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Period · 1650–1800

Knowledge and revolutions

works
152

A hundred and fifty works for a century and a half that invents criticism. Laws, religion, education and the rights of women are argued over, and the book becomes an instrument of that argument, in the form of the philosophical tale, the epistolary novel, the dictionary or the comedy. The same moment is the moment of empires: the ships that carry ideas also carry the slave trade, and the first American works in the catalogue appear while the colonies are rising. Reading this period means holding both together.

Europe 89

Eighty-eight works, and a shift in the place where writing happens: the court gives way to the salon, the coffee house and the reading room. Molière, Milton, Swift, Voltaire, Rousseau, Goethe. The book becomes a piece of public argument, which earns it censorship, clandestine publishing and printing abroad, three practices so widespread that part of this corpus first appeared under a false imprint.

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The Arab, Turkish and Persian worlds 7

Seven works, and one date that explains almost everything: in 1727 a decree at last allows printing in Arabic characters in the Ottoman Empire, but the first press produces only seventeen titles in fifteen years before closing. Poetry goes on circulating in manuscript divans, copied and recopied in the learned circles of Istanbul, Cairo and Damascus, and that is where literary life takes place.

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Caucasus and Central Asia 12

Twelve works, almost all in verse, and one recurring figure: the poet who writes in his own language while the elites write in Persian. Magtymguly thus founds Turkmen poetry, Khushal Khan Khattak Pashto poetry. Such choices of language are political acts before their time, and they make these authors, two centuries later, the fathers of nations that did not yet exist.

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East Asia 13

Thirteen works, among them Dream of the Red Chamber, a novel of four hundred characters that circulates first in manuscript copies, and Bashō's travel journals. Edo Japan, closed to foreigners, develops a popular book market with lending booksellers and prints; Korea sees novels written in hangul, the alphabet the learned despised and women read.

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South and Southeast Asia 9

Nine works, with one constant: the court remains the place of learned literature, in verse, on religious or royal subjects. The Javanese chronicles, the Malay hikayat, the Vietnamese tales of the Truyền kỳ tân phả. The Dutch and English companies settle on the coasts during this time, and it is their presses that will produce the first modern books of the region.

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Sub-Saharan Africa 3

Three works, and a century and a half the catalogue crosses almost empty: this is also the period when the Atlantic slave trade reaches its height. What is written in Africa is then mostly in Arabic, in the Sahel cities and on the Swahili coast, and the slave narratives published in English at the end of the century belong to the literatures of arrival, not to those of departure.

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The Americas 19

Eighteen works, and two worlds side by side: the learned poetry of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, a Mexican nun ordered to fall silent by her hierarchy, and the first texts of the young United States, such as Royall Tyler's comedy The Contrast, staged in New York in 1787. The first press in the English colonies dates from 1638, but the book there long remains religious.

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Oceania 0

Nothing, and this is where the gap between history and the catalogue is sharpest: between 1768 and 1779 Cook's voyages put the Pacific on European maps, and the narratives drawn from them are written by British navigators. The societies visited will write only after receiving the alphabet, and their first printed books will be translations of the Gospel.