Introduction: Literary Capitals in the Long Nineteenth Century—Spaces beyond the Centres

Abstract

The introduction sets out the main research questions underpinning the book: What is understood by literary capital and how do we use it to propose a new reading of the literary field in the long nineteenth century? In the first part, these questions are located in the context of recent research in postcolonialism, world literature and geocriticism. Arguing that readers must always be attuned to the local production of different genres of literature, we show how different places were invested with different types of capital—cultural, economic and symbolic—which varied according to historical, geographical and political factors. We propose to read these places as asterisms, similar to groups of stars within larger constellations, which allows us to map the field alongside the core-periphery model and to analyse how different places converge and diverge with regard to literary production, reception and representation. The second part traces how these affinities are explored in the book through nine different places: Calcutta, Hong Kong, Buenos Aires, Pest-Buda, Helsinki, Dublin, Trieste, Florence and Rome. It ends by considering how some of the ideas discussed in the different chapters, such as world-weaving and informal capital, contribute to the book’s intervention in the field of literary cartography.