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By date

Period · 1800–1900

Nations and the novel

works
749

Seven hundred and forty-three works, five times the previous century. Three causes combine: the school that manufactures readers, the press that publishes novels in instalments before binding them, and the nation that asks writers to supply it with a language, a history and heroes. It is the century in which languages until then spoken become literary languages, from Finnish to Bengali, often by first collecting the tales and epics that oral tradition had kept. The imbalance remains strong: Europe supplies six works out of ten.

Europe 445

Four hundred and forty-five works, five times the previous century. Three machines turn together: compulsory schooling manufactures readers, the newspaper publishes novels in instalments before binding them, and nations in the making or unmaking commission from writers a language and a past. It is also the century in which people set out to collect the tales of the countryside, before they vanish along with the dialects.

The Arab, Turkish and Persian worlds 21

Twenty-one works, and the beginning of what will be called the Nahda: presses are set up in Beirut and Cairo, the European novel is translated, newspapers are founded, the debate on language is reopened. Two inventions date from here, the modern Arabic novel and the literary press article, both born in printing houses often run by missionaries or by Syrian exiles settled in Egypt.

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Caucasus and Central Asia 46

Forty-six works, nearly four times the previous century, and an explanation in two words: the Russian Empire. It annexes the Caucasus and Central Asia, installs schools, presses and a censorship there, and that constraint paradoxically produces the first modern Armenian, Georgian, Azeri and Kazakh literatures, often written by authors trained in Saint Petersburg or Moscow.

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East Asia 6

Only six works, the lowest figure on the row, and it says nothing about actual production: China and Japan publish enormously in the nineteenth century. It reflects the state of translation and the catalogue's own choices: half the titles kept for this area are later than the Meiji opening of 1868, when Japanese prose reinvents itself in contact with the European novel.

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South and Southeast Asia 33

Thirty-one works, and a single engine: Calcutta, capital of British India, where Bengali becomes in fifty years a language of the novel, the stage and the newspaper. Around it, colonial presses print grammars, dictionaries and collections of tales, often to train administrators; local writers seize them and turn them against the administration that commissioned them.

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Sub-Saharan Africa 20

Nineteen works against three in the previous century, and an entry through two opposite doors. On one side the missionaries, who transcribe African languages in order to translate the Bible and publish along the way the first collections of tales. On the other the authors themselves, trained in those same schools, who write in Sotho, Xhosa or Yoruba texts that the mission presses agree to print.

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The Americas 161

A hundred and fifty-eight works against eighteen in the previous century: American independence has passed through. In the north a national literature searches for itself and then finds itself around 1850; in the south each young republic gives itself a founding novel and a gaucho poem. The slave narratives published in the 1840s and 1850s are written to weigh on a political argument then under way.

Oceania 17

Seventeen works, the first from this area in the catalogue, arriving by two roads. Most come from the settler colonies of Australia and New Zealand and are written in English. The others bring older narratives into writing: Maori writers fix the genealogies and narratives of their ancestors, and Kanak and Aboriginal legends are collected. What enters by this second road is therefore not new: it is an old body of material at last reaching writing.

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