or political debate. The result is not a simple, uniform or linear history of the book in the northernmost parts of Europe. On the contrary, focusing on literary citizenship helps us discover the very different ways engagement with print, in various genres and formats, has mediated and shaped local, national and transnational networks and communities, identities and agencies of multiple sorts in an interconnected media landscape.