The Concept of National Literature at the Present Time

Gary Wihl, Washington University in St. Louis

In this lecture, I would like to trace a set of concepts that underlie the definition of literature as the product of a nation. In an obvious way, it is meaningful to classify works of literature by the language bounded by national territory, giving rise to the study of German literature, or French literature, or English literature. Literature therefore becomes the expression of a nation’s particular language. No literature can be studied apart from the poetic, rhetorical, properties specific to the language in which it is written, even in some cases down to the appearance of the language as letters or characters on a page. But language by itself is insufficient as a category of literary classification when we speak of these literatures as expressive of the history, culture, values of the populations that speak those languages. Other forces and ideas are at work behind the common practice of asking students and scholars to study French literary history, or Spanish American literature, or indeed Arabic or Chinese literature. What gives rise, in the first instance, to these common  assumptions about the classification of literature into national groups?