Reconsidering Karl Marx’s Concept of World Literature

It is widely assumed that Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels regarded world literature as an epiphenomenal product of the capitalist world market, and therefore as a symptom of rather than potential cure to the crisis of modern society. However, this conflicts with the fact that they designated the Communist Manifesto itself as a world-literary production—the joint work of communists of various nationalities—and opposed it to the national limitations of German socialist literature. This article challenges existing interpretations by outlining how Marx and Engels incorporated the humanistic idealism of the Goethean Weltliteratur tradition into the theoretical framework of historical materialism. It shows, on the one hand, how they linked human liberation under communism to the development of world-historical consciousness, and, on the other, how they conceived written literature as the material presence of historical alterity within a society. In light of these arguments, Marx and Engels’ concept of world literature can be reconsidered as a modernist literary ideal

Alterity · Communism · German idealism · German Literature · Humanism · Idealism · Manifesto · World literature · Comparative and World Literature · Ecocriticism and Environmental Literature · German Literature and Culture Studies