/lit/ - Literature

Print language was crucial to early European nationalism. Many languages such as Gaelic, Castilian and Breton were pushed to the margins to make way for official state languages like English, Castilian (Spanish) and French, and these languages were at the forefront of nationalist movements, manifesting themselves in countless publications. Nationalism also caused social changes such as the abolishment of serfdom, public education and mass literacy:
>“In effect, by the second decade of the nineteenth century, if not earlier, a ‘model’ of ‘the’ independent national state was available for pirating. (The first groups to do so were the marginalized vernacular-based coalitions of the educated on which this chapter has been focused.) But precisely because it was by then a known model, it imposed certain ‘standards’ from which too-marked deviations were impermissible. Even backward and reactionary Hungarian and Polish gentries were hard put to it not to make a show of ‘inviting in’ (if only to the pantry) their oppressed compatriots. If you like, the logic of San Martín’s Peruvianization was at work. If ‘Hungarians’ deserved a national state, then that meant Hungarians, all of them; it meant a state in which the ultimate locus of sovereignty had to be the collectivity of Hungarian-speakers and readers; and, in due course, the liquidation of serfdom, the promotion of popular education, the expansion of the suffrage, and so on. Thus the ‘populist’ character of the early European nationalism, even when led, demagogically, by the most backward social groups, was deeper than in the Americas: serfdom had to go, legal slavery was unimaginable – not least because the conceptual model was set in ineradicable place.”