PhD thesis defence by Isabelle Riepe
The German composite term Weltliteratur (world literature), like many other historiographical and scholarly terms, has endured throughout time due to its vague and multifaceted meaning and application. This thesis hypothesises that the term Weltliteratur presents a material and cultural lens into wider historical developments in the German Sattelzeit (roughly 1750-1850). It addresses historians, literary historians, and critics with a methodological intervention by identifying and analysing how materiality, in the form of books, texts, and objects, operates in the earliest uses of Weltliteratur. These ‘things’ serve as the performative and experimental tools in the literary laboratory of eighteenth and nineteenth-century Germany. To study the historical formation and development of Weltliteratur, this thesis loosely draws on the framework of historiographical concepts: Reinhart Koselleck’s Begriffsgeschichte and Hans-Jörg Rheinberger’s concept of the ‘epistemtic thing’. Through the processes of conception, translation, commoditisation, politicisation and universalisation, this thesis tells a material story about the motivations and environments that conditioned the formation of Weltliteratur as a term and as an epistemic thing. The printed and written mentions of Weltliteratur emerge as unanticipated results of intellectual and literary experimentation.
This thesis moves beyond the predominant focus on Johann Wolfgang Goethe as the most renowned author of Weltliteratur in literary histories. It studies the materiality and ‘material experiences’ at work in its formation between its first mention by the Göttingen historian August Ludwig Schlözer in 1773 and the beginning of the Universal Bibliothek published by Reclam in 1867. Through a material culture approach, performative and experimental expressions and connotations of Weltliteratur emerge that originate from contemporary ambitions that retrospective historiographical and literary definitions cannot quite capture. This thesis argues that metaphors and references to objects should be taken at face value: the material environment of texts and the material environment of authors are permeable. The materiality of books and objects and their authors’ material environment allows us to reread people’s experiences through their own language, perception of materiality and imagination. This requires a close reading of printed texts and archival material and an obligation to the object and materiality of the book.
A historical study of the composite term Weltliteratur has not concentrated on the ‘material’ book itself. The use of the concept of ‘materiality’ contributes to a broad range of scholarship by bringing together literary and historical contexts through material, political and economic conditions. Weltliteratur emerges as a historical term interwoven with German publishing, history and historiography long before Goethe, comparative literature and literary history redeveloped it.