Modernizing Empires: Enlightenment, Nationalist Vanguards and Non-Western Literary Modernities (ERC StG 950513 NONWESTLIT)

This project is a comparative study of cultural reforms, linguistic renewal and literary renaissance movements in three imperial traditions, caught between the East-West divide: Russia, Turkey and Japan. We look at the negotiated cultural models in modernization and westernization processes and argues that their shared historical experience resulted in a common intellectual vocabulary and narrative models shared by otherwise extremely diverse cultures. We aim to develop a comparative model, drawing a polycentric and plural map of literary modernity. In three subprojects, we investigate structural similarities in: Questions and concepts in literary criticism Translational practices and translated works from Europe Narrative logic and typologies in fiction. The project is the first comparative multilingual study of the non-Western literary modernities to bring these specific traditions together. It follows a multi-method research strategy to conduct historical and literary comparisons between the emerging national literary systems, combining qualitative and quantitative methods in order to map transnational networks of narrative strategies, conceptual systems and translation practices. With this project, we hope to bring new directions in Digital Humanities, expanding it to non-Western and multilingual comparative research. Finally, we plan to make a much-needed contribution to the current literary corpus by making unknown and untranslated texts available and accessible.

Le riforme culturali, il rinnovamento linguistico e il rinascimento letterario nell’impero russo, turco e giapponese, hanno creato un’esperienza storica condivisa che ha portato a modelli intellettuali di vocabolario e di narrativa comuni. Per dimostrarlo, il progetto NONWESTLIT, finanziato dall’UE, svilupperà un modello comparativo, disegnando una mappa policentrica e pluralistica della modernità letteraria per indagare sulle somiglianze strutturali fra le tre tradizioni. Il progetto applicherà una ricerca multimetodo combinando approcci qualitativi e quantitativi. Inoltre, effettuerà confronti storici e letterari tra i sistemi letterari nazionali emergenti, mappando le reti transnazionali di strategie narrative, sistemi concettuali e pratiche di traduzione. Le scoperte apporteranno benefici agli studi umanistici digitali nella ricerca comparativa non occidentale e multilinguistica e renderanno testi letterari sconosciuti disponibili e accessibili.