About

Between the late eighteenth and early twentieth centuries, writers in Russia, the Ottoman Empire and Japan asked the same questions. Are we backward? What is our literature, measured against Europe's? How do we revive our own tradition and still become modern? Their answers produced reform programmes, new literary languages, large-scale translation from European literatures, and the first modern novels in each tradition.

 NONWESTLIT is the first comparative and multilingual study of these three literary modernities. Rather than tracing each national story alone, it asks what they share. Its working hypothesis is that the non-Western encounter with the Enlightenment produced an accelerated shift in thinking, and with it a common vocabulary and common narrative models across very different cultures.

 Russia, the Ottoman Empire and Japan were never colonised, yet each saw itself as "late" to modernity. That position, imperial and peripheral at once, does not fit the postcolonial model. Comparing the three on the basis of their shared experience of reform, rather than on religious or regional categories, opens a new map of literary modernity: polycentric, plural, and not centred on Western Europe.

Key Facts

• Funding: European Research Council Starting Grant, Horizon 2020, grant agreement no. 950513
• Host institution: University of Bologna, Department of Modern Languages, Literatures and Cultures
• Beneficiary: Middle East Technical University (METU), Ankara
• Principal Investigator: Özen Nergis Dolcerocca
• Duration: 2021–2027
• Languages of the corpus: Russian, Ottoman Turkish, Japanese

Research questions

• Criticism. How did intellectuals of the imperial non-West respond to the challenge of literary modernity? We trace new concepts and debates in literary criticism through the journals of each reform era.
• Translation. What role did translation play in building a national literature? We map what was translated from European languages, how often, and in which modes: adaptation, imitation, rewriting and translation proper.
• Fiction. Which plots, character types and narrative forms did the modern novel borrow, adapt or invent in each tradition?
• Comparison. What do the shared patterns tell us about literary modernity itself, including in the West?

Method

NONWESTLIT combines close reading with computational analysis. The team reads essays, translations and novels in the original languages and in context. In parallel, it builds a structured, multilingual database of nineteenth-century periodicals, with each article described, transcribed and tagged by concept and genre. The two approaches check each other: close reading tells us what to count, and counting shows patterns no single reader could see across three languages and 150 years.

The project works with three frameworks: a world-systems view of centre and periphery; attention to local cultural particularity, which complicates that map; and digital humanities tools for tracing concepts, translation networks and narrative types across the corpus.

• Explore the data and tools.

This project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No 950513).