unity is allowed to put on new phases of external form, but whose ‘essence’ is declared to remain unaltered? (21) These considerations introduced Posnett’s chapter on ‘Relativity of Literature,’ in which he asserted that literary production varies by the stage of social life in which it is produced. Admittedly, Posnett envisioned cultural relativity in a rather absolutist way. Building uncritically on the work of Herbert Spenser and the legal historian Sir Henry Maine, Posnett adopted a simple evolutionary scheme, summarized by Joseph Leerssen as the progression ‘vom clan-System zum Stadtstaat, weiter zur Nation und schlieslich zu einer universalen Kultur und “Weltliteratur”.’ Interestingly, though, Leerssen misstates the progression as Posnett actually gave it, for Posnett saw world literature as arising in imperial settings in late antiquity, long before the birth of the modern nation. Posnett himself noted that his ordering might seem counter-intuitive, but he insisted that the facts would bear him out: ‘it may be said that our order of treatment [of world literature] – after the literatures of the city commonwealth and before those of the nation – is not in harmony with prevailing ideas of literary development. Why not pass, it may be asked, from the city commonwealth to the nation, and from national literatures reach the universalism of world-literature?’ (240) He answered that modern European nations are heirs of Greco-Roman ideas and institutions, and so he must first treat the ‘days of world-empire and world-literature’ before turning to national literatures (241). In keeping with his anti-cosmopolitanism, Posnett spoke of world literature in quite negative terms: ‘The leading mark of worldliterature [...] is the severance of literature from defined social groups – the universalizing of literature, if we may use such an expression’ EUP_CCS3_1_09_Damrosch 3/7/06, 1:49 PM 106 The Global Origins of Comparative Studies 107 (238). The Roman Empire became Posnett’s model for a rootless cosmopolitanism whose literary productions lack any vital connection to a defined social group: ‘A society of such limited sympathies and unlimited selfishness was unsuited to the production of song. [...] if imagination depends on the existence of some genuine sense of human brotherhood, be it wide as the world or narrow as the clan, we must admit that the social life of Imperial Rome was such as must destroy any literature’ (266, 268). Publishing his work as he moved from the inner to the outer margins of the British Empire, Posnett saw clearly the dangers of an imperial cosmopolitanism. * * * How successful were Posnett and Meltzl in achieving their ambitious goals? Posnett was bitterly disappointed that his book failed to win many adherents. It was, notably, translated into Japanese within a few years of its publication, but it received little attention elsewhere. A brilliant, querulous autodidact, Posnett had read his way so far beyond the bounds of ordinary academic training that few were prepared to follow his lead, and for his part Posnett made little effort to engage with contemporary scholarship. Indeed, his book’s preface advertised his position as doubly marginal – methodologically as much as geographically. Posnett began by roundly declaring that ‘To assume a position on the border-lands of Science and Literature is perhaps to provoke the hostility of both the great parties into which our modern thinkers and educationists may be divided.’ He closed the preface by alluding to his shifting geographical position: ‘Should errors of print or matter have escaped the author’s notice, he would beg his readers to remember that this work was passing through the press just as he was on the eve of leaving this country for New Zealand’ (v, vii). Posnett’s global perspective may have led him to seek his appointment at Auckland, yet his move took him far from the Continental venues where the new discipline of comparative literature was being developed, and he made no further substantial contribution to literary studies. He returned to the subject once more, fifteen years later, in an article in which he proclaimed his pioneering role in coining the name ‘Comparative Literature’ and complained that subsequent scholars had ignored him while pursuing narrower concerns.8 Meltzl and Brassai’s journal was far more directly engaged with the scholarly community, and the journal’s international board collectively had the linguistic knowledge that Posnett lacked. But how did Meltzl’s EUP_CCS3_1_09_Damrosch 3/7/06, 1:49 PM 107