La République mondiale des lettres in the World Republic of Scholarship

Abstract

Pascale Casanova’s seminal book has had an enormous and continuing impact around the world in a dozen languages, and as a result La République mondiale des lettres has itself become subject to the processes described within the book itself, as it enters world scholarly space. Casanova herself reflected directly on the somewhat unsettling results of this process, and her subsequent work was shaped in various ways by the international response to her pathbreaking book. This essay examines Casanova’s responses to the varied responses to her book, and suggests that her subsequent books should be understood as embodying a resulting mixture of resistance and rethinking of her earlier positions.