Restoration censorship forced European Romantic literature to retreat from society and politics into subjective intimacy, fantasy, mythology, history, and exotic places. In addition to conforming to restrictions, however, censorship also led writers to evade its control (pseudonyms, publication abroad, allusive style) and, more rarely, to overt or covert rebellion (petitions, satire, etc.). An example of this is the German sonnets written by the Slovenian romanticist France Prešeren in the mid-1830s as a poetic response to the public controversy over the cultural strategies of national revival (the so-called Slovenian ABC war) and the behind-the-scenes struggles over the censorship of the poetry almanac Krajnska čbelica (Carniolan Bee). With their illocutionary force, Prešeren’s sonnets are directed against prominent collaborators of censorship and the centers of ecclesiastical and secular power that wanted to keep the embrionic Slovenian literary field under their control. These poems move between satirical irony and sentiment, between the fictional suspension of dominant positions in the field and the search for sympathy for the depressing lack of consecration. The satire against the censors of his elegy dedicated to Matija Čop stands out with its acrostic and the affect of rage.

The introduction gives a survey of recent developments in cultural nationalism and world literature studies. I argue that these trends have come to tackle the issues of cross-cultural transfers in antithetical directions: While the former highlighted the transnational patterns of national self-fashioning, the latter wanted to reclaim the individual and the particular from all-absorbing globalist commodification. Then I summarize the findings of the articles collected in this issue as reminders that Goethe’s take on world literature as a tool for a dialogic national self-formation has not fully lost its validity even in our post-national present.