Slovinský literární historik a filolog Matija Čop v roce 1833 zasadil do kontextu jazykové polemiky ("pravopisné války") a svými komentáři rozvinul překlad kritiky básnického almanachu Krajnska čbelica, kterou v roce 1832 v Praze vydal František L. Čelakovský, mezinárodně uznávaný český básník: jeho apologii básnictví Franceho Prešerna, která obsahuje také ilustrativní překlady básní, použil Čop jako cizí argument zvenčí pro svůj romanticky kosmopolitní kulturní program rozvoje slovinského jazyka a beletristiky. V tomto metatextovém a překladovém rámcování přítomný článek rozebírá symptomy intertextuality, navzdory nimž se i v prostoru Rakouského císařství paralelně vytvářel systém národních literatur, slovanského literárního centrismu a světové literatury, včetně geokulturních rozdílů mezi centry, subcentry a periferiemi. and In the context of the 1833 language controversy ("Slovenian alphabetical War"), the Slovenian literary historian and philologist Matija Čop framed, with his extensive comments, a translation of the review of the poetic almanac Krajnska čbelica, which had been published in 1832 in Prague by František L. Čelakovský, an internationally known Czech poet: Čelakovský’s apology for France Prešeren's poetry (containing sample translations) was used by Čop as a foreign argument supporting his romantic and cosmopolitan cultural program of Slovenian language and aesthetic literature. The present article reads these metadiscursive framings to reveal the symptoms of interliterariness through which, in the Austrian Empire as well, three types of literary systems were being established concurrently, i.e., the systems of national literatures, the Slavonic literary centrism, and world literature (including geo-cultural differences between centers, subcenters, and peripheries).
The article addresses literary historical and comparative methods that are employed in the volumes of History of the Literary Cultures of East-Central Europe (2004-) edited by J. Neubauer and M. Cornis-Pope. This project, launched under the auspices of ICLA, is among the earliest and most elaborated realizations of several tenets proposed by recent efforts to renew (comparative) literary historiography, such as: methodological self-reflection, avoidance of totalizing master narratives, synecdochic, mosaic-like, and fragmentary composition, transnational scope, multiperspectivism, topographic approach to complex cultural areas, foregrounding of literature's sociocultural contexts, and search for recurrent, invariant discourses within a variety of national literatures/languages. However, this edition underestimates the textual (including aesthetic) dimension of historical processes. Furthermore, the prevailing method of summing up and framing of merely juxtaposed case studies from various national literatures does not suffice to explain the actual historical inter-connectedness of East-Central European cultures nor their common traits. What is missing, is a more elaborate, systematically employed, and convincing comparative methodology, e.g. of interliterary interference, cultural transfer, cross-cultural intertextuality and the like.
Literary history is a grand genre formed through interaction with its own "subject" (literature). It gives a comprehensive narrative synthesis. It has significant authority over the shaping of public past, national and cultural identities and the literary canon. The post-modern historic turn poses new challenges to this genre, such as a reconsideration of its own role in the social discourse, the substitution of omniscient narrative by the polyphony and collages, the redefinition of the ties between the literary work and the cultural context, and the preservation of its own genre identity through the historical analysis of the literariness and the literary field. One possible reformaton of the grande genre is offered by electronic hypertexts.