Terry Eagleton reviews Casanova's World Republic of Letters

'The history of the republic of letters, in Casanova's view, passes through four distinct stages. First, there was the challenge of the Renaissance and Reformation to the ancient hegemony of Latin and the Catholic Church. National literatures emerged, along with the idea of a world literature and an international literary market. If Italy was the first "recognised literary power", France followed hard on its heels, hotly pursued by Spain and England. War broke out in the late 18th century between Germany (for which literature was national, populist, Romantic and organic) and France, the home of the classical, elitist and universal. The second stage is literary nationalism, in which writing finds a role by harnessing itself to the building of the nation state. Literature and language become vital instruments of political power. In a third stage, writing frees itself from its former political dependency and makes its strike for freedom. This is known as modernism. You can tell that a district of the republic of letters has made it when its poetry and fiction are regarded as entirely useless. It is the culturally well-heeled, in short, who can afford to forget about the internecine struggles for authority and recognition that mark the literary republic as a whole, and that "dominated" nations in Africa, Asia and Latin America can scarcely avoid. For Old Europe, literature becomes pure, free, timeless and universal. Zulu poets struggling to get translated are not so sure. The fourth stage is when the empire writes back - when poetry, fiction and drama once again provide a means of access to the global cultural economy for those who have been excluded from it. The greatest revolutionaries of literature, as Casanova comments, are to be found among the ranks of those struggling to get out from under an imposed colonial language, and who are compelled to invent any number of ingenious devices to do so. It is European realism that hampers their development, as do European tariffs.' More here.