The Worldliness of Weltliteratur: Goethe's "Handelsverkehr" between China and Weimar

Abstract:This essay investigates the social and economic conditions that enabled Goethe's reception of Chinese literature in the 1820s, a productive engagement that led to the genesis of Weltliteratur as a critical practice. This entails a commitment to a "worlding" of world literature, that is to say, a form of analysis that pays heed to the actual conditions of translation, production, transport, and communication between China and Weimar in the period. Taking Peter Perring Thoms's translation Chinese Courtship as a case study, it is possible to show how Goethe's seemingly abstract and intellectual idea of Weltliteratur is anchored within networks of commercial and imperial mediation of literatures from around the globe. This then allows us to trace the tensions between two competing moments at the heart of Goethe's formulation of world literature, cosmopolitan Theilnahme and Eurocentric universalism, more fully. Finally, this historical account may be considered to be an intervention in contemporary debates on world literature, suggesting some of the ways in which we may critique the continuing structures and practices of inequality in world literary criticism's current modes of worldmaking.