Literary Communities and Literary Worlds (LCLW) is a project about the nature of and relationship between community, labour and belonging. At a time of increasing nativism and nationalism, it considers the fates of several mid-twentieth century authors who moved from one literary community to another. By tracking their efforts, and by connecting these with a host of other agents and institutions – publishers, editors, little magazines, book series, universities, writers’ groups – LCLW tells a story about the conditions of literary production and reception; about the horizons of expectation and possibility from which works emerge and which determine their meanings; and about the literary world of the mid-twentieth century.
Telling this story has involved developing two strands of research, each focused on a particular set of authors, and making use of a different conceptual lens. The first strand adopts Pierre Bourdieu’s model of the ‘literary field’, and examines the trajectories and practices of Vladimir Nabokov and Denise Levertov, all of whom succeeded in gaining entry to the American literary field, having begun their careers in the German, Russian and British fields respectively. This makes it possible to distinguish between citizenship and the kind of belonging achieved within a community of practice, and to trace the costs and demands of such belonging. It also makes it possible to identify the peculiar dimensions of, as well as the relationships between, the fields from which they departed and the one into which they arrived, and thus to build a picture of the structure of the literary world in the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s – a period shaped by crises and conflicts whose shadows loom over those of the present.
The second strand of research begins with Theodor Adorno's notion of ‘literary material’, and considers a different set of authors: Richard Wright, Peter Abrahams, Guy Butler and Kamau Brathwaite. All four incorporated West African aesthetic materials into signal works of the 1950s and 1960s, and all encountered West African artists and intellectuals. IBut only Brathwaite seems to have made any real effort to engage with a West African community of letters. The trajectories of these authors open up a line of inquiry into the nature and portability of literary materials, and bring into view the differences between literary communities that are capable of enforcing submission to their codes, and those which may be treated simply as sites of material extraction.
From the outset, LCLW has had four primary research objectives. To advance an understanding of literary context by uncovering the dynamics of particular literary communities of the mid-twentieth century; to develop a comprehensive and detailed theory of the literary world, by identifying forms of literary community and by establishing the relationship between them; to contribute to the understanding of literature after 1945, and especially literature of the Cold War and of exile, by offering innovative readings of authors and works that are otherwise kept apart; and, above all, to determine the importance of literary practice and literary institutions to these communities, by and elucidating various strategies of integration and belonging.
These objectives have been largely met, albeit in sometimes unexpected ways. What has emerged over the course of the research is a sense of the literary world that is more multi-dimensional than the one with which the project began, and more attuned to structural inequalities governing the transnational dimensions of cultural production. This has been essential to one of the project’s principal achievements: the development of a methodology for a world literary criticism.
