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

Abstract

The Slovenian philologist, literary historian, secondary-school teacher,and librarian Matija Cop (1797-1835) and the poet France Preseren(1800-1849), writers from the Habsburg Empire's peripheral, diglossic,and predominantly Slovenian province of Carniola, embody links betweentheoria and poiesis, erudition and creativity, or reflection andliterary art that were essential for the Jena romantic circle as well asfor further development of European aesthetic discourse. Moreover, theirwork fits the transnational pattern of cultural practices andmentalities of pre-1848 Europe that grounded both Goethe's notion ofWeltliteratur and ``world-history{''} narratives about the systemicdevelopment of post-medieval vernacular literatures, seen as culturalfoundations of nascent national identities (e.g., Mme de Stael,Bouterwek, or Friedrich Schlegel). From the outset, the notions ofEuropean or world literature (conceived either as the universal,canonical totality of humanist and aesthetic values or as the globaltraffic of cultural goods) were ridden with contradictory tendencies ofcosmopolitanism and nationalism. To ground ethnic identity in literarycosmopolitanism and attract educated classes to the rising Sloveniannational movement was the strategy that Cop and Preseren embraced in thefirst phase of Slovenian nation-building.This paper presents Cop and Preseren as the main proponents of theSlovenian cultural transfer of Schlegelian literary universalism, whichwent in parallel with Goethe's launching of the term and idea of worldliterature. From 1828 to 1835, Cop and Preseren were engaged inimporting repertoires of world literature into the emergent,semi-peripheral Slovenian literary field. The transfer processencompassed a complex of resources, texts, actions, and controversies,as well as endeavors to establish ``nationalized{''} literary media andinfrastructure, such as a public library. Cop and Preseren pursued andadvocated the transfer through Schlegelian concept of literarycosmopolitanism and, without using the term, realizing Goethe's idea ofworld literature. In view of Schlegelian literary universalism, recourseto ancient and Romance literary traditions appeared to be able tocultivate a presumably backward national literature and its vernacularand place them onto the world literary map. For Cop and Preseren, poeticlanguage, elevated and saturated by global aesthetic resources,represented a shortcut by which Slovenes-who were lacking media, publicsphere, and cultural and political institutions could catch up with moredeveloped European literatures. top's international networking andcorrespondence, polemical writing, cosmopolitan library, andaesthetic-philological expertise in fact realized most of what Goethewas envisioning as world literature at that time. The same applies toPreseren's version of the romantic classic, which cast highlyindividualized aesthetic self-reflection, national commitment, anderotic and existential declarations into forms of representationintertextually derived from repertoires of world literature fromAntiquity to the present. Finally, it is suggested that Cop, reading1827 Kunst und Altertum (Art and Antiquity), might have come acrossGoethe's first remarks about world literature. 639 and Preseren'stransfer of romantic cosmopolitanism thus represents the first strategicinscription of globalized literature in the local space of nascentSlovenian literary field.