Cosmopolis and Beyond: Literary Cosmopolitanism after the Republic of Letters

By Oxford UniversityEducation

Cosmopolis and Beyond: Literary Cosmopolitanism after the Republic of Letters episodes

April 06, 2016 Two English Women Periodicals Editors in Italy: Theodosia Garrow Trollope and Helen Zimmern as literary and cultural Go-betweens
Isabelle Richet analyses two English-language periodicals published by British expatriates in Florence in the 19th century. The large British expatriate community that settled in Florence in the second half of the 19th century engaged in many intellectual endeavours to promote Italian culture. This paper looks at two English-language periodicals, 'The Tuscan Athenaeum', edited by Theodosia Garrow Trollope in1848-1849 and 'The Florence Gazette', edited by Helen Zimmern from 1890 to 1915. It analyses the extensive transnational networks the two editors belonged to and the way these periodicals contributed to the development of a cosmopolitan 'imagined community'.
21 min
April 06, 2016 Le Haiasdan, Arménie, Armenia: Language Choice and the Construction of an Armenian Diasporic Identity (1888-1905)
Stéphanie Prévost discusses what publishing an Armenian periodical in Paris & London, in another language than Armenian meant for the construction of an Armenian identity at the time of the national awakening (Zartonk). Paris & London have often been regarded as cosmopolitan cities, especially at the turn of the 20th century. This paper reflects on the decision of the Armenian Patriotic Committee and of Minas Tchéraz, a member of the Armenian delegation to the 1878 Congress of Berlin, to launch Armenian periodicals in those two cities, in languages other than Armenian. Respecticely, 'The Haïasdan' (1888-1892) was bilingual, English-Armenian, including after it was taken over by the Anglo-Armenian Association in 1891; and Tchéraz published 'Armenia' (1890-1898), an English version of 'L'Arménie' (1889-1905) in which the resort to the Armenian language was minimal in both and even inexistant before 1891. What impact then did language choice have on the construction of an Armenian identity, especially on its scope (national, diasporic or cosmopolitan) and vis-à-vis its targeted readership?
23 min
April 06, 2016 The Italian press in Egypt: Writing and Reading the Alexandrian Cosmopolitanism
Alessandra Marchi examines the italian political press in Alexandria (Egypt), mainly at the beginning of the XX century. The Alexandrian cosmopolitanism can be studied through the prism of the Italian community and its representation in the national press circulating in Egypt, to illustrate some crucial interconnections between the press, literature, and political ideas, emerging from the work of some Italian-Alexandrian writers like Enrico Pea, Giuseppe Ungaretti, or Enrico Insabato and Leda Rafanelli. The aim of this paper is to show how the study of the Italian press of Egypt is fundamental to investigate the history of the relations between the two sides of the Mediterranean.
24 min
April 06, 2016 Literary Encounters fostered by Nineteenth-Century Francophone Press published in the United Kingdom
Valentina Gosetti gives the first presentation in the seventh panel; Cosmopolitan Literary Exchange in the Transnational Press.
16 min
April 06, 2016 Une Femme m’apparut: Lesbian Desire and “French” Identity
Sarah Parker focuses on the love affair between the Decadent poets Olive Custance and Renée Vivien and the American writer Natalie Barney, arguing that affecting ‘Frenchness’ and writing in French allowed them to articulate their desire for one another. This paper focuses on the literary productions inspired by the love affair between the Decadent poets Olive Custance, Renée Vivien (née Pauline Tarn), and the American writer Natalie Barney. It draws primarily on Vivien’s roman à clef 'Une Femme m’apparut' (A Woman Appeared to Me, 1904) along with Custance and Barney’s poetry. In analysing these texts, it is concerned primarily with the question: how does Vivien, Barney and Custance’s literary cosmopolitanism (in this case, their writing in – or affection of – ‘Frenchness’) reflect and interact with their expressions of lesbian desire? It also considers to what extent adopting a different language and national identity enabled these women to express a lesbian desire and to envision the possibility of a homoerotic cosmopolitan female community.
27 min
April 06, 2016 The “Unspeakable” T. W. H. Crosland
Rebecca N. Mitchell discusses the anti-cosmopolitanism of litigious editor and literary gadfly T. W. H. Crosland. Poet, editor, and constant litigant T. W. H. Crosland (1868-1924) grounded claims of moral superiority and sexual propriety in vitriolic nationalism, xenophobia, and homophobia. Yet, as this paper argues, Crosland’s court testimony, published invective, and personal behavior distilled the aesthetic and moral narrowmindedness of anti-cosmopolitanism, ultimately promoting the very values that Crosland ostensibly loathed.
23 min
April 06, 2016 The Relation of Fellow-Feeling to Sex: Laurence Housman and Queer Cosmopolitanism
Kristin Mahoney’s paper on Laurence Housman asserts that Housman implemented a Decadent vision of queer desire in his activist work in support of the pacifist and Indian independence movements in the 1930s and 40s. Author and illustrator Laurence Housman began his career as a ‘disciple of the Nineties’, a member of Oscar Wilde’s circle who worked frequently with the Decadent publisher John Lane, but during the twentieth century, he became more well known as a political activist, devoted to the causes of gay rights, peace, and Indian independence. The rhetoric that Housman employed in theorizing pacifism and the resistance to colonialism borrows directly from the conceptualization of promiscuous fellow-feeling in his writing about same-sex desire. This paper traces Housman’s interest in fellow-feeling through the many stages of his career, examining the representation of promiscuous amativeness in Housman’s Decadent fairy tales of the 1890s, the privileging of expansive affiliation in his queer activist writing in the teens, and the emphasis on ‘unity of spirit’ in his pacifist and anticolonial work of the 1930s and 40s, and it considers the centrality of eroticism to Housman’s theory of cosmopolitan community, the manner in which eroticism underwrote his vision of transnational unity.
22 min
April 05, 2016 The transnational Literary Field: Between (Inter)Nationalism and Cosmopolitanism (Keynote address)
Gisèle Sapiro traces the emergence of a transnational literary field in the twentieth century by analysing the book market for translations. Sapiro defines the notions of ‘cosmopolitan’, ‘international’, ‘transnational’, ‘global’ and ‘world’ from a historical and sociological point of view in order to show that they should not be understood to be in opposition to the national perspective. She then tackles the emergence of a transnational literary field and its inherent inequalities through the circulation of books and the increasing practices of translation as well as the formation of a World literary canon after the Second World War.
51 min
April 05, 2016 Make It… Foreign? The Cosmopolitan Aesthetics of Jaakooff Prelooker’s The Anglo-Russian
Martina Ciceri explores the cosmopolitan aesthetics of Jaakoff Prelooker’s magazine 'The Anglo-Russian' in Late-Victorian England. At the turn of the 20th century, Russian emigration to Britain fostered cross-cultural encounters, offering an unprecedented opportunity for cosmopolitanism. This paper examines the importance Anglo-Russian exchanges had in Jaakoff Prelooker’s English career. By posing a challenge to hegemonic discourses and traditional narrative, such encounters triggered the negotiation of the cosmopolitan aesthetics of 'The Anglo-Russian' magazine.
23 min
April 05, 2016 Cosmopolitan Conglomeration and Orientalist Appropriation in Oscar Wilde’s The Sphinx
Katharina Herold examines the interplay of cosmopolitanism and orientalism in Wilde's poem 'The Sphinx'. Wilde’s Orient is inspired by impressions from his father’s extended travels to the Middle East and North Africa in 1837, literary French influences, his friend Charles Ricketts and not least his own keen interest in ancient archaeology. Looking at images from the Middle East in Wilde’s poem 'The Sphinx' (published 1894), this paper interrogates Wilde’s literary manifestation of this cosmopolitan ideal of appropriation and conglomeration. Does Wilde’s resistance to nationalistic specification qualify as Orientalist because it ignores political implications of engrossing foreign cultural traits and disconnecting them from their history? Or indeed, could we consider Wilde a pioneer of multicultural fusion of national identities that results in celebrating literature as the ideal of aestheticist beauty transcending categories of national origin?
25 min

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Cosmopolitanism, derived from the ancient Greek for ‘world citizenship’, offers a radical alternative to nationalism, asking individuals to imagine themselves as part of a community that goes beyond national and linguistic boundaries. Recent years have seen an explosion of interest in cosmopolitanism in the humanities and social sciences, especially within philosophy, sociology and politics. Cosmopolitanism, however, has also exercised a shaping influence on modern literary culture. It is well known that during the Enlightenment it found an embodiment in the Republic of Letters. Its evolution thereafter included uneasy alliances with the idea of Empire in the nineteenth century, and with the experiments of the international avant gardes and modernist circles, and the phenomenon of globalisation in the twentieth. Through these, and more, cultural formations cosmopolitanism has given rise to new ways of writing, reading, translating and circulating texts; these processes have, in turn, led to new understandings of individual and national identity, new forms of ethics and new configurations of aesthetic and political engagement. From Kant to Derrida, cosmopolitanism has in the course of history been seen as fostering peace and communication across borders. Far from being uncontroversial, though, it has also been attacked by those who have denounced its universalism as impossible and its social ethos as elitist.