World Literature

In this article, I address the relationship between world literature theories and questions of peace and war. I argue that the genesis of the concept of world literature in the 1790s was informed by profound transformations, in political theory, of the issue of the relevance and meaning of war and peace and their public perception. Theorists such as Wieland, Novalis, Jean Paul, and Fichte offered their concepts in response to the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, adjusting them to shifting frontlines and the change of military fortune. Goethe’s notion of Weltliteratur already reflected on the geopolitics of the post-Napoleonic age, a period of relative tranquility. I reconstruct Goethe’s commitment to international peace provided by the Holy Alliance and confront it with Fichte’s dedication to emancipatory war. I argue that the Enlightenment’s innovation of one last war against all wars (in the form of a global civil war) was an equally important prompt for world literature theories as the proposals for perpetual peace

Alliance · Geopolitics · International relations · Politics · Spanish Civil War · World War II · Comparative and World Literature · German Literature and Culture Studies · Philosophy and Historical Thought