Battles and Borders. Perspectives on Cultural Transmission and Literature in Minor Language Areas is about literature on the fringes of Europe. The authors all discuss the often unique ways in which literary history and cultural transfer function in peripheral and central regions against the background of shifting national borders in the last two centuries. Special attention is paid to minority and migrant groups in Northwest Europe.
The present volume aims to prompt a reconsideration of the concepts of ‘minority’ and ‘migrant’ cultures and literatures in the past and the present day. It also suggests a new topic for further study: the importance of cultural transfer for migrant groups (whether or not they form a diaspora) and their ability to create new words and to develop new identities.
This seventh volume in the Studies on Cultural Transfer and Transmission (CTaT) series is a spinoff of the research project ‘Peripheral Autonomy? Longitudinal analysis of cultural transfer in the literary fi elds of small language communities’. This project was carried out by scholars at the University of Groningen, Ghent University and Uppsala University. It started in 2006 and concluded with the publication in 2012 of Rethinking Cultural Transfer and Transmission. Reflections and New Perspectives.
Preface 7
Petra Broomans
The Importance of Literature and Cultural Transfer – Redefining Minority and Migrant Cultures 9
PART I
Borders/Nation/Language, case Denmark/Germany 39
Nikolaj Bijleveld
Germans making Danes. Germans and the German Language in Copenhagen and the Construction of Danish Culture 1750-1880 41
Andrea Graw-Teebken
Language as cultural metaphor: The creation of a national identity in the German-Danish border area 59
PART II
Cultural Transfer, Language Frontiers, Across Borders 81
Adriaan van der Hoeven
The Discovery of Finland. Patterns in Cultural Transfer 83
Roger Holmström
Against all odds. Sally Salminen’s Katrina and the possibilities of cultural transfer 97
PART III
Minor Languages and Literary History/Within Borders 109
Idar Stegane
The rise, dispersal and stabilisation of New Norwegian literature 111
Malan Marnersdóttir
Towards a Monolingual Canon. Faroese and Danish on the Faroe Islands 133
PART IV
Literary History/Within Borders/Without Borders 151
Anne Heith
Anticolonial and Postcolonial De-/Constructions of the Nation Ethnonational Mobilisation in Meanmaa 153
Elka Agoston-Nikolova
Cultural Transmission. Diaspora Writing from the Balkans 175
About the Authors 185
Bibliography 189
Index 205
About the Studies on Cultural Transfer and Transmission series 213
