The article describes a prismatic, multicultural and to some extent multimedia model of literary history presented in the volumes of History of the literary cultures of East-Central Europe, which have been published by John Neubauer and the author over the past ten years. The series responds to the momentous events that have unfolded since the tearing down of the Berlin Wall, offering the first transnational study of the cultural and literary region that stretches from the Baltic countries to Bulgaria and Albania and from Ukraine and Moldova in the East to Czech Republic in the West. This joint work of more than 130 contributors from Europe, United States, Canada, and Australia, sponsored by the International Comparative Literature Association, is not a chronological narrative, but an experiment in writing literary history that acknowledges ruptures as well as transnational connections.
