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In a radical and ambitious reconceptualization of the field, this book argues that global literary culture since the eighteenth century was fundamentally shaped by colonial histories. It offers a comprehensive account of the colonial inception of the literary sovereign – how the realm of literature was thought to be separate from history and politics – and then follows that narrative through a wide array of different cultures, multilingual archives, and geographical locations. Providing close studies of colonial archives, German philosophy of aesthetics, French realist novels, and English literary history, this book shows how colonialism shaped and reshaped modern literary cultures in decisive ways. It breaks fresh ground across disciplines such as literary studies, anthropology, history, and philosophy, and invites one to rethink the history of literature in a new light.

Summary

This chapter revisits the nineteenth-century idea of Weltliteratur through colonial histories. It argues that world literature in the nineteenth century does not name a corpus, a space, or even a problem in literary history. It does not even refer to one single history or one singular event as the origin point for a planetary vision of literature. Rather, it directs one to the confluence of global histories that produced a modern idea of literature and some of the critical tools that constituted the new discipline of literary studies. The material condition for this confluence was provided by modern European empires and their meticulous arrangements for colonial governance, sustained through painstaking engagement with different linguistic and scribal traditions. This argument is fleshed out through close readings of the works of a host of colonial officials stationed in British India and their local interlocutors, and through their method of “colonial philology.” Colonial archives and philological methods, this paper suggests, provide one of the early genealogies of world literature as an idea.

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Colonialism, World Literature, and the Making of the Modern Culture of Letters

5 - Colonial Philology and the Origins of World Literature

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2 results

Colonialism, World Literature, and the Making of the Modern Culture of Letters

5 - Colonial Philology and the Origins of World Literature

Summary