The World Republic of Letters

The rise of geography in the social sciences has now officially entered the field of literary theory. I read this book as a person caught between different cultural and national identities and as a writer and artist caught between traditions and questions of how - and what - to represent. It was a thrilling read for me although not everyone, I suspect, will like the implications of this book. This isn't really the forum to go into them, but they are potentially revolutionary - and potentially liberating. Casanova's method draws heavily on the political sociology of Pierre Bourdieu and the historical sociology of Ferdinand Braudel. English-language fans of Immanuel Wallerstein and David Harvey will find fascinating correspondences. There are moments when I felt that she might be pushing her thesis too far, only to have my doubts dispelled within moments. 'The World Republic of Letters' is, I believe, the tip of the iceberg: these ideas will ripple out beyond literature into the broader cultural studies field. I hope many more people - especially writers who are, like me, baffled by the seeming bankruptcy of contemporay fiction - will engage with this book. It is only when we are stripped of our illusions and fantasies of what constitutes art and beauty that we shall be finally able to become true artists.

I read this book in the original (French) while writing my dissertation (comparative literature), and quoted from it often. The writing is engaging, the author covers an encyclopedic range of writers and literary periods, and she brings a compelling theoretical perspective to fundamental questions of cultural development and social history. The book is particularly authoritative in the crucial question of how literary vernaculars legitimate themselves--a question as central to contemporary post-colonial literatures as it was to the early-modern writing of the 16th and 17th centuries. That Casanova can speak meaningfully to readers and researchers at both ends of the modern literary spectrum indicates the magnitude of her scholarly achievement. This is the kind of book that all of us who are in the academic racket would like to have written, and it is one that anyone interested in literary studies would enjoy and profit from reading. I'm looking forward to reading this translation to remind myself of what I liked about the original, and to catch any nuances that my quite non-native command of French would have missed. Thank you, Harvard, for bringing this book out in translation: please put it out in paperback, as well!

I have not read this book! However, since there's not much info here about it, thought I would refer interested parties to a review in the Jan.3 '05 issue of The Nation by Wm. Deresiewicz, which I quote from: "(this book) is almost certain to become quite famous among intellectuals around the world over the next few years"; and in summing up "the main thrust of Casanova's argument, which covers roughly the last century and a half, is unimpeachable. She has created a map of global literary power relations where none had existed, and she has raised a host of further questions." A very positive review.