The study “The Politics of Literary History” has been published

The publishing house Palgrave Macmillan Cham has released the long-developed collective study “The Politics of Literary History”, which examines the historiography of literature in Latvia, the Czech Republic, Finland, and Russia after 1990.

The book was written by an international team of scholars and edited by Liisa Steinby, Mikhail Oshukov, Viola Parente-Čapková, and Benedikts Kalnačs, leading researcher at UL ILFA.

Benedikts Kalnačs on the publication:

“This multi-year research project has confirmed the close interrelation between ideology and cultural phenomena, clearly reflected in the tendencies of writing literary history across four fundamentally different countries. Conceived and realized as a collective monograph, the work demonstrates not only methodological shifts in the writing of literary history but also how persistent the imperial drive has been to subject cultural and scholarly narratives to political agendas—turning the analysis of literary processes into one of the instruments of power.

Special attention is given to the conditions under which, in democratic societies, literary history functions as a forum that explains how the corpus of literary texts forms the basis of identity—through interaction and dialogue with other cultural processes and contemporary scholarly trends, thereby reinforcing openness and tolerance as core civic values.”

Seven literary scholars contributed to the book, each addressing and contextualizing the paradigms of literary history in their respective countries. The chapter “Latvian Literature as an Ideologically and Politically Contested Terrain: Literary Historiography Between Foreign Rule, Nationalism, and Comparative Perspectives” was co-authored by Benedikts Kalnačs and Māra Grudule of UL ILFA, focusing on the tradition of writing Latvian literary history from 1812 to the early 21st century.

More information: https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-031-18724-7