Perspectives and problems of regional literary histories

Abstract

With the recent growth of globalization and migration, the expansion of the European Union and with strong criticism of the meta-narratives of national literature, the regional trend of modelling and researching literary histories has become increasingly relevant, especially for small literatures. Literary historians are becoming less and less interested in the idea of ​​national uniqueness of literatures established in the 19th century. The intensive democratization processes in post-Soviet societies inevitably encourage their literary historians to move from closed national literary models to open pluralistic comparative cultural models. Several examples of this trend are: Czesław Miłosz Native Realm (Rodzinna Europa, Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 2001), History of the Literary Cultures of East-Central Europe: Junctures and Disjunctures (ed. Marcel Cornis-Pope, John Neubauer, Amsterdam). : Johns Benjamins Publishing, 2004-2006), Baltic Postcolonialism (ed. Violeta Kelertas, Amsterdam: Rodopi Editions, 2006), We Have Something in Common: The Baltic Memory (ed. Anneli Mihkelev and B. Kalnačs, Tallinn, The Under and Tuglas Literature Center of the Estonian Academy of Sciences, 2007) etc. In all these works, the history of literature is researched and modelled according to the regional comparative principle, which unites various national cultures in certain aspects. How important and promising are regional memory-building efforts for individual historians of small literatures? And what problems do historians of such research face? The paper seeks concrete answers to these questions.