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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
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