The formation of the Russian and Polish romantic literary canons: A survey of textbooks and literary histories, 1815-1865

摘要

Over the past two decades, Western canon theory has focused primarily on problems of literary value, literary and educational institutions, and the relationship between canon formation and nation formation. The cases of nineteenth-century Polish and Russian literatures challenge current theories by presenting the additional problems of censorship, the coexistence of "official" and "unofficial" canons, and the social contexts of a stateless nation and empire. The dissertation combines contemporary canon theory, a historical examination of the teaching of literature in Great Russia and the partitions of Poland, and an analysis of textbooks of literature to explore the formation of the Polish and Russian Romantic literary canons from 1815 and 1865. The study examines the rise of Romanticism, literary historiography, the teaching of literature in schools, and the articulation of a national consciousness in the first decades of the nineteenth century as key factors contributing to the formation of a Romantic canon in both cultures. The concurrent appearance of literary biography in textbooks and literary histories encouraged an identification with national writers as an element of the national identity construct on the popular level.;My research demonstrates that the stabilization of the Russian and Polish Romantic canons in the 1860s was the result of a conscious effort to build a literary tradition based on the evaluative criteria of "national originality" (narodnost' in Russian, narodowosc in Polish). This feature of the early articulation of a national literary tradition as such supports the argument that canon formation in its early stages based on new categories of social identification is inherently political. In Polish culture, national discourse found a resonant mode of expression in the Romantic program which valorized a social "ideal" (statehood) over the "real" (statelessness) and is reflected in the immediate and widespread acceptance of Adam Mickiewicz as Polish national poet; in Russia, Romanticism met with much greater ambivalence, as evinced in the questioning of Pushkin's status as national poet in the middle decades of the nineteenth century.