Comparing What, Precisely? H. M. Posnett and the Conceptual History of ‘Comparative Literature’

Abstract

The emergence of Comparatism is not just a specific topic within the history of literature, or of literary criticism; it should be understood as the point of interaction of at least four major intellectual shifts in the nineteenth century. There may be more factors involved; but the four I highlight in the following pages are: 1) the progressive development of scientific methods and insights; 2) the institutional infrastructures underlying the ‘social production of knowledge’, such as the status of intellectuals (critics, historians, philologists, antiquaries) and the education system;1 3) cultural ideologies concerning the diversities within humankind and what value judgements to attach to those; and 4) political loyalties and convictions, conscious or not, concerning power relations between and within countries. To add yet another dimension to that complexity: these four forcelines were aligned differently in different countries (Britain, Germany and France being most relevant in the present context), and shifted at differential rates over the decades; yet developments in one country could act as stimuli on other, differently situated ones. ‘The’ development of a quiddity called ‘Comparative Literature’ in nineteenth-century Britain is therefore as complex a process as the development of the weather, or obesity, and all that anyone can say about it must be said under the proviso of partiality – one’s own as much as others’.2 Since the days of Foucault, we can take as a given the fact that scientific knowledge, which rests its claims to epistemic superiority (objectivity,