Review of National Literatures: Selected Essays (1970–2001): Emergent and Neglected National Literatures (review)

Review of National Literatures: Selected Essays (1970–2001): Emergent and Neglected National Literatures is the second of three collections of essays culled from the pages of Review of National Literatures, the journal of the Council on National Literatures published from 1970–2001. During its thirty-one year publication, rnl offered readers essentially two types of essays: overviews of literatures normally excluded from the Western canon and atypical approaches to the works and movements of the West, approaches which Anne Paolucci, the editor of the rnl journal and these collections, terms “multi-comparative.” The first volume in this series of three collections of essays, Review of National Literatures: Selected Essays (1970–2001), published in 2006, is a “sampler,” to use Paolucci’s term, of both types of perspectives and essays normally found in the rnl journal: Japanese translations of Shakespeare, the neglected literatures of Hungary, and the work of Justin Windsor, Harvard’s first librarian. The third volume, Review of National Literatures: Selected Essays (1970–2001): The European Spectrum (2008), is a sampling focused only on multi-comparative essays discussing European literature, including racial terms for Africans in Elizabethan usage, the impact of Europe on the development of Indian literature, and the topology of German Expressionism. The second volume, the subject of this review, focuses only on overviews of literatures normally excluded from the Western canon, namely emergent and neglected national literatures.

Paolucci’s use of the term “sampler” to describe these three volumes of essays is especially apt. This second volume contains topics that range spatiotemporally from modern Norwegian to ancient Persian literatures and thematically from the EuroAfrican experience to the state of comparative literature in New Zealand—all within the volume’s seventeen essays that average nineteen pages in length. Though this range might appear too broad for some, the included essays generally fall into one of two implied categories: historical overviews and comparative criticisms. The historical overviews, which make up eleven of the essays, provide broad surveys of “emergent” or “neglected” national literatures exemplified by their greatest authors, including the literatures of New Zealand, Australia, India, Norway, the former Yugoslavia and modern Balkan nations, Hungary, Persia and Iran, Armenia, and Japan. Each essay’s author warns the reader of the limited scope necessitated by the length of a single essay, but all provide elucidating accounts of their respective literatures. These accounts often go beyond mere introductions by incorporating discussions of the various past and current receptions of the works, their geopolitical contexts, and the schisms and divergences within the literary movements of those nations. Furthermore, in the case of Australia, India, and the former Yugoslavia and modern Balkan nations, multiple essays in the volume are dedicated to recounting their literary histories.

The six essays in the volume are comparative criticisms in respect to methodologies used to compare the literatures of multiple cultures, nations, and/or languages. Lloyd Brown’s “The Black Aesthetic and Comparative Criticism” asks if there is a Black (Pan-African) aesthetic, if it is always synonymous with Black culture, and if only critics who are not Euro-centric in their methodology are equipped to make such determinations. Albert S. Gérard’s “Literature Emergent: The EuroAfrican Experience” draws a parallel between medieval European and colonial and postcolonial African literatures, particularly in the context of adopted languages. Janheinz Jahn’s “Modern African Literature: Bibliographical Spectrum” outlines the proportions of modern African literatures written in English, French, Portuguese, and African languages before he examines the linguistic disproportions among critical studies of those literatures: Critical studies written in a European language about literature written in the same language excessively outnumber studies in a European language about literature written in another language, especially in the cases of French and Portuguese, which statistically have almost no critical studies of African literature written in other languages. Norman Simm’s “Comparative Literature in New Zealand” reviews comparative literature courses and departments at various universities around New Zealand, concluding...