The collection Great Immortality: Studies on European Cultural Sainthood edited by Jón Karl Helgason and Marijan Dović, has been nominated for the ESCL Excellence Award for Collaborative Research. The award encourages collaborative comparative research, in recognition of the often-undervalued creative work of editor(s).
In Great Immortality, twenty scholars from considerably different cultural backgrounds explore the ways in which certain poets, writers, and artists in Europe have become major figures of cultural memory. Even though the major focus of the book is the nineteenth-century cults of national poets, the volume examines a wide variety of cases in a very broad temporal and geographical framework – from Dante and Petrarch to the most recent attempts to sanctify artists by both the Catholic and Orthodox churches, and from the rise of a medieval Icelandic author of sagas to the veneration of a poet and national leader in Georgia. The publication is an indirect sequel to National Poets, Cultural Saints: Canonization and Commemorative Cults of Writers in Europe by Jón Karl and Marijan, published in 2017. Both books are part of the National Cultivation of Culture series (12th and 18th volume).
Jón Karl Helgason is a professor at the University of Iceland's Faculty of Icelandic and Comparative Cultural Studies, and Marijan Dović is a specialist at the ZRC SAZU Institute of the Slovenian Literature and Literary Studies in Ljubljana. The collection is published by Brill.
It will be revealed this autumn which book receives the awards.
Information on the collection can be found on the publisher's website.