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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.
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”