Introduction to the special issue World literature and the strategies of nation-building

Abstract

The introduction gives a survey of recent developments in cultural nationalism and world literature studies. I argue that these trends have come to tackle the issues of cross-cultural transfers in antithetical directions: While the former highlighted the transnational patterns of national self-fashioning, the latter wanted to reclaim the individual and the particular from all-absorbing globalist commodification. Then I summarize the findings of the articles collected in this issue as reminders that Goethe’s take on world literature as a tool for a dialogic national self-formation has not fully lost its validity even in our post-national present.