Chinese opera in America has several intertwined histories that have developed from the mid-19th century onward to inform performances and representations of Asian Americans on the opera stage. These histories include Chinese opera theater in North America from 1852 to 1940, Chinese opera performance in the ubiquitous Chinese villages at various World Fairs in the United States from 1890 to 1915, the famous US tour of Peking opera singer Mei Lanfang from New York to Chicago and San Francisco in 1930, a constellation of imagined “Chinese” opera and yellowface plays from 1880 to 1930, and the more recent history of contemporary opera created by Asian Americans commissioned by major opera houses. Some of these varied histories are closely intertwined, not all are well understood, and some have been simply forgotten. Since the mid-19th century, Chinese opera theater has become part of US urban history and has left a significant imprint on the collective cultural and historical memory of Chinese America. Outside of Chinese American communities arose well-known instances of imagined “Chinese” opera, yellowface works that employ the “Chinese opera trope” as a source of inspiration, or Western-style theatrical works based on Chinese themes or plotlines. These histories are interrelated, and have also significantly shaped the reception and understanding of contemporary operas created by Asian American composers and writers. While these operatic works of the late 20th and early 21st centuries are significantly different from those of earlier moments in history, their production and interpretation cannot escape this influence.
Article
Asian Americans in Opera: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives
Nancy Yunhwa Rao
Article
Bildungsroman
Anne Rüggemeier
The Bildungsroman, or novel of formation, is one of the most widely used and most adaptable genres in literary history. Characteristically, the plot unfolds through the narrative of a young person’s development and formation that ideally results in “maturity”—a rather contested concept, which is traditionally understood as the harmonious integration of personal aspirations and the demands of the social. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, 1795) has traditionally been discussed as the urtext of the Bildungsroman. The genre has been interpreted as a form of self-expression of the intellectually emancipated but economically powerless German bourgeoisie. The tension between inner aspirations and outer limitations remains a key topic of the Bildungsroman throughout the centuries. The history of the Bildungsroman is closely interrelated with the emergence of the novel and with the idea of Bildung as it was discussed and refined in post-Kantian thought, German Idealism, and also the movement of German Pietism.
Despite critical attempts to deny the existence of the genre, the Bildungsroman continues to enjoy tremendous popularity and has been adapted, developed, parodied, and rewritten in various European and non-European literatures. Throughout the centuries, as the genre takes on ever new forms, the idea or ideal of Bildung is constantly renegotiated. The generic demarcations between Bildungsroman and the so-called Anti-Bildungsroman continuously blur as the latter marks the shortcomings of the former, demonstrating how modern understandings of self-formation and social success are unavoidably marked by contradictions.
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The Chapter
Nicholas Dames
First known as a kephalaion in Greek, capitulum or caput in Latin, the chapter arose in antiquity as a finding device within long, often heterogenous prose texts, prior even to the advent of the codex. By the 4th century ce, it was no longer unusual for texts to be composed in capitula; but it is with the advent of the fictional prose narratives we call the novel that the chapter, both ubiquitous and innocuous, developed into a compositional practice with a distinct way of thinking about biographical time. A technique of discontinuous reading or “consultative access” which finds a home in a form for continuous, immersive reading, the chapter is a case study in adaptive reuse and slow change. One of the primary ways the chapter became a narrative form rather than just an editorial practice is through the long history of the chaptering of the Bible, particularly the various systems for chaptering the New Testament, which culminated in the early 13th century formation of the biblical chaptering system still in use across the West. Biblical chapters formed a template for how to segment ongoing plots or actions which was taken up by writers, printers, and editors from the late medieval period onward; pivotal examples include William Caxton’s chaptering of Thomas Malory’s Morte d’Arthur in his 1485 printing of the text, or the several mises en proses of Chrétien de Troyes’s poems carried out in the Burgundian court circle of the 15th century. By the 18th century, a vibrant set of discussions, controversies, and experiments with chapters were characteristic of the novel form, which increasingly used chapter titles and chapter breaks to meditate upon how different temporal units understand human agency in different ways. With the eventual dominance of the novel in 19th-century literary culture, the chapter had been honed into a way of thinking about the segmented nature of biographical memory, as well as the temporal frames—the day, the year, the episode or epoch—in which that segmenting occurs; chapters in this period were of an increasingly standard size, although still lacking any formal rules or definition. Modernist prose narratives often played with the chapter form, expanding it or drastically shortening it, but these experiments usually tended to reaffirm the unit of the chapter as a significant measure by which we make sense of human experience.
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The European Circulation of Nordic Texts in the Romantic Period
Robert W. Rix
From the 1750s until the 1840s, the interest in Icelandic manuscripts of mythology and heroic sagas, as well as various forms of Nordic folklore, entered a new phase. One of the central reasons for this was an emergent attention to vernacular, national, and even primitive literature associated with the rise of Romanticism. Investigations of the Nordic past had been carried out before this time, and a popular craze for all things “Viking” came later in the 19th century, but the Romantic period marks a major juncture in relation to providing the Old North with cultural meaning. If the intellectual history of rediscovering Old Norse texts (i.e., poetry and prose written in the North Germanic language until the 14th century, known primarily from Icelandic manuscripts) and medieval Nordic folklore (found in medieval ballads, sagas, and heroic legends) differed in various European countries, there was also a remarkable sense of common aim and purpose in the reception history as it developed during the Romantic period. This was because European scholars and writers had come to see medieval Nordic texts as epitomizing the manners and literature of a common Germanic past. In particular, Old Norse texts from Icelandic manuscripts were believed to preserve the pre-Christian religion, as this was once shared by Scandinavians, Anglo-Saxons, Germans, and the Franks. Thus, interest in such texts circulated with particular intensity between Scandinavia, Germany, and Britain, as well as, to a lesser degree, France. Paradoxically, if medieval Nordic texts were seen as wild and unwieldy pieces, unaffected by classical learning and sophistication, they were also sought out as triumphant records of the vernacular and national. In addition to this, the untamed use of fantastic and sublime elements in these texts fitted into a new Romantic emphasis on the primitive and imaginative resources of literature.
There are three interrelated areas in which Nordic texts made an impact. The first of these was in the field of antiquarian studies. Scholars had taken an interest in the texts and culture of the Nordic past beginning in the 17th century, publishing their findings primarily in Latin. But efforts were redoubled after Paul Henri Mallet, a professor at Copenhagen, published a popular history of the Old North (1755) and a selection of Norse poetry (1756) in French. These works gained wide European traction and influenced the reception history in fundamental ways during the Romantic period. The second area of impact was the acceleration of translations and/or adaptations of original manuscript texts that began to appear in modern European languages. But, in effect, a relatively small body of texts were repeated and reworked in various national languages. The third area in which the interest in Nordic literature asserted its impact was among writers and poets, who trawled antiquarian works on Norse history and mythology as an ore to be mined for the purpose of creating—or rather reviving—a national literature. This was a literature that consciously broke with classical models and decorum to provide a new poetic orientation that was both more vernacular and imaginative.
The celebration of medieval Nordic literature cannot be treated in isolation, as if it were an independent phenomenon; it was part of a wider revival of ancient national/vernacular literary forms around Europe. To a significant degree, the attention to Old Norse texts was propelled by the phenomenal success that the Gaelic Ossian poetry enjoyed across Europe. Norse poetry was harnessed as a Germanic parallel that could match both the vigor and purported ancientness of the Ossian tradition. Sometimes the Nordic past was invoked as a larger legacy that represented a shared ethno-cultural past; at other times, it was used with a more focused nationalist aim. But, whatever the intent in individual circumstances, the rediscovery of the Old North took place through the circulation of ideas and key texts as part of a wider European exchange.
Article
Forms of Realism in Dostoevsky and Céline
Max Lawton
Many critics, Michael André Bernstein prominent among them, have noted similarities between the 19th-century Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky and the 20th-century French modernist Louis-Ferdinand Céline. These critics often compare the underground man and similar characters in Dostoevsky’s work to Céline’s singular, auto-fictional narrator. Two novels, Crime and Punishment and Death on Credit, grounded in a common literary-historical narrative—that of French Realism and Romantic Realism—show that Céline has a distinct philosophical vision, which is the opposite of Dostoevsky’s.
At first glance, Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment and Céline’s Death on Credit seem to be entirely different in terms of their aesthetics, engagement with national traditions, and thematic preoccupations. The former is a novel with a religious message and a traditionally teleological narrative, while the latter reflects a deeply nihilistic vision of human existence and deconstructs narrative structure and style. Examining the two novels in another light, however, draws attention to Dostoevsky’s treatment of squalid, modern situations and puts Céline into a different, nonnational lineage of authors, while also highlighting the unity of his philosophical vision. For both authors, desperately poor people and acts of extreme violence create the impression of a godless world. The two novels’ focus on poverty and crime seem to have their origin in the two epic cycles written by the most famous practitioners of French Realism and Romantic Realism, Balzac and Zola. In Balzac’s La Comédie humaine and Zola’s Les Rougon-Macquart, the two authors’ most consistent focus is the way systems of economic power force people to commit crimes and the consequences that ensue. This might be said to be so of Realism and Romantic Realism in general: all of the intensive worldbuilding it entails is performed to offer verisimilitude to the desperate crimes by impoverished people it dissects. At the very least, this is what Dostoevsky and Céline both took from the genre.
Article
The Image of the Karaites in 19th- and 20th-Century Literature
Mikhail Kizilov
The article analyzes the image of the Karaites in Karaite, Jewish, European, and Russian literatures in the 19th and the 20th centuries. The Karaites are Jews who do not accept the teaching of the Talmud and the Rabbinic concept of the “Oral Law.” Many well-known 19th- and 20th-century belletrists were attracted to the Karaites’ unusual Judeo-Turkic culture as well as their influential status in the Russian empire, their wealth, and their intellectual achievements. It appears that there was no unified image of the Karaites among the authors of this period: Men of letters of various countries, religions, and ethnicities presented the Karaites as marginal Jewish sectarians, a “nation of traders,” descendants of the Turkic Khazars and Cumans, true Israelites, and even as “sons of Japheth.” Why were these images so contradictory? There is no doubt that it was, at least in part, due to the Karaites themselves, who by altering their ethnic identity in the 19th and 20th centuries, transformed the perception of their community in the eyes of external observers—thus leading modern belletrists to portray them in such contradictory ways.
Article
The Modern Swedish Book Business, 1800–2000
Ann Steiner
The Swedish book business began as a poorly developed market with serious economic, social, and infrastructural issues, but transformed over the course of two centuries into a well-functioning, albeit small, market with strong international ties. The 19th-century book market was hampered by poor infrastructure and underdeveloped publishing and book sales. Technological innovations in printing techniques and the new wood-based pulps for paper, in combination with better infrastructure, improved matters. The book business was increasingly professionalized at every stage, and by the turn of the 20th century could fairly be described as industrial and modernized. Access to forestry (and hence inexpensive pulp), inexpensive hydroelectric power, and strong industrial growth have been important factors in the advances in the Swedish book trade: they contributed to making printing cheaper and faster and thus paved the way for the low-priced books that were to dominate the business throughout the two centuries. Regardless of the era or the ideologies and purposes involved, cheap books have always driven the industry and have also been one of the most important factors in breaking down the social and cultural barriers to reading.
Developments in Sweden’s book trade generally followed the same course as socioeconomic history, with the notable exception that Sweden’s book trade has always been more liberal and commercial than other forms of trade and industry. The book market was regulated through trade agreements between 1843 and 1970. These created a stable, but strictly controlled, market. A deregulation of the trade in 1970 saw the pendulum swing far back. In comparison with other Western European countries since 1970, Sweden has had fewer restrictions and regulations and thus a highly commercial and price-conscious market.
A further notable aspect of the Swedish book trade is that despite the smallness of the country in terms of population and language, exports and imports have been far larger than most comparable countries. The international ties in terms of business-to-business relations, translations, and foreign rights sales remain strong, with the Swedish book trade very dependent on the international trade.
Article
Periodical Fiction in Denmark and Norway before 1900
Aina Nøding
Prose fiction, poetry, and essays were integral parts of the Danish and Norwegian periodical press from its early modern beginnings to the rise of the modern news media. They range from the 17th-century versified newspaper Den danske Mercurius (The Danish Mercury), to the fables, poems, essays, and stories of 18th-century newspapers and spectator journals, to Henrik Ibsen’s plays and the serial novels of the 19th century.
The print markets in Denmark and Norway were closely integrated due to the union of the two states until 1814. They remained so during Norway’s union with Sweden 1814–1905, with major publishing houses for Norwegian authors still in Copenhagen until 1925. Danish remained the basis for the primary written language in Norway for most of the 1800s, partly due to the proximity of the two languages. While there was an increased call for more Scandinavian and Swedish–Norwegian collaboration after 1814, the Swedish-Finnish print market remained largely separate from the Dano-Norwegian. While newspapers and journals were local or national publications, their fiction reflected the book market and the Dano-Norwegian literary discourse.
The periodical press served as an important arena for new writers, by offering them a large audience and allowing for experimentation with form and content. Furthermore, the periodical form and the publication context of news pieces informed how fiction was written and read.
The genre of the sketch, a traveling journalist’s highly subjective and literary report, exemplifies the blurred lines between fact and fiction. Maurits Hansen, Camilla Collett, and Knut Hamsun were among its Norwegian practitioners; Holger Drachmann and Herman Bang notable Danish ones. Simultaneously, they were all renowned novelist and poets, both inside and outside the press, with some works reflecting the crime stories and exotic tales of the paper columns. Hans Christian Andersen, by contrast, applied the traditional genre of allegory to comment on topical events in the 1850s by producing fairy tales for the press. Ibsen claimed newspapers to be his favorite reading material. While building his career, periodicals served as important publication channels both at home and abroad. They informed his later plays, increasingly concerned with events and issues of his time.
By the mid-19th century, there was a growing movement to introduce a written
Norwegian language more in line with the spoken word. Ivar Aasen (1813–1896) introduced Landsmål (New Norwegian language) in 1853, based on dialects. To prove its applicability, the journalist A. O. Vinje published poems and stories, alongside witty essayistic prose, in his weekly Dølen (The man from the valley; 1858–1870). The author Arne Garborg followed suit in the newspaper Fedraheimen (Fatherland; 1877–1883), publishing both his own fiction and essays as well as translated novels. Newspapers thus became seminal in shaping a new written language and its literature.
The press enabled a speedy introduction of foreign literature and new genres, circulating as part of an international print market. In the 18th century, the Dano-Norwegian press featured literary texts by François-Marie Arouet de Voltaire, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Christian Fürchtegott Gellert, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Carl von Linnaeus, Saadi, Joseph Addison, and Oliver Goldsmith. The first feuilleton novel in Denmark was Eugène Sue’s The Mysteries of Paris (Les Mystères de Paris), printed from July 1842 in Dagen (The day), while the novel was still under publication in France. In Norway, the first novel came hot off the British press in 1844: Arabella Stuart in Den Norske Rigstidende (The Norwegian national newspaper). The novel by G. P. R. James was typical of the taste for gothic and mystery tales set in historic times that were to fill the feuilleton section at the bottom of the page (termed “the cellar”). Female writers are notably present from the beginning and reached a wider audience than ever before, thanks to serial literature. Often writing under pseudonyms, Scandinavian women entered positions as novelists, journalists, editors, and translators for newspapers and journals. Among the favorite translated authors were George Sand, George Eliot, and Harriet Beecher Stowe, who became household names for newspaper readers. Jane Austen was tellingly introduced in Norway by way of a newspaper serial: Persuasion (called Familien Elliot) in Morgenbladet (The morning paper) 1872–1873.
Article
Technology
Eleonora Lima
The history of literature has always been influenced by technological progress, as a transformative cultural power—threatening destruction or promising a luminous future—as a theme inspiring new narrative forms and plots, or as a force influencing the way authors conceive textuality and perform their creative work. The entanglement between literary and technological inventions is even recorded in the etymology of the word, which comes from the Greek “techne,” a term referring to arts as well as crafts. The way writers conceive this relationship, however, varies greatly: although some consider the work of technicians to be congenial to artistic creation, as they both demonstrate human creativity and ingenuity, others believe technology to be a dehumanizing and unnatural force, not only alien to literature but in competition with its own ethos. Therefore, depending on their position, the writer comes to embody the mythical figure of Prometheus, the first technician and defiant creator, or that of Orpheus, symbolizing the marriage between poetry and nature compared to any artificial creation. However, the opposition between nature and technology, with literature positioning itself either in one realm or the other, is only one of many possible critical perspectives. Indeed, when moving beyond the idea of technology as merely a kind of artifact, the affinities between texts and machines clearly emerge. A mutual relation connects technology and textuality, and this has to do with the complex nature of material and cultural objects, each shaped by social use, aesthetic norms, and power structures. This bond between discursivity and materiality is impossible to disentangle, as is the contextual relationship between literature and technology: Texts prescribe meanings to machines just as much as the latter shape their textuality. To recognize literature and technology as two different systems of meanings and sets of practices which are nevertheless always in conversation with each other is also to understand literature as technology. This stance has nothing to do with the likeness of the poet and the technician as creative minds but rather with the idea of literary texts functioning like technologies and, ultimately, offering a meta-reflexive analysis of their own textuality. According to this critical perspective, literature performatively enacts the changes in textuality brought about by technological progress, from the printing press to digital writing tools.
