Afterword

Many contemporary college and university courses on ‘literary citizenship’ have examined in very particular ways the material and ideological conditions that inform such activity, and given that most of today’s writers and artists receive training in state-funded institutions, those individual citizens are unsurprisingly encouraged to reflect on their public and civic roles and responsibilities.1 R. Martin, ‘Artistic Citizenship: Introduction’, in M. Schmidt Campbell and R. Martin (eds), Artistic Citizenship: A Public Voice for the Arts (New York, 2006), p. 1. For some critics, modern emphasis on voluntarism as being integral to literary citizenry also skews the debate towards an acceptance by writers of unfairly penurious returns.2 See, for example B. Tuch, ‘More Work, No Pay: Why I Detest “Literary Citizenship”’, Salon (23 April 2014), <www.salon.com/2014/04/23/more_work_no_pay_why_i_detest_literary_citizenship> (accessed 23 February 2023). For other, more optimistic critics, modern media expansion makes real a community involvement that spans governmental institutions, literary festivals, reading series, coffee-serving bookshops, book clubs and online platforms such as Wattpad and Goodreads. Such modern equivalence can indeed be suggestive: it can foster awareness and promotion of the exotic and eccentric as much as the mainstream and popular, of the political as much as the social and cultural.

Before Brexit I was a subject of the United Kingdom and a citizen of the European Union. Now I am back to being a subject of the British Crown although, confusingly since the 1948 Nationality Act, all British subjects can be known by the alternative title Commonwealth Citizen. At the same time, in both practice and legal definition, ‘citizenship’ has become the critical term, in Britain as elsewhere, for rights of abode (or ‘settlement’) and nationality. Such citizenship carries the legal status whereby a person has the right to live in a state. As a result, the state cannot refuse them entry or deport them. In Norway, as in most states, citizenship can be acquired by (and only by) fulfilling a particular set of requirements which depend largely on nationality and immigration status. Since January 2020, however, it is also possible to obtain Norwegian citizenship without having to renounce an existing citizenship (or nationality) of another country. Modern citizenship can thus overlap with other allegiances, much as in the past. Individuals, groups and communities might all hold diverse allegiances to different cultural and linguistic entities as well as to different political and religious authorities: familial, local, state and international.

Such presentist considerations of citizenship, and particularly in relation to subjecthood, are not inappropriate for interrogation of a past ‘literary citizenship’, a term broadly accepted by all contributors to this volume to address recent understandings of diverse and changing literary involvement and engagement. Considerations of responsibility, of community and place, of material and ideological origination and movement, of overlapping and non-exclusive allegiances, and above all of what participation and commensurate rights actually mean are at the heart of the foregoing history of literariness. As this volume has also shown, the debate between citizenship and subjecthood remains very much alive: a debate that centres upon notions of civic engagement, participation and rights. Historically within most states, specific (but much debated) processes ensured that subjects of the Crown gradually became, as indeed Holberg put it, ‘all the subjects in a State’. It was a transformation involving the accretion of very real testimonies of allegiance from taxation, voting and other concrete participatory activities which widened in scope and in legally enforceable authority over the centuries. And today, within a particular polity and as subject to the particular laws and practices of that polity, citizenship exists as a reciprocal relationship between the individual and the state to which the individual owes allegiance and, in turn, is entitled to that state’s protection.

Beyond these relational considerations are issues of permanence and change, issues which also feature prominently in any analogous enquiry into literary citizenship. Legal citizenship may be conferred at birth, but also, at least in most states, obtained through naturalisation. Entitlement to authorship might seem a specious notion, but status at birth and connections of family have clearly assisted in literary endeavour. Citizenship within well-resourced and acquiescent states further involves, just as in literary realms, relational complexity between individuals, or citizens, given the supply of participatory rights. Where voting, education, welfare and healthcare (among other considerations) support such relational development in states, so contract, copyright, pre- and post-publication censorship and policing and restrictions on the number and sites of printing presses all feature within the elaboration of literary spheres. In return, the author, mediator and reader accept, consciously or not, self-censorship, market conditioning and a raft of activities and perceptions which constitute a sense of literary community and belonging. Citizenship and authorship, literary infrastructure and mediation, and readership and reception thus become intrinsically entangled with the nature of civil society, with questions of self and group identity, notions of belonging, and the acts and understanding of reciprocity and responsibility. Evidence for the valuation of citizenship is consequentially inherent to the larger history of ‘literary citizenship’.

In adopting and elaborating such a richly analogous concept, this collection of essays has also offered further significant correlations. In initial terms at least, citizenship pivots on the individual, most obviously the writer but also the publisher-bookseller, other circulatory and editorial agents, and finally the reader. There are in fact many mediating agencies (including, as shown in the chapters above, media technology, transportation, critical intervention, and libraries and book clubs), but by adopting the perspective of the citizen, the individual actor is invariably given pre-eminence. This means that in considering livres sans frontières and the importance of crossing borders, itself another key aspect of citizenship and the boundaries of belonging and perception, that crossing is often chronicled as undertaken by human agents – by travellers, by merchants and factors, by clerics and subversives, all conclusively putting the individual first. It is a marked feature, for example, of many of the studies in this volume that individual writers, booksellers and printers are exceptionally well travelled. A characteristic of many northern European literary endeavours was to experience and connect with likeminded individuals and professionals in the towns and cities of the heartland of the continent. A recurrent focus is the conveyor as well as the originator and the receiver, rather than the cross-bordered text. The transnational practices explored in these essays are fundamentally personal, affecting individual lives and decisions as practices change and adapt.

Exploration of identity is the concomitant of this focus on the individual, while concentration on the personal and on identity heightens interest in the ‘vantage point’. The point of view, as we might also call it, was in fact given linguistic prominence by Bergen bishop Erik Pontoppidan in his mid-eighteenth-century personal and published writings. In Pontoppidan’s 1752–3 Det første Forsøg paa Norges naturlige Historie, his (partly posthumously published) 1763–7 Den danske Atlas, and frequently in his private correspondence, the bishop savoured the combination of hoved (main), øye/øje (eye) and mærke (mark/point) as Hoved-Øyemærke (Hoved-Øjemærke).3 See Ordbog over det danske Sprog, <https://ordnet.dk/ods_en/>. This interest in the focal point of attention, the perspective of the author, attests to growing rumination on what it meant to write and be published both at home and abroad in what Pontoppidan himself called the Enlightenment or Oplysning (the latter also translating as ‘information’, ‘disclosure’ and ‘awareness’). As he wrote about his own literary citizenship, he strove to

It would seem, therefore, that reciprocity involving the individual and his or her awareness of different mutualities is fundamental to this study, and yet also apparent are numerous tensions and paradoxes. Nationality, for example, can be both central but also tangential and contingent with citizenship in the sense that literary citizenship often embodied linguistic or national belonging but also bore a transgressive relationship with boundaries. This is particularly complex across the Nordic countries stretching from the Hanseatic and Germanic south to the northern Finn­mark boundary of Christendom and to colonies from Greenland to Tranquebar. The subordination of Norway in union with Denmark and the nineteenth-century union of the Crown with Swedish realms also paradoxically demonstrate both the fragility and obduracy of boundaries as well as the sometimes surprising lack of exchange in experience and understanding. The latter includes, for example, the different paths to the greater freedom of the press taken in Sweden and Denmark–Norway described in Chapter 5 (Langen, Nordin and Stjernfelt). And as explored by Ellen Krefting in Chapter 8 and elaborated on by other contributors, nationalism does not simply equate to patriotism. ‘Patria’ extended to the sense of belonging to a place, of a rootedness that might also generate or release a certain romanticism and nostalgia, a literary longing and invention of the past for current reasons. Other tensions appear in the linguistic and philological where on the one hand elasticity between written and oral degrees of comprehension heightened interest in different literacies and dialects and the impeding of communication, but on the other hand, writing and interest in the vernacular promoted linguistic purification and standardisation akin to a reification of citizenship (as particularly explored in Chapter 4 by Bjerring-­Hansen). As Chapters 6 (Kukkonen), 7 (Nøding) and later contributors remind us, the issue is one of different literacies informing different types and perceptions of citizenship – one size does not fit all.

Such differentials bring us back to parallels in present connotations of the word ‘citizenship’. That denotation is usually associated with those guided by or acting with a sense of civic responsibility; this, however, can conflict with a ‘citizenship’ of the nation more associated with rights and privileges than with responsibilities and, moreover, as enforceably bounded by passports, customs controls, detention centres and deportations. Literary citizenship again embraces both broad-based participation and exclusive and excluding practices. Some concerned with modern citizenry have insisted on demarcation. As then British Prime Minister Theresa May protested after Brexit, ‘if you believe you’re a citizen of the world, you’re a citizen of nowhere. You don’t understand what the very word “citizenship” means’.6 T. May, speech to the Conservative Party Annual Conference, 9 October 2016, <www.ukpol.co.uk/theresa-may-2016-speech-at-conservative-party-conference/> (accessed 23 February 2023). Belonging brings boundaries; the freedom to write and the freedom to believe that you are part of a community inevitably creates frontiers, exclusions, privileges, limitations. But also, as Anthony Appiah argued in contradicting at least part of the May contention, ‘transnational institutions can stand alongside national ones. […] You can feel a profound loyalty to a particular community and to humanity’.7 K. A. Appiah, ‘Mistaken Identities’, The Reith Lectures, BBC Radio 4, 8 November 2016, <www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b080twcz> (accessed 23 February 2023). In other words, the literary citizenship we are uncovering created boundaries but also multiple and overlapping and porous allegiances – some boundaries were more rigid, more permanent and, for that matter, more illusory than others.

The tensions are again particularly evinced in the sense of belonging. To varying degrees, citizenship embodies perceptions of allegiance, of being aware of participation in a community, but also widespread is the interplay between censorship and freedom, of expression and control. As Annabel Patterson put it, ‘literature’ in the Early Modern period was conceived in part as the way around censorship.8 Annabel M. Patterson, Censorship and Interpretation (Madison, WI, 1984). This, above all else, is what these essays describe: the understanding, often in the face of objection and interference, of a sense of shared literariness, shared literary participation and shared engagement. Such tensions are evidenced across different literary and media forms. A compelling range is analysed in this collection: bibles, catechisms and liturgical works, missionary tracts and religious textbooks, scandal sheets, illustrated books, periodicals and the multiple and faster-­produced forms of the greater mechanised nineteenth century. Professionalisation increased, but standards were not always what we might expect. The quality of production often proved variable and the means by which works were written, printed and circulated often chaotic. Literary citizenship might have applied a certain formalism of operation and expectations across many genres, but the reality of creation, imposition, circulation and reception was sometimes unexpected, poor and disappointing.

Finally, as noted at the outset, many commentators on literary citizenship also emphasise the voluntary. Cathy Day and Lori A. May have emphasised the need for contemporary writers to be generous in their community involvements. Katey Schultz has argued that we should think not about ‘literary citizenship’ but about ‘literary stewardship,’ a term that she sees as better placing an emphasis on ‘contributing and collaborating, not taking and capitalizing’.9 K. Schultz, ‘Literary Citizenship: Point and Counterpoint’ Kateyschultz.com (n.d.), <www.kateyschultz.com/2017/10/literary-citizenship/> (accessed 23 February 2023); cf. D. Ebenbach, ‘Literary Citizenship Does Not Mean “Gimme”, Medium (28 April 2014), <https://medium.com/human-parts/literary-citizenship-does-not-mean-gimme- e7ac3f97b140> (accessed 23 February 2023). In fact, making money is not excluded from such consideration of citizenship: literary philanthropy balances literary entrepreneurship on literary citizenship courses (all related in different ways to courses in creative writing) at Ball State University, SUNY Oswego, the College of New Rochelle and the University of Chicago Graham School, Arizona State University, California Institute of the Arts, and the University of Central Arkansas (among others).10 See C. E. Smitherman and S. Vanderslice, ‘Service Learning, Literary Citizenship, and the Creative Writing Classroom’, in A. Peary and T. C. Hunley (eds), Creative Writing Pedagogies for the Twenty-First Century (Carbondale, IL, 2015), pp. 153–68. Robert McGill and André Babyn run a course in Literary Citizenship at the University of Toronto which majors in the interrogative:

Such duality, drawing on contemporary parallels to the nature of citizenship today, extends perspectives in the meaning and intent of historical bibliography and the history of the book. Literary citizenship is revealed in this volume as the act of promoting literature, literary community and literary culture, and one with a range of settings, the most abiding of which are northern, certainly, but also continental European and with global networking. The new perspective incorporates both the material and the global turn that have been so important to recent developments in the history of the book, while the focus on equity also affords the opportunity to think about how gender inflected literary citizenship. Above all, the concept highlights a number of tensions and paradoxes that actually help us think through the way in which a bookish culture develops. In twenty-first-century Scandinavia, along with many countries worldwide, entitlement to citizenship has become more exclusive in terms of residence and language requirements – all responses to globalisation and immigration and wider pressures to close down access as much as to open it up. That interplay between current citizenship definitions and the ‘literary citizen’ remains tense, unstable, unsettled and open to productive debate. The connotations of the scope of literary citizenship and its performance are wide-ranging. Windows are opened indeed.