Book contents
- The Cambridge History of World Literature
- The Cambridge History of World Literature
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- Part I Genealogies
- 1 Ancient World Literature
- 2 The Silk Roads of World Literature
- 3 Arabic Literary Prose, Adab Literature, and the Formation of Islamicate Imperial Culture
- 4 Worldmaking and Early Modernity: Cartographic Poesis in Europe and South Asia
- 5 Colonial Philology and the Origins of World Literature
- 6 Globalism’s Prehistory: Technologies of Modernism
- 7 After 1945: Holocaust Memory, Postcoloniality, and World History
- 8 World Literature after 1989: Revolutions in Motion
- Part II Thinking the World
- Part III Transregional Worlding
- Part IV Cartographic Shifts
- Part V World Literature and Translation
- Part VI Poetics, Genre, Intermediality
- Part VII Scales, Polysystems, Canons
- Part VIII Modes of Reading and Circulation
- Part IX The Worldly and the Planetary
- Index
- References
5 - Colonial Philology and the Origins of World Literature
from Part I - Genealogies
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 17 August 2021
Edited by
Book contents
- The Cambridge History of World Literature
- The Cambridge History of World Literature
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- Part I Genealogies
- 1 Ancient World Literature
- 2 The Silk Roads of World Literature
- 3 Arabic Literary Prose, Adab Literature, and the Formation of Islamicate Imperial Culture
- 4 Worldmaking and Early Modernity: Cartographic Poesis in Europe and South Asia
- 5 Colonial Philology and the Origins of World Literature
- 6 Globalism’s Prehistory: Technologies of Modernism
- 7 After 1945: Holocaust Memory, Postcoloniality, and World History
- 8 World Literature after 1989: Revolutions in Motion
- Part II Thinking the World
- Part III Transregional Worlding
- Part IV Cartographic Shifts
- Part V World Literature and Translation
- Part VI Poetics, Genre, Intermediality
- Part VII Scales, Polysystems, Canons
- Part VIII Modes of Reading and Circulation
- Part IX The Worldly and the Planetary
- Index
- References
Summary
This chapter revisits the nineteenth-century idea of Weltliteratur through colonial histories. It argues that world literature in the nineteenth century does not name a corpus, a space, or even a problem in literary history. It does not even refer to one single history or one singular event as the origin point for a planetary vision of literature. Rather, it directs one to the confluence of global histories that produced a modern idea of literature and some of the critical tools that constituted the new discipline of literary studies. The material condition for this confluence was provided by modern European empires and their meticulous arrangements for colonial governance, sustained through painstaking engagement with different linguistic and scribal traditions. This argument is fleshed out through close readings of the works of a host of colonial officials stationed in British India and their local interlocutors, and through their method of “colonial philology.” Colonial archives and philological methods, this paper suggests, provide one of the early genealogies of world literature as an idea.
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- The Cambridge History of World Literature , pp. 132 - 147Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2021
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