World Literature in Carniola: The Transfer of Romantic Cosmopolitanism and the Making of National Literature

Abstract

The Slovenian philologist, literary historian, secondary-school teacher, and librarian Matija Čop (1797–1835) and the poet France Prešeren (1800–1849), writers from the Habsburg Empire’s peripheral, diglossic, and predominantly Slovenian province of Carniola, embody links between theoria and poiesis, erudition and creativity, or reflection and literary art that were essential for the Jena romantic circle as well as for further development of European aesthetic discourse. Moreover, their work fits the transnational pattern of cultural practices and mentalities of pre-1848 Europe that grounded both Goethe’s notion of Weltliteratur and “world-history” narratives about the systemic development of post-medieval vernacular literatures, seen as cultural foundations of nascent national identities (e.g., Mme de Staël, Bouterwek, or Friedrich Schlegel). From the outset, the notions of European or world literature (conceived either as the universal, canonical totality of humanist and aesthetic values or as the global traffic of cultural goods) were ridden with contradictory tendencies of cosmopolitanism and nationalism. To ground ethnic identity in literary cosmopolitanism and attract educated classes to the rising Slovenian national movement was the strategy that Čop and Prešeren embraced in the first phase of Slovenian nation-building. – This paper presents Čop and Prešeren as the main proponents of the Slovenian cultural transfer of Schlegelian literary universalism, which went in parallel with Goethe’s launching of the term and idea of world literature. From 1828 to 1835, Čop and Prešeren were engaged in importing repertoires of world literature into the emergent, semi-peripheral Slovenian literary field. The transfer process encompassed a complex of resources, texts, actions, and controversies, as well as endeavors to establish “nationalized” literary media and infrastructure, such as a public library. Čop and Prešeren pursued and advocated the transfer through Schlegelian concept of literary cosmopolitanism and, without using the term, realizing Goethe’s idea of world literature. In view of Schlegelian literary universalism, recourse to ancient and Romance literary traditions appeared to be able to cultivate a presumably backward national literature and its vernacular and place them onto the world literary map. For Čop and Prešeren, poetic language, elevated and saturated by global aesthetic resources, represented a shortcut by which Slovenes–who were lacking media, public sphere, and cultural and political institutions–could catch up with more developed European literatures. Čop’s international networking and correspondence, polemical writing, cosmopolitan library, and aesthetic-philological expertise in fact realized most of what Goethe was envisioning as world literature at that time. The same applies to Prešeren’s version of the romantic classic, which cast highly individualized aesthetic self-reflection, national commitment, and erotic and existential declarations into forms of representation intertextually derived from repertoires of world literature from Antiquity to the present. Finally, it is suggested that Čop, reading 1827 Kunst und Altertum (Art and Antiquity), might have come across Goethe’s first remarks about world literature. Čop and Prešeren’s transfer of romantic cosmopolitanism thus represents the first strategic inscription of globalized literature in the local space of nascent Slovenian literary field.