Kyung-Ho Cha, Ivana Perica, Aurore Peyroles, Christoph Schaub (Eds.): European Centers and Peripheries in the Political Novel (Caponeu Working Papers)

When analyzing asymmetries between centers, semi-peripheries, and peripheries, literary scholars draw on various theoretical and methodological traditions, such as post- and decolonial approaches or, as, for example the Warwick Research Collective (2015), world-systems analysis. Some of these literary scholars rather emphasize asymmetries and exchanges between (the) European center(s) and non-European (semi-)peripheries, while paying less attention to how global economic centers such as Europe – whatever its boundaries may be – are marked by internal center-periphery-dynamics (e.g., between Germany, or France, and Eastern Europe). Additionally, sociological approaches in world literature studies (e.g., Casanova 2004; Moretti 1998, 2000) focus on examining center-periphery dynamics in literary fields, or systems, and highlight how these dynamics influence literary form. They supplement approaches that analyze how specific literary texts represent center-periphery-asymmetries. This collection of working papers builds on these lines of inquiry, yet organize its discussion around the question of how center-periphery-dynamics are articulated in explicitly political terms by the political novel, a genre tentatively understood here as a set of procedures through which a novel is coded and decoded as political within a particular constellation of circumstances, resulting in its recognition or misreading as political. The papers aim to put special emphasis on examining Europe as a combined and uneven formation characterized by economic, social, cultural, and literary asymmetries. They investigate the question of what formal and textual features are common, if not typical, of literary capitals (centers) on the one hand and margins and peripheries on the other, as well as the question of how literary centers and peripheries respond to political novels – and how these literary texts, their authors, publishers, and reading publics anticipate, react to, and interact with these responses.

Table of Contents

Kyung-Ho Cha, Ivana Perica, Aurore Peyroles, Christoph Schaub: European Centers and Peripheries in the Political Novel

Alina Bako: Semi-peripheral Nodes and the Circulation of Political Ideas. The Case of a Romanian Novel
Paul Stewart: Uneven and Combined Development in the Centre of Modernism: Beckett, Joyce, London and Dublin. Response to Alina Bako.

Charles Sabatos: Reimagining Political Peripheries in Pišťanek’s and Boldizar’s Siberian Slovakia
Nina Weller: Response to Charles Sabatos

Mónika Dánél: Multilingual Minority: Poetical Decomposition of the Embodied Dictatorial Legacy
Philipp Wegmann: Entrapment and Resistance. Language and Power in Andrea Tompa’s The Hangman’s House. Response to Mónika Dánél

Alexandra Irimia: Bureaucracies of Memory. Institutionalized History in Four Contemporary European Novels
Stephen Shapiro: Response to Alexandra Irimia

Brînduşa Nicolaescu: A Political Novel between the Periphery and the Center: Norman Manea’s Plicul negru (1986) / The Black Envelope (1995)
Natalya Bekhta: Response to Brînduşa Nicolaescu

Stefan Segi: Vlastimil Vondruška and the Inevitable Demise of Europe
Błażej Warkocki: Being East European (from a Polish perspective). Response to Stefan Segi.

Bibliography:
Casanova, Pascale. 2004. The World Republic of Letters. Translated by M.B. DeBevoise. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Moretti, Franco. 1998. Atlas of the European novel, 1800-1900. London/New York: Verso.
Moretti, Franco. 2000. “Conjectures on World Literature.” New Left Review 1: 54-68.
Warwick Research Collective (WReC). 2015. Combined and Uneven Development: Towards a New Theory of World-Literature. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press.

Citation
Kyung-Ho Cha, Ivana Perica, Aurore Peyroles, and Christoph Schaub, eds. 2025. European Centers and Peripheries in the Political Novel (Caponeu Working Papers), https://www.caponeu.eu/cdp/materials/european-centers-and-peripheries-in-the-political-novel-caponeu-working-papers.

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This collection of working papers is based on presentations and responses, given at the workshop "European Centres and Peripheries in the Political Novel", which took place at the Leibniz-Zentrum für Literatur- und Kulturforschung (Leibniz Center for Literary and Cultural Research) on June 6–7, 2024. The workshop was organized by Kyung-Ho Cha, Patrick Eiden-Offe, Johanna-Charlotte Horst, Ivana Perica, Aurore Peyroles, and Christoph Schaub.