Cfp Multilingualism in 19th Century European Literature

Call for Contributions to an Edited book on Multilingualism in 19th Century European Literature
Ed. by Olga Anokhina (CNRS, Paris), Till Dembeck (University of Luxemburg), and Dirk Weissmann (University of Paris-Est)

We kindly invite scholars in all disciplines devoted to European (Romance, Germanic, Slavic, Baltic, Finno-Ugric) literature to submit contributions for a collective volume on “Multilingualism in 19th Century European Literature”.

The bilingual English-French book will be published in 2018 by the Lit-Verlag in the “poethik polyglot” series directed by Britta Benert, Rainier Grutman, and Alfons Knauth.
Scholarship on multilingual literature from Europe has up to now mostly focused either on pre-modern periods (e. g., Medieval and Renaissance multilingualism), or on avant-garde modernism, and on the present (e. g., postcolonial literature, literature of migration, etc.). At first sight, the 19th century does not seem to matter for the history of European literary multilingualism. This might seem logical since the 19th century is rightfully considered the epoch that most effectively promoted nationalist monolingualism, in the wake of the European reception of the Post-Herderian theory of culture. Still, it is worth considering forms of multilingualism also in this period. Firstly, not all European countries have undergone a process of nationalization and monolingualization to the same extent. And secondly, recent studies, namely in sociolinguistics, have shown that monolingual norms can be implemented only by massive language-political intervention. Therefore, it is plausible to assume that some forms of multilingualism play a role even in the apparently most monolingual constellations of European literary history. A mapping of literary multilingualism in 19th-century European literature seems thus necessary.

This collective book will propose an investigation into 19th-century European literary multilingualism, particularly into the period from 1800 to 1880. All areas of European literature will be considered. The term ‘multilingualism’ as used in this book includes all kinds of code-mixing, either in single literary texts or in multiple texts produced by the same author.

Topics to be explored might be the following, amongst others:

• multilingual authors in struggle with monolingual or national frameworks, multilingualism as a (hidden) background for national writers
• literary subversions of monolingual norms, language normalization processes and literature
• language contact and literary creativity
• travel, exile, extraterritoriality and literary multilingualism
• translation, heterolingualism and language hybridity
• representations of multilingual realities in monolingual literary writing
• translingual borrowing of literary, aesthetic and rhetoric structures and strategies
• multilingualism in writers’ manuscripts, sketches, notebooks, etc. (critique génétique)
• the heritage of pre-1800 multilingualism and links to modernist literary multilingualism (post-1880), lines of rupture and continuity

Proposals (in English or French) should be send before June 1st 2017 to the following addresses: till.dembeck@uni.lu; weissmann@u-pec.fr; olga.anokhina@freesbee.fr.
The full texts (5000-8000 words) of accepted contributions will be expected before December 31st 2017.