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A Northern Republic of Letters? Transnational Periodical Cultures around 1700, 1800 and 1900
Jens Bjerring-Hansen
Framing Scandinavian print culture in the period covered by this book was a megatrend of ‘vernacularisation’. An increasingly close relationship between language and nation from the middle of the eighteenth century onwards led the cultural historian Peter Burke to talk about a ‘nationalisation of language’.
1 P. Burke, Languages and Communities in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, 2004), pp. 163–9. On Scandinavia in this development, see I. Berg, ‘The Making of the Scandinavian Languages’, in G. Rutten and K. Horner (eds), Metalinguistic Perspectives on Germanic Languages. European Case Studies from Past to Present (Oxford, 2016), pp. 35–55. Before that, and along the same lines, in his classic study of the social construction of nation states, the historian Benedict Anderson had highlighted the consolidation of vernacular languages, Danish, Norwegian, Swedish etc., as a prerequisite for notions of the ‘nation’ and ‘nationalism’, while, importantly, stressing the importance of the book market in this development. The modern Western European nations, which took form around 1800, relied on a ‘convergence of capitalism and print technology on the fatal diversity of human language’, according to Anderson.
2 B. Anderson, Imagined Communities, 2nd edn (London, 2006 [1983]), p. 46. The Scandinavian situation generally conforms to this broad picture. In the first book printed in the Danish language,
Den danske Rimkrønike (1495), a chronicle of the kings of Denmark written in verse, the patriotic agenda is clear.
3 P. Hermann, ‘Politiske og æstetiske aspekter i Rimkrøniken’, Historisk Tidsskrift 107:2 (2007), 389–411. In the eighteenth century, in spite of his international agenda and renown, Ludvig Holberg (1684–1754), the foremost Dano-Norwegian representative of the early Enlightenment as well as a reformer of the book market, can be considered the spiritual father of mid-eighteenth-century patriotism through his insistence on the Danish language for most literary purposes.
4 See O. Feldbæk, ‘Kærlighed til fædrelandet. 1700-tallets nationale selvforståelse’, Fortid og Nutid, 31 (1984), 272; J. Bjerring-Hansen, Ludvig Holberg på bogmarkedet (Copenhagen, 2015). The radical nationalisation of language and print in the nineteenth century finally becomes evident when comparing with the previous century. The multilingual print culture (with publications in Danish, Latin, French, German, including Low German etc.) was largely abandoned in favour of Danish (and after 1814, Norwegian, which for decades hereafter would be identical to Danish).
In this chapter the focus is on three interregional, or with an anachronism from the early nineteenth century, more or less ‘Scandinavian’, literary journals, the
Latin
Nova literaria from around 1700, the bilingual Danish-Swedish
Nordia from around 1800 and, finally, the Danish
Det nittende Aarhundrede [The nineteenth century] from just before 1900. The aim is to address the strategies of language and distribution of these more or, mostly, less successful border-crossing ventures against the backdrop of the increasing nationalisation, intertwining the book market and the cultural politics of language. Historical light will be shed on the cultural transfer as well as the contestation and conflict between different ‘modes’ of circulation (Alexander Beecroft) in which Scandinavia took part – and,
mutatis mutandis, still does – that is, the national, the regional, the global.
5 A. Beecroft, ‘World Literature Without a Hyphen’, New Left Review 54 (2008), 87–100. In the examination of the journals, special attention will be given to the ‘paratexts’ (Gérard Genette), such as prefaces, subscription adverts etc., which frame and present the scope of the journals.
6 G. Genette, Paratexts, Thresholds of Interpretation, trans. J. E. Lewin (Cambridge, 1997). Before addressing the particular publications, the periodical as medium or genre will be considered, especially in terms of its transnational nature and its ability to involve new readerships.