Chapter 31 scrutinises the term Weltliteratur (world literature), often invoked but little understood. Weltliteratur is a motif in Goethe’s oeuvre, rather than a unified theory, and it either describes the increased international literary exchanges which are the result of modernisation, or it has a normative charge, suggesting that Weltliteratur enables intercultural understanding. The chapter considers the origins of and various sources for the concept, together with its key resonances and concerns; it also reflects on the role played by the term in the establishment of the modern academic discipline of comparative literature.

Chapter 3 explores colonial archives to unearth two models of comparatism – one diachronic or chronological and the other synchronic or territorial. The first model emerged from Jones’s works, both his translations and his speculative essays in Asiatick Researches, covering a broad range of subjects such as Indian chronology, astronomy, literary history, and so on. Along with this, and in explicit opposition, the second model was developed by colonial officials such as Brian H. Hodgson and W. W. Hunter through their copious comparative vocabularies: Hodgson’s numerous essays published in the Journal of the Asiatic Society after 1847 and Hunter’s A Comparative Dictionary of the Languages of India and High Asia, with a Dissertation (1868). The potential of these two phases was fully realized in the ambitious Linguistic Survey of India (1894–1928) under the supervision of George Abraham Grierson. My claim in this chapter is that, with Grierson’s attempt to enumerate and describe modern Indian vernaculars, and his seamless mixing of colonial structures and linguistic knowledge in the survey, we encounter the full range of the comparative method for the first time.

In parallel with the establishment of English as an academic subject, Pater’s lifetime coincided with the institutionalisation of Modern Languages as an independent field of study within British universities. Pater’s contribution to the debate over a School of English at Oxford must therefore be understood in relation to his involvement with the Oxford School of Modern Languages and with the cultural and social space of the Taylorian Institution. In 1890, Pater was invited to contribute to the prestigious Taylor Lectures, which were designed to promote the study of modern European languages and literatures. The resulting lecture and essay, ‘Prosper Mérimée’, presents the French writer as a cosmopolitan and cultural mediator. After Pater’s death, the first series of Taylor lectures was collected in a volume entitled Studies in European Literature (1900). Reading the essay on Mérimée in the context of that volume enables us to see Pater as an advocate of a comparative approach to literature and as rejecting the nationalist mentality in which the rise of English in universities found itself implicated.

This chapter comparatively probes the distinct trajectories of avant-garde poetics in Spanish America and Brazil from the postwar to the 1980s. The 1920s and 1930s witnessed the rise of the Spanish American Vanguardias and Brazilian Modernismo, which adapted European experimental vocabularies to local contexts. Subsequently, a revival of the utopian avant-garde impulse developed into singular and divergent poetic forms of expression. This divergence can be clearly seen in, among other things, the preference in Brazil for synthetic forms and in Spanish America for the long poem. In other cases, the traditions converged in the adoption of an anti-lyrical stance, constructivist concerns, the use of long forms, and politically engaged poetry. From the 1970s on, the neo-baroque aesthetic also brought together figures from the entire region. This chapter looks at these divergences as well as points of confluence, seeking to understand how, in general, the reception of Surrealism and other poetic traditions led to a more “discursive,” personal poetry, and how the foregrounding of the materiality of language fueled synthetic, non-discursive forms.

This chapter comparatively probes the distinct trajectories of avant-garde poetics in Spanish America and Brazil from the postwar to the 1980s. The 1920s and 1930s witnessed the rise of the Spanish American Vanguardias and Brazilian Modernismo, which adapted European experimental vocabularies to local contexts. Subsequently, a revival of the utopian avant-garde impulse developed into singular and divergent poetic forms of expression. This divergence can be clearly seen in, among other things, the preference in Brazil for synthetic forms and in Spanish America for the long poem. In other cases, the traditions converged in the adoption of an anti-lyrical stance, constructivist concerns, the use of long forms, and politically engaged poetry. From the 1970s on, the neo-baroque aesthetic also brought together figures from the entire region. This chapter looks at these divergences as well as points of confluence, seeking to understand how, in general, the reception of Surrealism and other poetic traditions led to a more “discursive,” personal poetry, and how the foregrounding of the materiality of language fueled synthetic, non-discursive forms.

Ernst Robert Curtius’s European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages remains a monumental achievement of postwar scholarship, whose vast scope – spanning a continent and more than a millennium – has kept it continuously relevant. However, its strangely atemporal view of literature, its treatment of medieval Latin as a medium (rather than a creative literature in its own right), and its peculiar structure have likewise been criticized since its publication. This essay argues that ELLMA’s virtues and faults are intertwined, and that both are inseparable from Curtius’s use of the psychoanalytic theories of C.G. Jung. Adapting Jung’s theories of archetypes and the stratified collective unconscious to literary study, Curtius reimagined medieval Latin as the collective unconscious of modern European literature. This boldly creative decision allowed him to achieve his goal: a reparative vision of a Europe forever unified through classical education.

The introduction outlines some important differences in approaches to literature and ethics. It goes on to situate the following work in relation to those differences. For example, we may be concerned principally with the literature (e.g., how to evaluate literary works morally) or the ethics (e.g., how to think in more nuanced ways about ethical problems in real life); this volume is concerned principally with the latter. More significantly, the study of ethics may be descriptive or normative. In other words, it may address what constitutes ethical thought or it may advocate a particular version of ethics. The book is divided into two parts. The first part treats descriptive ethics, seeking to isolate cross-cultural and transhistorical patterns in the relation between ethical attitudes, on the one hand, and structures of storytelling, on the other. The second part takes up normative ethics, focusing on an aspect of emotional response that is important in both ethics and literature – empathy.

In this chapter we argue that a predominant concern in many contemporary European crime novels is the consolidation of a democratic culture that protects the rights of citizens and upholds the rule of law. Drawing on a wide range of literary texts from across the continent, we analyse this overall ambition via three of its major manifestations: democratization as seen most clearly in post-dictatorial transitional societies, the treatment of immigrants as an indicator of inclusiveness and social equality and the honest discussion of the national past as the foundation for a healthy democratic culture. What these three themes have in common is that they embody our greatest social aspirations while at the same time being vulnerable to horrific criminal aberrations, which is why crime fiction is a particularly apt medium for analysing and understanding them. This duality forms the basis of one of the master narratives of European crime fiction: the story of how the unsettling and often dangerous process of uncovering crime is the precondition for a more perfect democratic society.

Edward Said’s lifelong commitment to Romance philology and the discipline of Comparative Literature gave him an unusual and critical angle on the globalization of culture and ideas. This chapter explains that heritage and demonstrates the usefulness and power of that critique.

Chapter 11 offers historical reflections on the role that translation has played in comparative literature as a discipline in Europe and in East Asia. It examines current scholarship to cast light on the relationship between translation and comparative literature and the polemics that this relationship has sparked. It argues for a diversified view of translation and comparative literature that acknowledges not one but many conceptualizations of their interrelations.

The inadequacies inherent in tracing literary history in purely national terms have been apparent ever since the emergence of national literature in the early nineteenth century: the problems caused by multilingual nations, authors, and texts; by multinational languages, and so on. If world literature is not merely to replicate the errors of national-literary analysis on a larger scale, then new geographies will be needed. Various options exist, from the “areas” of Area Studies (linked to a dubious model of “civilizational” contact and conflict), to “-spheres” and “-phones” (the Sinophone, the Anglosphere, etc.), to hemispheric and oceanic studies. Each of these approaches opens new perspectives – and creates new blind spots. I review an alternative model, which I have earlier proposed in my An Ecology of World Literature (Verso Books, 2015), which seeks instead to identify typological similarities between the “ecological” contexts in which literatures exist. These similarities are transhistoric and trans-continental, and while they do not provide a perfect substitute for geographically-based models in all circumstances, my ecological typology suggests new comparative possibilities for world literature.

Comparing cultural developments in Ireland with European romanticism is problematic on a number of scores. The European periodisation of romanticism is broader than the English-derived start- and end-dates applied to Ireland; European surveys, in aggregating many exemplars from many different countries, create an unjustified impression of quantitative preponderance, against which background any small individual country would appear comparatively scant; and a proper European comparison should juxtapose Ireland with similar countries (imperial peripheries like Bohemia, Croatia, or Finland), rather than with imperial-metropolitan heartlands such as neighbouring France or England. This chapter attempts to correct these imbalances. Most importantly, it is argued that romanticism manifested itself, not only in the field of poetic production (to which its meaning is reduced nowadays), but also in the fields of cultural reflection and knowledge production; and it is in these fields that Irish developments are most closely analogous to European ones.

Affect Studies are arguably still dominated by Eurocentric assumptions and categories. There is a tendency to universalize the emotions rather than pay attention to translating across differing cultural contexts and languages. To what degree do we need to take into account other taxonomies of affect informed by other languages and cultures as providing alternative grammars of the emotions (linked, for example to aesthetics) that are quite separate from the prevailing European concepts dominated by psychology and psychoanalysis? Like the ‘psy’ disciplines from which they derive, Affect Studies are too often dependent on universalist and ahistorical conceptual categories. The chapter examines Han Kang’s The Vegetarian (recent Man-Booker winner) to ask questions concerning the translatability of affect. Is it useful, for example, to invoke the Korean concept of ‘han’ as an interpretive lens for considering Kang’s text or does this land us inevitably in cultural essentialism? As we open up our concepts to the world, translation will be an unavoidable foundational element.