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

Summary/Abstract: From 1828–35, while Goethe was introducing his idea of world literature to the European public, Matija Čop and France Prešeren were engaged in the complex process of the cultural transfer of Schlegelian Romantic cosmopolitanism to Slovenia. In this way they hoped to ground the emerging and peripheral literature of Slovenia, tied to a national movement, in the universality of aesthetic humanism, and, by connecting it to the repertoire of European literary traditions from antiquity to Romanticism, to establish it as a modern classic at the world level. Čop and Prešeren, though without using the term, were realizing Goethe’s idea of world literature. There is a strong probability that Čop was also familiar with Goethe’s early remarks on Weltliteratur.

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