Lcs #4 The Nation State And Print Capitalism

The Gutenberg Galaxy

• 1500 - 20, 000, 000 Books in Print

• 1600 - 200, 000, 000 Books in Print

Mass Literacy

• urbanization

• printing

• centralized government

Nation

the nation is a cultural and/or ethnic entity.

State

the state is a political and geopolitical entity

The Nation-StateA political unit consisting of

an autonomous state inhabited predominantly by

a people sharing a common culture, history,

and language.

Rise the of Nation-State

15th-18th Centuries

Nation-State

•Development of Central, Secular Governance - less powerful monarch and church

•Rise of Vernacular Languages - Latin became less influential

•Shared Identity - idea of belonging to a particular cultural, political and geographical entity

Historical Map of Europe

1400

Historical Map of Europe

1800

Historical Map of Europe

1900

“The Origins of National Consciousness”

Print Capitalism• print as a commodity

• the printed book as the first mass produced commodity

• within 150 years, the saturation of the Latin market leads printers to seek out new markets

• vernacular languages represented “potentially huge” markets

Capitalism and Vernacular Languages

• Changing character of Latin

• Impact of the Reformation

• Spread of particular Vernaculars as instruments of Administrative Centralization

•Changing character of Latin• Scholars began to emphasize Classical Works

over Ecclesiastical Sources

• Humanists turned to Cicero and other Roman rhetoricians, as well Ancient Greek works

• This Latin was very different in character and usage than Church Latin and led to the decline of Church Latin as a lingua franca

•Impact of the Reformation• Martin Luther

• 1517 - Posts the 95 Theses on the door of Wittenberg

• The first author to sell works on the basis of his name

• Within 15 days these were seen all over Germany

• Opening of a “colossal religious propaganda war”

Vernaculars and Centralized Administration

• Particular vernaculars became favored

• Crowded out other vernaculars and dialects

• This began prior to the advent of print

• Print accelerated this process

Print Capitalism• Required the dominance of a few specific

vernaculars

• “if print capitalism had sought to exploit each potential oral vernacular market, it would have remained a capitalism of petty proportions” (43)

• Varied dialects were assembled into print-languages far fewer in number

Print Capitalism laid the foundation for National Consciousness in

Three Distinct Ways

• Created unified fields of exchange - various dialects that would have had a hard time communicating could now relate via print

• Gave a new fixity to languages - book form gave permanence to language - rate of linguistic change slowed

• Created languages of power - certain dialects were inevitably closer to print language

The Role of Print in the Rise of the Nation-State

• Rise of Vernacular Languages

• Decline of Latin

• Growth in Readership - due in part to Protestant Movements

• Development of New Literary Forms

• All factor into the consolidation of the Nation-State

“the convergence of capitalism and print

technology on the fatal diversity of language

created the possibility of a new form of imagined community, which in its

basic morphology set the stage for the modern

nation”

Literacy, Literature and the Nation

The Novel

E.M. Forster: “A fiction in prose of a certain extent”

An extended prose narrative

Novel - New

Rise of the Novel

17th and 18th Centuries

Precursors of the Novel

•Elizabethan prose fiction•French heroic romance--vast baroque

narratives about thinly disguised contemporaries (mid-17th century) who always acted nobly and spoke high-flown sentiment

•Spanish picaresque tales--strings of episodic adventures held together by the personality of the central figure; Don Quixote is the best known of these tales.

“horizontal-secular-transverse time”