Perspectives and Problems of Regional Literary Histories

Abstract

The article discusses the demand for renewal of the methodological approaches and narrative forms of national literary history in historical scholarship. With the recent growth of globalization and migration, the expansion of the European Union and with strong criticism of the metanarratives of national literature, the regional trend of modelling and researching literary histories has become increasingly relevant, especially for small literatures. We can see the attempts of many literary scholars to change the customary progressive ethnocentric model of historical narrative and to search for more contemporary forms of cultural identity, based on heterogeneous multicultural grounds. The intensive democratization processes in post-communist societies inevitably encourage their literary historians to move from closed national literary models to open pluralistic comparative cultural models. Several examples of this regional trend are discussed in the article. 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 report seeks concrete answers to these questions. But the questions don't stop there.