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Worlding a Peripheral
Literature
Marko Juvan
Canon and World Literature

Series Editor
Zhang Longxi
City University of Hong Kong
Kowloon, Hong Kong
World literature is indeed the most exciting new phenomenon in literary
studies today. It is on the rise as the economic, political, and demographic
relationships and balances are changing rapidly in a globalized world.
A new concept of world literature is responding to such changes and is
advocating a more inclusive and truly global conceptualization of canonical
literature in the world’s different literary and cultural traditions. With a
number of anthologies, monographs, companions, and handbooks already
published and available, there is a real need to have a book series that
convey to interested readers what the new concept of world literature is or
should be. To put it clearly, world literature is not and cannot be the
simple conglomeration of all the literary works written in the world, but
only the very best works from the world’s different literatures, particularly
literary traditions that have not been well studied beyond their native
environment. That is to say, world literature still needs to establish its
canon by including great works of literature not just from the major
traditions of Western Europe, but also literary traditions in other parts of
the world as well as the “minor” or insufficiently studied literatures in
Europe and North America.

More information about this series at

http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/15725
 Marko Juvan

Worlding a Peripheral
Literature
Marko Juvan
Research Center of the Slovenian
Academy of Sciences and Arts
Ljubljana, Slovenia

Canon and World Literature

ISBN 978-981-32-9404-2    ISBN 978-981-32-9405-9 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-32-9405-9

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer
Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2019
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
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The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information
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publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and
institutional affiliations.

Cover illustration: PjrStatues / Alamy Stock Photo

Title: Monument to France Prešeren (national poet, 1800-1849) in Prešernov trg (Prešeren
Square), Ljubljana, Slovenia.

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature
Singapore Pte Ltd.
The registered company address is: 152 Beach Road, #21-­01/04 Gateway East, Singapore
189721, Singapore
 Acknowledgments

In this book, which is partly based on the ideas of my Slovenian mono-

graph Prešernovska struktura in svetovni literarni sistem (The “Prešernian
Structure” and the Literary World System, Ljubljana: LUD Literatura,
2012), I have rewritten, adapted, and updated more or less extensive seg-
ments of the texts in English that have been previously published under
the following titles:

“World Literature(s) and Peripheries.” In: Marko Juvan, Literary Studies

in Reconstruction: An Introduction to Literature. Frankfurt/M. etc.:
P. Lang, 2011. Pp. 73–86. © Peter Lang.
“Introduction to World Literatures from the Nineteenth to the Twenty-­
First Century.” CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 15.5
(December 2013). Web. © Purdue University Press.
“Worlding Literatures between Dialogue and Hegemony.” CLCWeb:
Comparative Literature and Culture 15.5 (December 2013). Web. ©
Purdue University Press.
“The Crisis of Late Capitalism and the Renaissance of World Literature.”
In: Irma Ratiani, ed. National Literatures and the Process of Cultural
Globalization. Tbilisi: Shota Rustaveli Institute of Georgian literature,
2014. Pp. 21–33.
“Peripheries and the World System of Literature: A Slovenian Perspective.”
In: Amaury Dehoux, ed. Centres et périphéries de la littérature mondi-
ale. Saint-Denis: Connaissances et Savoirs, 2018. Pp. 91–118. © ed.
Connaissances et Savoirs.
“Perspectivizing World Literature.” Literaturna misal 61.1 (2018): 3–19.

v
vi ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

“Literary Self-Referentiality and the Formation of the National Literary

Canon: The Topoi of Parnassus and Elysium in the Slovene Poetry of
the 18th and 19th Centuries.” Transl. Marta Pirnat – Greenberg.
Neohelicon: Acta Comparationis Litterarum Universarum 31.1 (2004):
113–123. © Springer Nature.
“Romanticism and National Poets on the Margins of Europe: Prešeren
and Hallgrímsson.” In: Sonja Stojmenska-Elzeser et al., eds. Literary
Dislocations. Skopje: Institute of Macedonian Literature, 2012.
Pp. 592–600.
“World Literature in Carniola: Transfer of Romantic Cosmopolitanism
and the Making of National Literature.” Transl. Jean McCollister. In:
Jüri Talvet, ed. World Literature and National Literatures (Interlitteraria,
17). Tartu: Tartu University Press, 2012. Pp. 27–49.
“In the Background of the ‘Alphabet War’: Slovenian-Czech Interliterary
Relations and World Literature.” Transl. Jean McCollister. In: Liina
Lukas, ed. Taming World Literature (Interlitteraria, 20, 1). Tartu:
University of Tartu Press, 2015. Pp. 148–158.
“The Nation between the Epic and the Novel: France Prešeren’s the
Baptism on the Savica as a Compromise ‘World Text’.” Transl. Mojca
Šorli and Neville Hall. Canadian Review of Comparative Literature
42.4 (2015): 382–395. © CRCL/RCLC.
“The Aesthetics and Politics of Belonging: National Poets between
‘Vernacularism’ and ‘Cosmopolitanism’.” Arcadia: Zeitschrift fur ver-
gleichende Literaturwissenschaft 52.1 (2017): 10–28. © de Gruyter.

I would like to thank Shota Rustaveli Institute of Georgian literature,

Institute of Macedonian Literature, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, Peter
Lang, Purdue University Press, de Gruyter, Connaissances et Savoirs,
Springer Nature, University of Tartu Press, and Canadian Review of
Comparative Literature (CRCL/RCLC) for their permissions to use my
texts published in their editions.
I am most grateful to Professor Zhang Longxi, the editor of the series
Canon and World Literature, for his care and confidence. I would also like
to express my gratitude to Ms. Sara Crowley-Vigneau, the responsible edi-
tor of my book, and Ms. Connie Li, the editorial assistant, for all their
support during the preparation of this book.
 Contents

1 Introduction  1

2 The Canonicity of World Literature and National Poets 35

3 Perspectivizing World Literature (in Translation) 61

4 The Birth of National Literature from the Spirit of the

Classical Canon 81

5 World Literature in Carniola141

6 A Compromise “World Text”199

7 Worlding the National Poet in the World-­System of

Translation219

Works Cited257

Index277

vii
 CHAPTER 1

Introduction

In his private notes, written during the fascist repression of the Slovenian
minority in Italy, the Slovenian writer Vladimir Bartol (1903–1967), who
was compelled to leave his native Trieste and flee across the Italian border
to Ljubljana in his youth, boldly considered his novel Alamut (1938) a
potential global hit (see Košuta 1988: 554, 1991). In fact, the text gives
the impression that it was conceived to become an international bestseller,
in precisely the style that Rebecca Walkowitz defines as “born translated”
(Walkowitz 2015: 3–4). It uses an easily translatable style, draws on
Orientalist historical knowledge, sets the story in exotic eleventh-century
Iran, displays erudition, clings to successful genre patterns, creates sus-
pense, and addresses big issues of totalitarianism, dictatorship, terrorism,
and conspiracy theory. In the very year of its first publication in Slovenian,
Bartol tried to offer his novel to the global cultural market. He submitted
a screenplay about Alamut Castle directly to the Hollywood film metropo-
lis, but MGM studios rejected it. Fifty years later, Alamut nevertheless
began to gain worldwide popularity. It has been translated into almost
twenty languages, including English (Bartol 2004). In 2007, the plot and
idea of Bartol’s Orientalist novel even inspired the popular series of video
games Assassin’s Creed, and the Slovenian newspaper Delo reported on 22
February 2013, that the French film director and scriptwriter Guillaume
Martinez was enthusiastically planning to screen Alamut and make an
international hit out of it. Alamut’s success story remains unfinished; it
still has not been adapted for film. As a matter of fact, Bartol’s entrance

© The Author(s) 2019 1

M. Juvan, Worlding a Peripheral Literature, Canon and World
Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-32-9405-9_1
2 M. JUVAN

into global literary traffic occurred due to a favorable, although contin-

gent, historical situation and thanks to a global metropolis. In 1988, when
Alamut was first translated into French, its story and setting coincided
with the topicality of Islamic fundamentalism after Khomeini’s revolution
in Iran. Needless to say, the global obsession with Islamic radicalism, ter-
rorism, and suicide bombers continues to hold sway after 9/11, Al Qaeda,
and ISIS—whatever poses a permanent threat to Western-style democra-
cies and the world-system is suitable for the topicality of Bartol’s novel.
The case of Alamut shows that peripheral authors, even those subjected
to repression of their native language (their primary instrument), may
have a sense of the world literary space and a desire to take a position in
this space. Moreover, when writing intertextually and drawing on trans-
cultural resources, peripheral authors from small literatures and expressing
themselves in minor languages appear to have a better chance at establish-
ing themselves internationally, however troublesome and delayed their
entrance to the world literary traffic might be. However, such cases are
rare, and even rarer is international canonization of peripheral authors.
Probably hardly any player of the game Assassin’s Creed has ever heard of
Bartol, and it would be difficult to find a globally prominent literary critic
or scholar that would mention Bartol among the top fifty world writers of
the twentieth century. Alamut is quite popular across the world, but its
author is a far cry from being an international celebrity. This paradox leads
to the problem of the author function and the canon. The power of the
author function seems to vary according to the historically changeable
position of a particular writer in the world-systems of languages and litera-
tures. How and to what degree do authors partake in the world literary
space if they come from a peripheral (minor, weaker, dependent) literary
system? Compared to authors of major literatures, what are their chances
of becoming recognized, world-famous, awarded, and included in the
international literary canon?
While everybody knows Assassin’s Creed without having the slightest
idea of Bartol as a peripheral writer, everybody is familiar with the name of
Goethe without knowing how he sought to overcome the peripherality of
German letters vis-à-vis the European West. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe,
the internationally recognized promoter of the idea of world literature (his
quotes recur as a topos in every narrative on the history of the concept),
originally referred to the term Weltliteratur in order to lend a touch of
cosmopolitan universality to his writing and establish his position as a
“classical national author” (Goethe 1963: 239–244) in the German lands
 1 INTRODUCTION 3

and Europe alike. In other words, the idea of world literature was instru-
mental not only in rectifying Goethe’s intercultural intertextuality and his
social networking in the international respublica litterarum but also in his
self-canonizing efforts to become a German classic. He aimed to assume
the role of a nation-founding author whose classical universality would
simultaneously transcend nationalist parochialism and represent the
authority central to European literary life. Evidently, he wanted to help
German letters—which he held as backward in comparison to renowned
Western literatures—achieve international recognition on the purportedly
universal basis of humanism and the aesthetic mode of cultural consump-
tion. Such ambitions that surfaced in the context of the nineteenth-cen-
tury European national movements seem to be at odds with Goethe’s
canonical position in world literature today and with the current centrality
of Germany in the European core of the world-system. Hence, Goethe’s
enormous lifetime success and posthumous canonicity obliterated the par-
ticularly semi-peripheral and nationalist subtext of the presumed univer-
sality implied in his influential notion of world literature.
In comparison with existing narratives on world literature featuring
Goethe, I would instead call attention to his role in the nineteenth-­century
nexus of national and world literatures. As I corroborate in this book,
Goethe exemplifies the authorial function of a nation-representing author
from a (semi-)periphery whose canonicity establishes a symbolic link
between national and world literatures as interdependent entities. Having
explored the asymmetrical relations between a peripheral literary field and
the world literary system, I go on to show how a marginal perspective on
the original Goethean nexus of national and world literatures influenced
the emergence and development of one of the internationally least studied
East-Central European peripheries: Slovenian literature.1
The central figure of my theorizing on the nexus of national and world
literature in peripheral Romanticism is the Slovenian national poet France
Prešeren (1800–1849).2 He was born as the third of eight children to a
respected Upper Carniolan peasant family. His mother was literate, knew

1
In addition to a detailed history of the term “world literature,” the discussion of recent
concepts of world literature, in particular the world-systems analysis, the links between the
formation of Slovenian literature and the world literary spaces was the main topic of my
monograph in Slovenian Prešernovska struktura in svetovni literarni sistem (The Prešernian
Structure and the World Literary System; Juvan 2012a; for a review, see Tutek 2013).
2
The following biography of Prešeren is adapted from my encyclopedic entry (Juvan
2018). See also Slodnjak 1952, 1964.
4 M. JUVAN

German, and intended Prešeren for the priesthood. At school in Ljubljana

(1812–1813), his talent was spotted and encouraged by his enlightened
and Francophile teacher Valentin Vodnik (1758–1819), celebrated as the
author of the first Slovenian printed volume of secular poetry (1806).
While finishing his studies at the University of Vienna, he dropped his
clerical ambitions and enrolled as a law student, providing for himself by
various means such as scholarships or work as a private tutor to the future
poet Anastasius Grün and others. He received a doctorate in law in 1828.
While in Vienna, he presented his early poetry in 1825 to the renowned
Slavic philologist Jernej (Bartholomäus) Kopitar, who advised patience
and a more polished reworking of his texts. After obtaining his degree,
Prešeren returned to the Carniolan town of Ljubljana, where he planned
to practice law. After his jurisprudential qualification exam (1832), several
applications for his law practice were unsuccessful because of his bohemian
lifestyle, which raised the suspicion of him being a Freigeist. Ultimately, in
1846, he was allowed to practice in the provincial town of Kranj, where he
worked until his death.
Prešeren’s life was marked by a series of platonic relations or flirtations
with mostly much younger women. The most notable was Julija Primic,
the German-speaking daughter of a wealthy Ljubljana merchant family,
whom he poetically idealized as a Petrarchan “Laura” (1833–1836). In
the 1830s, he reconnected with the philologist Matija Č op (1797–1835)
and other friends from his school days. They founded a literary circle
around the almanac Krajnska čbelica. His comrades in this circle died
young (Č op in 1835, the Polish deportee Emil Korytko in 1839, and
Andrej Smole in 1840), which—added to his professional and amorous
disappointments—worsened his sense of failure. Consequently, the depres-
sive and self-destructive traits of his otherwise introverted, balanced, kind,
and occasionally jovial character began to prevail. He took to drinking,
attempted suicide, and became neglectful of himself. However, he perse-
vered with publishing or circulating his poems. His volume Poezije
(Poesies) appeared in 1847 and, although it did not sell well, some
Slovenian and German critics welcomed it. Prešeren marginally partici-
pated in the revolutionary events of 1848; he died of cirrhosis of the
liver in 1849.
Prešeren is the figurehead of Slovenian Romanticism. Although
Slovenian was his native language, and he consistently wanted to raise it to
a vehicle of literature and culture, like most central European intellectuals
at the time he was functionally bilingual in German and also used that
 1 INTRODUCTION 5

language for correspondence, poems (e.g., the elegy Dem Andenken des
Matthias Č op, To the Memory of Matija Č op, 1835), or translations (e.g.,
Mickiewicz’s sonnet Rezygnacja, Resignation). Although his poetry is
typically Romantic in its themes and genres, it also includes occasional
songs and satirical, humorous, folkloric, jovial, or Anacreontic verse. His
most celebrated work from the 1830s—ballads, Spanish romances, ele-
gies, sonnets, ghazels, and a verse tale—are marked by classicist imagery,
neo-Petrarchism, and reliance on earlier literary models. This universalist,
historicist, and classicist quality, which is also recognizable in his transla-
tions of Bürger and Byron, came to Prešeren by way of his erudite friend,
the philologist and aesthetician Č op. Prešeren’s work circulated through
oral recitation, in manuscripts, leaflets, and pamphlets, as well as in printed
form for a wider public (e.g., in the almanac Krajnska čbelica, in the liter-
ary supplement to the newspaper Laibacher Zeitung entitled Illyrisches
Blatt, and the weekly Novice). His publishing involved many clashes with
the censorship of the Metternich years. Kopitar, the imperial censor for
Slavic publications, became the harshest opponent of Prešeren’s circle.
Prešeren’s first printed book, the historical verse tale Krst pri Savici (The
Baptism on the Savica, 1836) appeared in 600 copies.
During his lifetime, Prešeren was already recognized as an outstanding
figure by various Slovenian, German, and Slavic critics in the Habsburg
Empire, even though his poetry was not fully understood. His role in
Slovenian literary life was underappreciated owing to his slightly bohemian
lifestyle and the fact that his poetry was considered objectionably amorous
and sentimental. His canonization as the Slovenian “national poet,” equal
to masters of world literature, began with the 1866 edition of his poems
by the circle of more radical liberal Young Slovenians. The centenary of
Prešeren’s birth was already a national celebration. His monument was
raised in the center of Ljubljana in 1905. In 1944, the Partisan resistance
movement proclaimed Prešeren Day a national holiday. It was celebrated
not only in communist Yugoslavia but since 1991 also continues to be
celebrated in Slovenia today. Since the German book translations of the
1860s, his major works have been translated into several other languages.
Having briefly presented Prešeren, the protagonist of my narrative, I
now introduce the structure, arguments, and basic concepts of this book.
As I have presented in more detail elsewhere (Juvan 2011: 73–86,
2013), the recent renaissance of Goethean Weltliteratur is a symptom of
sociopolitical shifts of literary studies in the context of globalization and
the crisis of late capitalism. As adopted in the current comparative
6 M. JUVAN

l­iterature, Goethe’s concept primarily refers to the practices and institu-

tions of the cross-national traffic of literary repertories. His metaphorical
parallels between the coming of world literature and the world economy—
with an eye to achieving the balance of trade between unequal stakehold-
ers—have lately inspired transnational comparative studies, especially
theorists that draw on world-systems analysis and its constitutive divide
between core and peripheral literatures. The notion of world literature
thus tends to designate phenomena akin to the present-day cultural glo-
balization and its asymmetrical relation between hegemonic centers and
subordinate semi-­peripheries and peripheries. It refers to economically,
culturally, or politically unequal locations of practices, media, and institu-
tions that foster textual circulation across national and linguistic boundar-
ies, cultural transfer, and translation, intertextual adoption of global
repertoires, cosmopolitan networking, and self-conscious production for
international audiences.
However, since the nineteenth century, national ideology has signifi-
cantly impregnated the originally cosmopolitan discourse of world litera-
ture. Hence, Weltliteratur, conceived as a composition of national
literatures, was instrumental in establishing the international profile and
self-esteem of individual European national literatures, primarily those
that started their worlding from a peripheral or semi-peripheral position.
Notwithstanding its cosmopolitan aim to transcend local parochialism and
national narrow-mindedness through cultural exchange, the idea of world
literature thus reinforced the ideological notion of national literatures in
both the dominant and dependent countries. Within the growing inter-­
state system, individual national literary systems—considered building
blocks of cultural identities necessary for the existence of a nation-state—
took form through imitation of and differing from more established litera-
tures of other communities (neighboring, dominating, or kindred ones).
From this, one may conclude that the concept of world literature rests
on the contradiction between a potentially boundless circulation of texts
and their territorialized production or consumption, which both depend
on power asymmetries. This might be why world literature is always
already localized and perspectivized: it can be grasped only through the
archives and perspectives of localized literary fields, whereas the distribu-
tion of central or peripheral sites of production and consumption of world
literature is world-systemic and historically changeable.
Ever since the first half of the nineteenth century, the discourse on world
literature has been essential to literature’s systemic autopoiesis because it
 1 INTRODUCTION 7

has reflected and ideologically steered the global development and under-
standing of transnational literary practices. As it is known, Goethe discussed
world literature in about twenty sketchy formulations scattered over his
public lectures, review articles from his Kunst und Altertum, talks with his
secretary Johann Peter Eckermann, and extensive personal communication
with intellectuals of European respublica litterarum (Goethe 1949, 1963:
351–352, 361–364, 1973; Eckermann 1998: 164–167). Goethe’s ideas
became fairly lively debated by British, Italian, and French literary journals
during the last years of his life (see D’haen 2012: 5–9; Koch 2002: 19,
231–233; Pizer 2006: 3, 21, 83). This early, short-lived exchange, how-
ever, engendered a long-lasting transnational meta-discourse on world lit-
erature, which, functioning as an autopoietic recursive loop, both reflected
and fostered localized practices of global literary processes, such as “biblio-
migrancy” (see Mani 2012), translation, interliterary intertextualities, and
transnational canonization. Goethe’s utterances initiating this discourse
responded to contradictory aspects of his experience of a “national” (i.e.,
German) author who gained a broader “international” reputation (see
Pizer 2006: 18–46; Strich 1949: 32–51).
Indeed, the historical moment of Goethe’s introduction of world litera-
ture meta-discourse and the periods of its conjuncture coincide with cycles
of world capitalism from the industrial revolution to the present global
dead-end of late capitalism. In the nineteenth century, the international
book market and copyright fundamentally changed the social position of
writers. Authors began to be evaluated according to their success in book
sales, their symbolic capital, and increasingly also by their international
profile. It is within this reconfiguring of the author function that Goethe’s
idea took shape (see Juvan 2012a: 87–89, 112–117). The next two major
global turning points in the functioning of the literary field are associated
with further conjunctures of the world literature discourse. In the after-
math of the major economic depression and WWII, Strich, with his cos-
mopolitan liberal humanism, undertook the first resounding revival of
Weltliteratur, while since the turn of the millennium, coinciding with the
end of the American cycle and the crisis of world capitalism, we are wit-
nessing a renaissance of this concept in Pascale Casanova, Franco Moretti,
David Damrosch, John Pizer, Mads Rosendahl Thomsen, Theo D’haen,
and others. Triggered by Moretti’s controversial and lucid 2000 essay, the
concept of world literature has evolved from a denomination of a research
field to a “new critical method” (Moretti 2000: 55), moreover, to a new
“paradigm” of literary studies (D’haen 2012: 1; Thomsen 2008: 5–32).
8 M. JUVAN

In its attempts to transcend the respective fields of comparative literature,

national literary histories, and postcolonial studies, however, world litera-
ture studies has been formed heteronomously, by imagining and interpret-
ing its object of cognition through models that have been already proposed
by globalization theories. Worldlit studies correspond with their emphasis
on international and transcultural flows of people, capital, goods, and
ideas, and deconstruction of monolingual, ethnically essentialist categories
(see Hayot 2012b: 223–224). Through the same key, the current literary
studies has actualized Goethe’s Weltliteratur as a locus classicus, the his-
torical prototype for the reinterpretation of interliterary relations.
During its late-capitalist revival, Goethe’s idea of Weltliteratur trig-
gered contradictory interpretations. On the one hand, it was perceived in
terms of multicultural dialogism and free exchange, whereas on the other
hand it was recognized as a cultural form of hegemony coextensive with
the world-system. Launching a long-lasting transnational discourse on
world literature during the rise of early industrial globalization, Goethe
grounded his idea of dialogism on the unacknowledged hegemony of
Eurocentric aesthetic ideology. In his enlightened cosmopolitan human-
ism, Goethe expected world literature to open up an equal dialogue
between nations, languages, and civilizations.
As mentioned above, his ideas of allgemeine Weltliteratur grew from
his uncertainty about the position of German literature vis-à-vis tradition-
ally established national literatures of Western Europe (Casanova 2004:
40; Damrosch 2003: 8; Pizer 2006: 18–41; Strich 1949: 27–30), while
also taking roots in his cosmopolitan networking through which intellec-
tuals of the European republic of letters pursued their universal human
ideals (Buescu 2012; D’haen 2012: 7–8; Koch 2002: 43–176). Other fac-
tors of living experience also played an essential role in Goethe’s invention
of the term: his worldwide private library (Nethersole 2012: 309; Mani
2017: 53–54) along with reading, translating, and commenting on for-
eign literatures and print media; his poetry that intertextually drew on
manifold literary resources, peripheral and non-European included (Koch
2002: 177–229); last not least his notion of “circulation” based on the rise
of the late modern traffic of artworks across linguo-cultural boundaries.
With the statements with which he introduced the phrase Weltliteratur,
Goethe declared that he was witnessing the dawn of a new, cross-national
era of literary production (see Strich 1949: 5, 16, 31, 52). From his novel
Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship to statements made in his old age,
Goethe, occasionally using economic metaphors, compared the circulation
 1 INTRODUCTION 9

of cultural goods with the capitalist world market (Casanova 2004: 12–14;
Koch 2002: 2, 17; Strich 1949: 31). Literature was going global because
of the exposure to the capitalist mode of production and the accelerated
development of communication technologies. It was above all this new
social reality of the post-Enlightenment literary discourse that was
reflected, given sense, and even programmed by a meta-discourse on
world literature inaugurated by Goethe.
It has been repeatedly stressed that Goethe, with his aristocratic-­
cosmopolitan humanism, expected world literature to encourage the
renewal of every national literature and to create a space in which smaller,
peripheral, or non-European literatures could establish themselves on an
equal basis (see, e.g., Strich 1949: 32–36, 45–48). For Goethe, the open-
ing world literary space allowed national literature to assert itself interna-
tionally, without feeling hampered by the dominance either of the canon
of the Antiquity or major literatures that had been established and widely
recognized since early modernity. Even national literature that appeared to
be dependent on and lagging behind major literatures of the European
West could now prove to be an original producer, a competent translator,
and a central mediator of cross-literary traffic. To be sure, Goethe was
thinking primarily of German national literature. Through his self-con-
scious networking within the European republic of letters, Goethe
attempted to promote Weimar not only to make of it the cohesive intel-
lectual center of politically disjointed and backward Germany but also as a
hub of the nascent world literary system at large.
A necessary condition for the worldwide assertion of the national litera-
ture is, however, that it renounces parochial self-sufficiency. As epitomized
by his intertextual dialogue with Hafez in West-östlicher Divan, in which
he represents his subjectivity through Orientalist otherness, Goethe was
persistently attempting to avoid subjectivist arbitrariness and, by refracting
his experience through foreign forms and themes, achieve the status of a
“classical national author” (klassicher Nationalautor), comparable to
British, French, and Italian writers of European fame (Goethe 1963:
240–242; Strich 1949: 45–47). Goethe advised every literature to make
use of literary patterns from other parts of the world and recognize within
the foreign elements a different individualization of the “generally
human”; thus individual national literatures build up universality through
their active exchange (see Eckermann 1998: 164–167). According to
Goethe, the aesthetic perception of works from foreign languages and
distant civilizations enabled the self-reflection of the modern European
10 M. JUVAN

individual, while interliterary traffic and the cooperation of intellectuals in

a literary republic was the path to intercultural understanding and durable
peace between nations (see Strich 1949: 5, 12–20, 31–39).
Nonetheless, to facilitate mutual dialogue and the overcoming of dif-
ferences, Goethe thought it necessary to imagine a “universal” common
foundation, for which he adopted a particular European concept of aes-
thetic humanism whose canonic criterion was the ancient classics (see
Damrosch 2003: 13; D’haen 2012: 29–33). Goethe therefore based the
utopia of spiritual dialogue between cultures, which is in fact totalized by
Western aesthetic ideology, on speculation about the potentials that could
be brought to cultural production by globalization. This impresses a dis-
tinctly Eurocentric seal on the universalism of his Weltliteratur. In his
statements on world literature, in many places, Goethe silently presup-
poses various forms of hegemony. As a high noble official in the Weimar
Court, he was able to form his cosmopolitanism through access to the
cultural goods that Europe as a colonial power had concentrated in its
libraries and examined in other “centers of calculation” (see Latour 1996;
Young 2012: 213–214). Goethe perceived world literature within the
frameworks of cosmopolitan high culture, which was the privilege of the
European cultured class. However, Goethe frequently consciously
responded to and resisted Western cultural hegemony. He introduced the
conception of Weltliteratur partly intending to use it as a means to con-
tend with the traditionally dominant Western centers and to establish the
equality of new national literatures, such as German literature. In the
world literary market, however, Goethe also anticipated the potential mar-
ginalization of serious, sophisticated literature which would likely become
overshadowed by standardized literary production calculated to please the
masses. Thus, he was the first to distinguish the elite and the mass circuits
of works that find their audiences abroad (see D’haen 2012: 8).
Democratic and egalitarian as it appears to be, Goethe’s dialogism, in
fact, rests on the assumptions of the post-aristocratic high culture. Goethe
reserved cross-national conversation, networking, and cultural exchange
for the monde, the educated elite he deemed capable of aesthetically dis-
criminating between highbrow and mass culture. In addition to cosmo-
politan elitism, Goethe’s apparently dialogic interaction of different
cultural perspectives tends to universalize the norm-giving role of the
Western perspective, including its aesthetic ideology and canonic norms
derived from Greco-Latin antiquity. Echoing Goethe’s intimations of
Weltliteratur, Marx and Engels exposed aesthetic and humanist cosmo-
 1 INTRODUCTION 11

politanism as the ideology masking the European bourgeoisie’s global

economic hegemony and the worldwide expansion of Western geoculture.
In their Communist Manifesto of 1848, Marx and Engels materialistically
grounded the economic metaphors with which Goethe had described the
dawn of world literature. Instead of following Goethe’s interpretation in
terms of aristocratic aesthetic humanism, they disclosed cosmopolitanism
as an ideology with which the European bourgeoisie masks its world eco-
nomic hegemony. Thus, they linked world literature, which is supposed to
replace the particularism of national literatures, with the global dominance
of (cheap) Western bourgeois geoculture over economically dependent
cultural practices:

In place of the old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have
intercourse in every direction, universal interdependence of nations. And as
in material, so also in intellectual production. The intellectual creations of
individual nations become common property. National one-sidedness and
narrow-mindedness become more and more impossible, and from numer-
ous national and local literatures, there arises a world literature. The bour-
geoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production, by the
immensely facilitated means of communication, draws all, even the most
barbarian, nations into civilization. … It compels all nations, on pain of
extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production … In one word, it
creates a world after its own image. (Marx and Engels 1998: 39)

Regardless of Marxian harsh diagnosis, part of Western literary studies,

frequently associated with teaching literature, interprets world literature
primarily as a space for the intercultural dialogue. Through the circulation
of texts and their active presence in foreign environments, individuals and
communities are supposed to broaden their horizons, reflect upon their
own identity in a multicultural relationship to otherness. Thus, they sur-
pass nationalist narrow-mindedness, strengthen the cosmopolitan ethos,
refashion domestic traditions, increase the scope of the expressible, and
gain an opportunity to establish themselves globally, even if they perhaps
write in a minor language. In his monograph Goethe and World Literature,
Strich affirms Goethe’s ideal of world literary circulation in which,
through dialogue, authors contemplate themselves and their national lit-
eratures in the mirror of the world. In so doing, Strich indirectly supports
the renewal of international peace, economic exchange, and cultural
cooperation, as i­ llustrated by the following excerpt, colored with Goethe’s
economic metaphors:
12 M. JUVAN

World literature is, then, according to Goethe, the literature which serves as
a link between national literatures and thus between the nations themselves,
for the exchange of ideal values. Such literature includes all writings by
means of which the peoples learn to understand and make allowances for
each other, and which bring them more closely together. It is a literary
bridge over dividing rivers, a spiritual highway over dividing mountains. It
is an intellectual barter, a traffic in ideas between peoples, a literary market
to which the nations bring their intellectual treasures for exchange. … It is
an international conversation, an intellectual interest in each other. (Strich
1949: 5; emphases added)

In recent years, Sarah Lawall and Damrosch have rearticulated Strich’s

liberal-humanist perspective in contemporary vocabulary, connecting it
with social issues current in the US in the period of late capitalism. In her
introduction to the 1994 volume Reading World Literature, Lawall erodes
the dominance of the Western-centric aesthetic-ethical universalism of
university world literature curricula in the US, supporting the broadening
of the transnational canon with the voices of subalterns. With the decon-
struction of the oppositions, self vs. Other and home vs. the world, Lawall
goes on to show how identities enmeshed in interliterary communication
contrive themselves through signification and cognition as dialogic net-
works (Lawall 1994: 33–34). The author refers to Goethe’s idea, claiming
that “interconnected society and world view” form themselves through
“the community discourse of world literature” (46). By emphasizing the
relationalism of identities immersed in reading acts within transnational
literary discourse, Lawall shows world literature to be a system of cogni-
tive interactions; that is, a dialogue.
Along with Pascale Casanova and Moretti, Damrosch usually figures in
the trio of founders of the Wordlit paradigm of literary scholarship. His
What Is World Literature?—unlike Dionýz Ď urišin’s monograph of the
same title published in 1992, which was practically unknown in the West
until recently—has become a key reference in the globalized renaissance of
Goethe’s conception. Damrosch realizes the ideal of the multicultural
broadening of the canon with his selection of texts of peripheral origin,
which he interprets as examples of world literature. Thus, he commits
himself to the interests of communities and regions whose peripherality
was only given a historical explanation by Casanova and Moretti. Unlike
them, Damrosch does not present Goethe’s ruminations on international
literary circulation as a prefiguration of the global culture market, typically
 1 INTRODUCTION 13

dominated by major centers that occasionally appropriate sources, products,

and workers from the peripheries under their own influence; instead, he
interprets Goethe from the perspective of cosmopolitan conceptions of
intercultural hermeneutics and aesthetics. Damrosch argues that in world
literature, literary works that circulate across the border of their original
language and culture with the aid of translation make gains as they actively
come to life in foreign societies. To Damrosch, the world literary traffic rep-
resents a “mode of circulation and of reading” in which “windows on the
world” open up to us, and through which the intellectual horizons of
national literatures refract in mutual dialogue. These works, therefore, create
an autonomous, transnational, multicultural, and decentralized (elliptical)
aesthetic space, enabling us to free ourselves from a political connectedness
to our nation, language, or class (see Damrosch 2003: 5, 15, 281).
In opposition to the liberal-humanist perspective of Strich, Lawall, and
Damrosch, contemporary critics of world literature emphasize its hege-
monic character. Critiques of world literature’s dialogism come not only
from camps of comparative literature, postcolonial studies, and literary
transnationalism. Even champions of Wordlit studies have denied dialo-
gism of interliterary exchanges stressing the hegemonic model of cultural
diffusionism instead. According to diffusionism, texts and conventions
that are produced or mediated by the major Western languages and cul-
tural metropolises spread throughout the planet, whereas peripheral or
dependent cultural spaces only passively adapt them. Under the global
influence of few world literary capitals and world languages, a standard-
ized geoculture, with its products, conventions, and practices, gradually
imposes itself on local cultural dialects—such a condition of world litera-
ture is currently criticized as “Anglo-globalism” (Arac 2002). With his-
torical sociology of literary field and forms respectively, Casanova’s and
Moretti’s work emphasize asymmetries in the constellation of cultural
power, that is, inequality between the dominant centers of influence and
the weaker, predominantly receptive peripheries. Casanova and Moretti
point out that this systemic imbalance, which is partly homologous but
not reducible to historically changing constellations of global economic
and political power, has been shaping the flow, direction, and content of
interliterary processes from the beginning of the modern era to contem-
porary times. Critics reproach the conceptions of the “world literary
­system” (Moretti 2000, 2003) or “world literary space” (Casanova 2004:
3–4, 82–125) for placing exaggerated emphasis on competitiveness,
Darwinian survival struggle, and for their reductionist explanation of
14 M. JUVAN

interliterariness through analogies with Fernand Braudel’s and Immanuel

Wallerstein’s economic histories of capitalism (see, e.g., Prendergast
2004). By underestimating the unpredictable creative potentials of
“world-semiosis” in the peripheral zones beyond Western metropolises,
Casanova and Moretti are thought to have overlooked the polycentrism,
plurilingualism, and multidirectionality of literary flows (see, e.g., Kliger
2010; Thomsen 2008: 33–39, 138).
In these reproaches, multiculturalists and humanist liberals from
Worldlit studies concur with those who attack world literature from other
camps, such as Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak in the name of a “planetary”
and subaltern renewal of philological-comparative methods (Spivak 2003:
101, 108), or representatives of postcolonial and transnational studies.
Pier Paolo Frassinelli and David Watson, for instance, accuse Casanova of
“a progressivist notion of aesthetic development” and “a teleological nar-
rative” in which “the literary aesthetic [is] overcoming history, the nation,
and the political, and generating its own autonomous space.” They expose
her “reproducing a geography in which much of the postcolonial world is
positioned as peripheral to literary modernity” as a characteristic of
“Eurocentric diffusionism” (Frassinelli and Watson 2011: 197–199). One
can hear the even harsher appraisals that Goethean Weltliteratur, with its
historical genesis and current methodological application on a global scale,
is, in fact, provincial (see Behdad and Thomas 2–7, 10). According to
Graham Huggan, politically it even represents “the cultural realpolitik of
globalization masquerading as either a ‘worldly’ cosmopolitanism of read-
ing (Damrosch 2003) or a transnational study of form (Moretti 2000)”
(Huggan 2011: 491). Theorists of the world literature system and their
critics thus share a common perception that the concept of world litera-
ture implies hegemony. Therefore, Weltliteratur—whether we understand
it as a theoretical concept, an ideologeme, a publishing and translation
practice, a transnational network of literary life or a school canon—appears
to legitimize Western (male, white, bourgeois) dominance and reinforce
monolingualism (English as a global language), imposing itself on all oth-
ers as a universal criterion.
After all, the terminology is an indicator of the conflictive and aporetic
nature of theoretical thinking and the expression “world literature” may
be ranked among Mieke Bal’s “traveling concepts.” These are migrating
“between disciplines, between individual scholars, and between geograph-
ically dispersed academic communities.” Because their “meaning, reach,
and operational value differ” (Bal 2002: 24), they have become “the sites
 1 INTRODUCTION 15

of debate, awareness of difference, and tentative exchange” (13). As a

traveling concept, the term “world literature” has been globalized in dif-
ferent linguo-semantic variants and invested with ideological tensions,
such as partly described above. As far as the late modern cultural history
of European territory is concerned, the prevailing notions of world litera-
ture—focused mainly on the Greek and Latin classics, the Bible, and the
modern literary traditions of the (European) West—were based on the
ideology of cultural nationalism, the concept of nation-state, and the colo-
nial experience. This is why they presupposed national literatures as a
prime if not only components of the global literary space; conversely,
actors in particular literary systems referred to the ideas and practices of
world literature in order to ideologically establish or confirm their national
identity on a broader scale (see Juvan 2011: 73–79).
Although Dionýz Ď urišin (1992: 109–160), Irina Neupokoyeva
(2012), and Alexander Beecroft (2008, 2015) rightly claim that the world
literary process knows systemic units other than nations and nation-states
(e.g., tribes, city-states, imperia, regions and border zones, minorities, dia-
sporas, migrations, or interliterary communities and other territories con-
nected religiously or linguistically), it cannot be denied that, in the period
that gave birth to the international book market and the term Weltliteratur
respectively (i.e., the epoch of the “‘second’ Weltliteratur” or the “world-
literary system,” according to Moretti [2013: 134–135]), national move-
ments and nation-states figure as most important players, at least
ideologically. The inclusion of the national in the world, the presence of
the world in the national, and nationality as a necessary condition for the
appearance of world literature may be understood as symptoms of the
interlocking ideologies of post-Enlightenment cultural nationalism, cos-
mopolitanism, and the aesthetic understanding of art practices (Juvan
2011: 77). Along with the expansion of capitalist world-system and the
global diffusion of Western liberal-bourgeois modernity in the form of the
leading “geoculture,” this nexus has been reproduced and modified also
outside Europe and become increasingly compatible with the “inter-state
system,” since the latter is legitimized through proliferation of distinctive
national identities (see Wallerstein 1991: 139–157, 184–199). So it does
not come as a surprise that since the early nineteenth century, world lit-
erature has been inscribed into every European literature, be it emerg-
ing-peripheral or traditionally established and central. To be sure, the
contents and quantity of such imports vary: while major languages and
influential literatures tend to be somewhat self-sufficient, the share of
16 M. JUVAN

translation—the primary medium of world literature’s circulation—in lit-

erary print is more prominent in smaller languages and (semi-)peripheral
literary systems (see, e.g., Sapiro 2011).
Hence, it is within this ambivalence of dialogism and hegemony that
the process of worlding and nationalizing European literatures has taken
place since the early nineteenth century. Nationalizing, the first of the
concepts that inform the thrust of this book denotes the transformation of
post-Enlightenment belles-lettres into the ideological apparatus of national
movements and nation-states (see Schmidt 1989: 282–283; Widdowson
1999: 35). Printed in the vernacular whose standardization they cultivated
and exemplified, national literatures took part in building the public
sphere of the ethnic community by demonstrating the aesthetic capacity of
its proper language, evoking its history, and depicting its land, mores, and
spirit. The other key concept is worlding (see Kadir 2004; Hayot 2012a,
b). In my understanding of the concept, to world national literature means
to determine its actual and desired positions in the global literary space
and, starting from this act of imaginary or analytical comparison with
other literatures, attempt to export national repertoires across ethnic and
language borders.
In the second chapter, I deal with the canonicity of world literature as
reflected in the canonization of national poets in the periphery. Aware of
their dependence on imperial powers, the protagonists of (semi-)periph-
eral national movements longed for the international recognition of their
nascent collective identity. The figures of national poets were invented to
represent their respective nations to the gaze of the Other, symbolized by
the emerging world literature and empowered through the evolving inter-­
state system dominated by the core countries of the European West. In a
secular parallel to the canonization of saints in the Catholic Church, the
imaginary placing of a national poet in the world (i.e., worlding) was cru-
cial in the (unfulfilled) longing for the poet’s international confirmation as
belonging to the hyper-canon of world literature. Whereas several East-­
Central European national poets involved in national movements showed
what Andre Terian aptly called a “vernacular” tendency, Goethe repre-
sented the more “cosmopolitan” model of a national classic (see Terian
2013). Such affiliation to the universal aesthetic canon is also characteristic
of the politics of the Slovenian Romantic movement and its poet, France
Prešeren. Although Prešeren’s poetry, which suffered from the Austrian
censorship, only sparsely employs explicit nationalist discourse, his imagi-
nary worlding and intertextual transfer of universal aesthetic repertoires
 1 INTRODUCTION 17

from the established literatures into the Habsburg periphery fashioned a

cosmopolitan strategy of cultural nationalism. Prešeren has been vener-
ated in Slovenia since the late nineteenth century as the singular national
classic whose oeuvre compensates for the apparent lack of classical and
modern traditions in Slovenian and deserves to be recognized worldwide.
Employing typological comparison from the systemic point of view, I
show how literary systems from distant margins of Europe—Slovenian and
Icelandic literatures—reflect the figure of the national poet as a distinctive
cultural phenomenon of European Romantic nationalism. As mentioned
above, the canonization of national poets, such as the Slovenian France
Prešeren and his Icelandic contemporary Jonas Hallgrímsson (1807–1845),
enabled national communities to enhance their internal cohesion ideo-
logically. On the other hand, national poets proved that a nation—espe-
cially if deprived of statehood—resembled other nations and could meet
the imagined standards of the world literature canon. These poets them-
selves attempted to render topics of presumably national importance in
the aesthetic codes that figured as the standard of modern artistic develop-
ments in core European literary systems or as key to the Western tradition.
The lives and works of Prešeren and Hallgrímsson, as well the processes of
their posthumous canonization, show striking parallels, regardless of the
differences that can be epitomized by the opposition of the decentered
and centered cultural paradigm. Through their surface similarities, the
analogies of their systemic functions come to the fore. These shed light on
analogous developments of the aesthetic autonomization and nationaliza-
tion characterizing two emergent peripheral and dependent literatures
during Romanticism.
The third chapter, devoted to peripheral perspectives on world litera-
ture, starts from the observation that the division of the world literary
and translation system into hegemonic centers and dependent peripheries
has drawn criticism from theorists that have tried to pursue literary stud-
ies within the postnational paradigm in a manner different from that of
the followers of Goethe’s Weltliteratur in the era of globalization. The
conception of world literature seems problematic to these theorists due
to its Western-centrism. In its materialist-systemic interpretation with the
center/periphery antagonism, world literature is said to reinforce the cen-
trality of the cultural model that was developed in modernity by Western
capitalism. On the other hand, in its humanistic and cosmopolitan inter-
pretation, it reproduces Western-centrism through the domination of
global English as the language of translation, through the globalization of
18 M. JUVAN

an aesthetic mode of reading, and the Eurochronology of literary history.

Various strategies have arisen as an alternative to the center/periphery
model of world literature, ranging from the substitution of the concept of
world literature with other terms (such as transnationalism, cosmopolitan-
ism, postcolonialism, Francophonie, etc.), through the pluralization and
decentralization of world literature in the name of perspectivism, to the
affirmation of the periphery. In their verbal commitment to the symbolic
elimination of global literary inequality, these approaches are reminiscent
of Freudian denial (Verleugnung). They adopt the deceptive view that texts
move freely, and that they can be attributed global importance irrespective
of their origin, the pressures of the economic and political system, and
the restrictions on the international cultural market. As a system that has
evolved from the end of the eighteenth century until the present day, world
literature is a pertinent analytical category that, in my opinion, should be
accepted because it helps in understanding the economic, political, and
linguistic-cultural overdetermination of global interliterary exchange.
However, drawing on Dionýz Ď urišin, Yuri Lotman, Ilya Kliger, and
Susan S. Friedman, it can be argued that peripheral cultural interaction
occasionally bypasses global centers, establishing its networks and tem-
porary subcenters; for example, in the twentieth-century avant-garde
movements. Moreover, peripheries enable the reproduction of world lit-
erature metropolises and influence their evolutionary shifts, even though
the semiotic dynamics that infuse centers tend to be exoticized, anony-
mized, or marginalized. Although semiotic production of transgressive
information is by no means limited to centers, the pressures of the liter-
ary world-system do condition, select, and channel the global circula-
tion of peripheral innovation. The modernist poetry of Srečko Kosovel
(1904–1926) illustrates the modes of peripheral productivity and its
irregular paratactic response to evolutionary processes in the center. It
also highlights the systemic obstacles that prevent this information from
being globalized.
How nationalizing and worlding influence the literary canon formation
of national movements is the question the fourth chapter addresses.
During the early, so-called philological phase of European national reviv-
als, standardizing the vernacular and developing the media and
­infrastructure that were necessary for the social diffusion of literary texts
in the standard language were essential in establishing the ideological
coherence of the national community in statu nascendi and the commu-
nity’s public sphere. In Slovenian poetry from the Enlightenment to post-­
 1 INTRODUCTION 19

Romanticism, too, the utopian imagining of the national literary system,

its planning, and the gradual formation of its canon went hand in hand
with the efforts toward the standardization of Slovenian. In this context,
the intertextual indigenization of the Greco-Latin topoi of Parnassus and
Elysium—images of the chosen and collectively memorized personalities
representing a norm-giving culture—served as a self-regulatory strategy
acquired by Slovenian writers in the Habsburg land of Carniola to assimi-
late the structures of the universal canon and capitalize on its Pan-
European prestige within the emerging national literary ecology. At the
same time, their indigenization of images of the top cultural accomplish-
ment stressed the symbolic difference between a peripheral semiosphere in
the making and the universality of the classics. Finally, by representing
how the national canon formation emulates the classical canon, the actors
of the evolving literary periphery compared the highest national aesthetic
achievements with other national literatures. To take an example, the post-
Romantic critic and poet Josip Stritar attempted to world Slovenian litera-
ture in an imaginary way by evoking the elevation of the national poet
Prešeren to the international hyper-canon.
From 1828 to 1835, while Goethe was introducing his idea of world
literature to the European public, the philologist Matija Č op and the poet
France Prešeren were engaged in the cultural transfer of Schlegelian
Romantic cosmopolitanism to Slovenia. In the fifth chapter, I demonstrate
how these authors from the margins of the Habsburg Empire embody
links between theoria and poiesis that were essential for the Jena Romantic
circle and its legacy. Moreover, their work corresponds to transnational
cultural practices of pre-1848 Europe that grounded both Goethe’s
notion of Weltliteratur and the world-history narratives about postmedi-
eval vernacular literatures, seen as cultural foundations of nascent national
identities (e.g., Mme de Staël, Friedrich Bouterwek, Friedrich Schlegel).
From the outset, the notions of world literature were rife with contra-
dictory tendencies of cosmopolitanism and nationalism. To ground ethnic
identity in literary cosmopolitanism and attract the educated classes to the
national movement was the strategy that Č op and Prešeren embraced in
the early phase of Slovenian nation-building. Their cultural transfer of
early Romantic nationalist universalism into vernacular literature ­emerging
on the periphery of world literature encompassed not only emulation and
intertextual adoption of repertoires from the core European literatures. It
also entailed activities and controversies connected to their endeavors to
establish Slovenian literary media and infrastructure. From the viewpoint
20 M. JUVAN

of Schlegelian literary universalism, recourse to Roman and Romance lit-

erary traditions appeared to be able to cultivate a presumably backward
national literature, elevate its language, and place the nation on the world
literary map. Poetic language, intertextually referring to European aes-
thetic resources, represented a shortcut to Č op and Prešeren by which
Slovenians—subjects of the Habsburg crown that lacked a public sphere
and institutions of their own—could catch up with developed European
literatures. Č op’s considerable international networking, polemic writing,
cosmopolitan library, and aesthetic-philological expertise were in line with
most of what Goethe was envisioning as world literature at that time. The
same applies to Prešeren’s poetics of the Romantic classic, which cast
highly individualized aesthetic self-reflection, national commitment, and
erotic and existential declarations into forms of representation intertextu-
ally derived from repertoires of world literature from the Antiquity to the
present. Č op and Prešeren’s transfer of the German early Romantic cos-
mopolitanism thus represents the founding inscription of world literature
in the national literary field. It was a Schlegelian compromise between the
universality of the world literature canon and the non-conformist, nation-
alist, and revolutionary spirit of Romanticism that inspired the Slovenian
orientation toward the so-called Romantic classic.
Although it is probable that Cop,̌ who read and quoted from Goethe’s
Kunst und Altertum (Art and Antiquity), was familiar with his mentions of
Weltliteratur, the Slovenian periphery introduced an explicit discourse on
world literature several decades after Goethe had been able to conceptualize
his lifelong cosmopolitan literary practice in semi-peripheral Germany.
As I present in more detail elsewhere (Juvan 2012b), the term
Weltliteratur was first mentioned in Slovenian periodicals only in 1866 (in
German) and 1884, respectively (in Slovenian as svetovna književnost), but
Josip Stritar’s critical essays of the 1860s and 1870s tacitly assumed the
term. Stritar attempted to evaluate Slovenian literary and artistic achieve-
ments in the light of the world literary canon, the classical tradition, and
his quasi-universal notions of humanism and the aesthetic. Being aware of
the unequal importance of national literatures in “the world culture” tra-
dition and the contemporary circulation of international literary trends
(such as naturalism), he worried about the proper proportion between
original and translated literature in Slovenia that would not jeopardize the
sense of national belonging. Key to Stritar was to demonstrate that
Prešeren as the Slovenian national poet was equal to other world classics.
The majority of mentions of the term svetovna književnost around 1900
 1 INTRODUCTION 21

presupposed the normative and canonic understanding of the concept that

led to a frustrating conviction that Slovenian literature is doomed to lag
behind the West. The comparative view that enabled Slovenian intellectu-
als to recognize that Slovenian literature shares its marginal position with
other small and non-Western literatures of Europe was essential to Anton
Ocvirk’s conceptual and institutional transfer of (French) comparative
literature to his homeland’s academe, where national literary history
prevailed. In his 1936 introduction to comparative literature Teorija prim-
erjalne literarne zgodovine (Theory of Comparative Literary History), one
of the earliest volumes of its kind in Europe, Hazard’s student Ocvirk
provided the first in-depth comparative, historical, and theoretical descrip-
tion of the concept of world literature from a Slovenian perspective.
In the sixth chapter, I start from Barthes’s thesis that European
nineteenth-­century literatures witnessed the move from classical to mod-
ern writing. It seems that, whereas peripheral European literatures sought
to establish a national identity with the aid of the epic as a privileged form
of classical writing, the central and well-established national literatures
demonstrated their integrity with the novel as a popular form of modern
writing. In Slovenian literary culture, Prešeren’s narrative poem Baptism
on the Savica (1836), which thematizes the involuntary compromise of an
epic hero and his renunciation of the national cause, was paradoxically
canonized as a sacred text that defines “Slovenianness” and as such gives
rise to ever new reinterpretations. This is in contrast to Josip Jurčič’s Deseti
brat (The Tenth Brother, 1866), the first Slovenian novel, which—accord-
ing to Moretti’s formula (2013: 50–57, 116–117)—comes across as an
(unhappy) compromise between a foreign genre form imported from the
center and local Slovenian subject matter and perspective. Therefore, in
the nineteenth century, a peripheral nation was constituting itself on the
“sacred text” of a compromise but singular epic, rather than merely on the
mass printing of compromise novels.
Finally, based on Kadir’s (2004) and Hayot’s (2012a, b) concept of
worlding, which differs from Cheah’s (2016) recent ethical turn of
Heideggerian term, I discuss the worlding of the Slovenian national poet
within the world-system of translation. The imaginary worlding of
Prešeren through perspectives and canonization internal to the Slovenian
literary system has proven to be ideologically successful. His actual pres-
ence in the global literary space, however, does not correspond to home-
grown perceptions of his value.
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