National Literature

Abstract

Even as it was in the process of being established at the end of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the productivity and function of the concept of “national literature” was already being questioned. National literature and its apparent oppositeworld literaturefind their origins in German Romanticism. The intimate, organic connection between land, language and people (captured in the concept ofVolksgeist, or “national spirit”) that lies at the heart of all understandings of national literature owes a great deal to the ideas of Johann Gottfried von Herder (1744–1803); the first expression of the concept of aWeltliteratur(world literature) was made by Herder's contemporary, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. This origin of opposites from the same conceptual terrain is less surprising than it might seem. From our contemporary perspective, it is all too easy to imagine that the idea of national literature has been gradually superseded by ideas of world literature, global culture, and cosmopolitanismthe xenophobia and false limits of the national giving way over time to the borderless imaginings that we (too quickly) assign to contemporary cultural production. But in literature the “world” was always already a category that unsettled the assertion of the national. Goethe's scattered comments on world literature show how the consolidation of a number of discrete national‐literary fields immediately opens up its opposite: the possibility of encountering numerous literary traditions as a form of enlightened training in both difference and the common humanity thought to be expressed incompletely in each national form.