Alexander Maxwell (Victoria University, Wellington)
Abstract
As the era of nationalism began, Slavs in the Habsburg Empire espoused Panslavism, which they imagined as a linguistic community arising because all Slavs spoke the same “Slavic language.” Efforts to promote this language, and the distinct literary traditions it encompassed, rested on the unstated assumption that a single “language” may contain multiple literary traditions, imagined as “dialectical” yet written in distinct orthographies. This paper examines this literary Panslavism as a form of nationalist politics. It suggests that literary Panslavism affected subsequent Czechoslovak and Yugoslav nationalism, both of which similarly posited a single language with multiple literary traditions.
Biografie
Alexander Maxwell is associate professor of history at Victoria University in Wellington, New Zealand. He completed his Ph.D. at the University of Wisconsin, Madison in 2003. He previously taught at the University of Wales Swansea, and the University of Nevada, Reno. He is the author of Choosing Slovakia, Patriots Against Fashion, and Everyday Nationalism in Hungary. He has published widely on nationalism theory and nationalism in East-Central Europe. He has guest edited themed issues of Nationalities Papers, Nationalism and Ethnic Politics, the Journal of Nationalism, Memory, and Language Politics, German Studies Review, and Central Europe. He is currently working on Habsburg Panslavism.