Great Immortality

Marijan Dović is an associate professor at the ZRC SAZU Institute of the Slovenian Literature and Literary Studies in Ljubljana. He has published extensively in Slovenian and English on cultural nationalism, national poets, the literary canon, systems theory, the avant-garde, and authorship.Jón Karl Helgason is a professor in the Department of Icelandic and Comparative Cultural Studies at the University of Iceland. He has published monographs and articles on cultural history, cultural saints, metafiction and the afterlife of Iceland’s medieval literature.

"The culture-specific particularities and the local twists to the editors’ foundational model keep the individual case studies intriguing. [...]. Great Immortality contributes in meaningful and significant ways to the new surge of nationalism studies. [...] "Brill’s book series National Cultivation of Culture, in which Helgason and Dović’s excellent volume appears, keeps on producing such fine scholarship to investigate these complex matters further". Sándor Hites, in Literary Research, Fall 2020. "A stimulating and rich collection of essays, Great Immortality introduces and explores the metaphor of “cultural saint” in its bid to understand the complex relationship between authors’ and creative artists’ lives, their reception by their contemporaries and their posterity, and the relationship of these factors to 19th-century romantic nationalism. [...] The volume’s engagement with the nature of cultus presents not only important insights into European cultural history but also into 19th- and early 20th-century memory politics and canon formations." Zsuzsanna Varga, in CompLit Journal of European Literature, Arts and Society, 2022.

• PrefaceMarko Juvan and Sveinn Yngvi EgilssonAcknowledgementsList of FiguresNotes on ContributorsIntroductionMarijan Dović and Jón Karl HelgasonPart 1: 1 Sacral States: The Politics of Worship, Religious and SecularJoep Leerssen2 Framing the Bones of Dante and Petrarch: Literary Cults and Scientific DiscoursesHarald HendrixPart 2: 3 Taming a Romantic: The Canonization of Adam MickiewiczRoman Koropeckyj4 The Riddles of the Shevchenko CultChristian Noack5 Hagiographic Discourse in the Early Biographies of France PrešerenAlenka Koron6 Stanko Vraz and the Missing Saints of the Illyrian MovementAndraž JežPart 3: 7 Bialik the Prophet and the Modern Hebrew CanonDavid Fishelov8 Jacint Verdaguer, a Catalan Cultural SaintMagí Sunyer and Jaume Subirana9 “Altars of the Flemish Movement”: Tombstones and Rituals of Nation-BuildingAndreas StynenPart 4: 10 Hero or Traitor? The Cultural Canonization of Snorri Sturluson in Denmark, Norway, Iceland, and BeyondSimon Halink11 Ilia Chavchavadze: Georgia’s Cultural Saint and a Saint of the Georgian Orthodox ChurchBela Tsipuria12 The Third Canonization of Njegoš, the National Poet of MontenegroBojan BaskarPart 5: 13 Prophet, Martyr, Saint: Mihai Eminescu’s Lateral CanonizationAndrei Terian14 Antoni Gaudí and Jože Plečnik: Two Architects on the Path from Cultural Canonization to Catholic BeatificationLuka Vidmar15 From the Culture of Saints to the Saints of Culture: The Saint and the Writer between Life and WorkJernej HabjanCopyright of FiguresIndex of Names