ABOUT BOOK

The concept at issue in this book is Weltliteratur, or World Literature. Theoretical ~frameworks usually view the now-famous epistolary exchange between Johann ~Wolfgang von Goethe and the young Johann Peter Eckermann as the true foundation ~of the concept, (though earlier promoters of similar ideas, such as August ~Wilhelm Schlegel can be cited)1. Goethe wrote this to Eckermann in a well-known ~letter in 1827: “National literature is now a rather unmeaning term; the epoch of ~World Literature is at hand, and everyone must strive to hasten its approach”2. ~Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels as well as Richard Moulton and Erich Auerbach, ~among many others, also all contributed to the category from their respective ~historical moments and theoretical perspectives. Marx and Engels, of course, ~took a materialist point of view that emphasized the expansion of the capitalist ~economic project and its progressive conquest of the world as a market. Richard ~Moulton and Erich Auerbach, on the other hand, came from a humanistic philological ~perspective that, as Jérôme David has put it in his reflections on the different ~genealogies of World Literature, “derived from the anxious preoccupation ~with what the literary works mean” (2013: 14) and focused very early on the problems ~of translation and canonization that would become crucial for the conceptual ~debates of our time