Table Of ContentLITERARY URBAN STUDIES
Literary Capitals
in the Long
Nineteenth Century
Spaces beyond the Centres
Edited by Arunima Bhattacharya
Richard Hibbitt · Laura Scuriatti
Literary Urban Studies
Series Editors
Lieven Ameel
Comparative Literature
Tampere University
Tampere, Finland
Patricia García
University of Alcalá
Madrid, Spain
Eric Prieto
Department of French and Italian
University of California
Santa Barbara, CA, USA
Markku Salmela
English Language, Literature & Translation
Tampere University
Tampere, Finland
The Literary Urban Studies Series has a thematic focus on literary media-
tions and representations of urban conditions. Its specific interest is in
developing interdisciplinary methodological approaches to the study of
literary cities. Echoing the Russian formalist interest in literaturnost or
literariness, Literary Urban Studies will emphasize the “citiness” of its
study object—the elements that are specific to the city and the urban con-
dition—and an awareness of what this brings to the source material and
what it implies in terms of methodological avenues of inquiry. The series’
focus allows for the inclusion of perspectives from related fields such as
urban history, urban planning, and cultural geography. The series sets no
restrictions on period, genre, medium, language, or region of the source
material. Interdisciplinary in approach and global in range, the series
actively commissions and solicits works that can speak to an international
and cross-disciplinary audience.
Editorial board
Ulrike Zitzlsperger, University of Exeter, UK
Peta Mitchell, University of Queensland, Australia
Marc Brosseau, University of Ottawa, Canada
Andrew Thacker, De Montfort University, UK
Patrice Nganang, Stony Brook University, USA
Bart Keunen, University of Ghent, Belgium
Arunima Bhattacharya
Richard Hibbitt • Laura Scuriatti
Editors
Literary Capitals in
the Long Nineteenth
Century
Spaces beyond the Centres
Editors
Arunima Bhattacharya Richard Hibbitt
Edinburgh Napier University University of Leeds
Edinburgh, UK Leeds, UK
Laura Scuriatti
Bard College Berlin
Berlin, Germany
ISSN 2523-7888 ISSN 2523-7896 (electronic)
Literary Urban Studies
ISBN 978-3-031-13059-5 ISBN 978-3-031-13060-1 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-13060-1
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This book is dedicated to all those who choose peace, dialogue and
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In memory of all those who lose their lives due to war.
P a
reface and cknowledgements
Some of the chapters in this volume are based on papers given at the 2017
Annual Meeting of the American Comparative Literature Association,
which took place at Utrecht. Other chapters were specially commissioned.
It has been a difficult few years since we began editing the book, and we
would like to thank all our contributors for their patience, promptness,
generosity and collaborative spirit.
Many thanks also go to Richard Cleminson, Pirjo Lyytikäinen and
Richard Robinson for their comments on various chapters of the book,
and to Elizaveta Vasserman for her expert indexing.
We would also like to thank the publishing team at Palgrave Macmillan
and the editors of the Palgrave Literary Urban Studies for their support of
the book.
Leeds; Berlin Arunima Bhattacharya
2 022 Richard Hibbitt
Laura Scuriatti
vii
c
ontents
1 Introduction: Literary Capitals in the Long Nineteenth
Century—Spaces beyond the Centres 1
Arunima Bhattacharya, Richard Hibbitt, and Laura Scuriatti
Part I Beyond Europe 29
2 Producing the Colonial Capital: Calcutta in Handbooks 31
Arunima Bhattacharya
3 World-Weaving in Nineteenth-Century East Asia: The
Case of Hong Kong’s Earliest Chinese Newspaper, Gems
from Near and Afar (Chinese Serial) 61
Michael Tsang
4 Turn-of-the-Century Buenos Aires: A Capital of Queer
Spectacles 87
Carlos Gustavo Halaburda
ix
x CONTENTS
Part II Redefining Peripheries 115
5 Bilingual Authors, Multilingual Printing Presses and
‘Informal Capital’: Pest-Buda in the Early Nineteenth
Century 117
Zsuzsanna Varga
6 Helsinki or Helsingfors? Jean Sibelius and the Stage 145
Philip Ross Bullock
7 ‘A Place in Hungary’: The Phantasmal Dublin of Ulysses 165
Catherine Toal
Part III Polycentric Italy 183
8 Trieste’s ‘Adventurers of Culture and Life’ 185
Elena Coda
9 Untimely, Modern City: Literary Interventions on
Florence as an Intellectual Capital at the Turn of the
Century 207
Laura Scuriatti
10 From World Capital to National Capital: Literary
Periodicals and the Construction of Modern Rome 233
Stefano Evangelista
Index 253
n c
otes on ontributors
Arunima Bhattacharya is lecturer in English at Edinburgh Napier
University. Before this she was a postdoctoral research assistant on an
AHRC- funded project titled The Other from Within: Indian Anthropologists
and the Birth of a Nation in the School of History at the University of
Leeds. Her most recent publication is ‘Everyday Objects and Conversations
Experiencing “Self ” in the Transnational Space’ in Asian Women, Identity
and Migration: Experiences of Transnational Women of Indian Origin/
Heritage (Routledge, 2021). She is currently finishing her first mono-
graph on ‘Calcutta Handbooks’ in British India. Her research interests
include colonial and postcolonial literatures; heritage and cultural legacy;
spatiality and city studies; travel literature and island literatures. She is
involved in the ‘Curating Discomfort’ project at the Hunterian Museum
(Glasgow). She is also a staff reviewer and blog editor for Sanglap: Journal
of Literary and Cultural Inquiry.
Philip Ross Bullock is a professor of Russian literature and Music at the
University of Oxford, and a fellow and tutor in Russian at Wadham
College, Oxford. His books include The Correspondence of Jean Sibelius
and Rosa Newmarch, 1906-1939 (Boydell, 2011), Pyotr Tchaikovsky
(Reaktion, 2016), Song Beyond the Nation: Translation, Transnationalism,
Performance (Oxford University Press, 2021, co-edited with Laura
Tunbridge), Music’s Nordic Breakthrough: Aesthetics, Modernity, and
Cultural Exchange, 1890-1930 (Boydell, 2021, co-edited with Daniel
M. Grimley) and Rachmaninoff and His World (University of Chicago
Press, 2022). He is a recipient of the Philip Brett Award of the American
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