In “The Origins of the National Consciousness”, Anderson views the role of the development of print-as-commodity as the moving force of the qualitatively new consciousness in the society of the 17th century driven by the generation of authentic and progressive ideas (37).
Anderson points out that the rapid development of capitalism in the world and its penetration in the publishing industry facilitated the search for new markets (38). The main challenge was to find enough readers and buyers for the books. The overall customer base was small due to several factors. First of all, the number of educated people in Europe was relatively small. Secondly, the books were published in Latin, and that limited the number of potential buyers to the bilingual individuals only (Anderson, 38). As soon as the market of the Latin-reading elite was saturated, the capitalist publishers turned to the monoglot majority as the primary source of the customer base.
Naturally, there developed a tendency towards the vernacularization of the market that was facilitated by three driving factors:
- The change of the language character. Over the generations, Latin that was used in books became gradually outdated as the society began to use a more common version of it.
- The division based on religious preferences. In 1517, the theses of Martin Luther were translated and printed in German for faster popularization. The outcomes were the growth of the Protestant influence in Europe and the growing tension in the religious communities as to the norms of publishing religious works in Latin that had been persisted for centuries. As a result, the capitalist publishers could not help but notice how many new segments of the population they could cover selling vernacularized literature.
- The political and geographical factors. As a language, Latin did not belong to any state in Western Europe but was widely used in the realms of religion which made its influence incomplete. At the same time, the vernacularized texts bad much more power combining the geographical, cultural, and political aspects and could address the identities of the readers in a much more effective way.
As a result, the language became a useful tool unifying the communities based on multiple features such as culture, religion, geographical position, and political identity simultaneously providing connectivity between all of these aspects. As unifying as it was for individual nations, the capitalist penetration of publishing and vernacularization of literature brought that states apart from one another increasing their national identities and international tension as a consequence.
Further, in order to avoid the fragmentation of the reader markets, the publishers tended to print and sell literature in just a few languages that were distributed for the nations speaking similar dialects. That way, the speakers of various versions of a particular language learned to comprehend a common language that led to the changes in their cultural identities that went beyond that state borders creating imagined communities unified by written text (Anderson 44).
Besides, the printed books provided a material example of antiquity and became a symbol of development illustrating how far humanity has come over centuries. Finally, the language of published texts became the language of power automatically devaluing the languages of smaller or less influential nations and pushing them out of written culture and, in turn, history.
To sum up, the national consciousness has been tightly connected to the published literature for many centuries. This tendency secured unity of the reading communities but also facilitated division into more and less powerful languages and nations.
Works Cited
Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. New York, New York: Verso, 1991. Print.