This volume is the outcome of a co-ordinated effort of a group of scholars who set themselves the task of reconsidering nineteenth-century Latvian literary history. We are seeking to pluralize literary history studies by looking for novel insights into Latvian literature and contributing to the research of East-Central European literary cultures. Scholars from diverse but related research fields (literature, history, art history, and folklore studies) scan the nineteenth-century cultural scene from various intersecting perspectives, taking into account important links between literature, oral culture and visual art, changes in reading practices, periodicals, and the book market as well as the complex interactions between social transformations and aesthetic developments.

The Enlightenment of peasants, an 18th-century phenomenon that originated from an interest in common people and ideas of about the emancipation of the lower classes, had a crucial impact on creating Latvian secular literary culture. When Baltic German intellectuals, inspired by the Popular Enlightenment in German-speaking countries, undertook the task to educate Latvian peasants through books, they also laid the foundation for the future emancipation of Latvian culture. By exploring the nature of book production and changing images of peasants in Livonia and Courland in the second part of the 18th and the beginning of the 19th century, this book offers insights into the complex historical relationship between Latvians and Baltic Germans and the regional specifics of the Baltic Enlightenment.