To conclude: while perhaps somewhat ignoring the practical and financial difficulties involved, the critical remarks on Brandes’s journal by Ibsen as well as other Norwegians and Swedes highlight two crucial and interconnected issues involved in the making of a transnational journal: language and readership. All three pan-Scandinavian journals examined here aimed, each in their own way, to rearrange the literary marketplace by involving new readers and contributors, a pragmatic aspect of the periodical arguably in part defining it as media. Around 1700 the common European sociolect of Latin made things easy for the
Nova literaria. Around 1800 the bilingual Dano-Swedish language policy was part of the explanation for
Nordia’s failure, while around 1900 the monolingualism of
Det nittende Aarhundrede can explain both its relative longevity and its parenthetical status in the history of the ‘Modern Breakthrough’ as a pan-Scandinavian phenomenon. A final point, prompted by the three more or less Scandinavian journals, relates more broadly to the question of transnationalisation of print culture. Famously and importantly, pioneering historians of the book such as Roger Chartier and Robert Darnton have stressed the inherent international nature of the book and its constitutive impulse to defy borders. However, this perception of the book as a ‘cosmopolitan agent’ (Matt Cohen)
1 For a discussion on the internationalisation of book history, see M. Cohen, ‘“Between Friends and Enemies”: Moving Books and Locating Native Critique in Early Colonial America’, in S. Richard Lyons (ed.), The World, the Text, and the Indian: Global Dimensions of Native American Literature (New York, 2017), pp. 103–28. should be complemented with trajectories of regional efforts of transfer and transnationalism in the margins of the international or global system of literary circulation, which did not last, did not succeed, or did not happen at all.