Chapter 31 scrutinises the term Weltliteratur (world literature), often invoked but little understood. Weltliteratur is a motif in Goethe’s oeuvre, rather than a unified theory, and it either describes the increased international literary exchanges which are the result of modernisation, or it has a normative charge, suggesting that Weltliteratur enables intercultural understanding. The chapter considers the origins of and various sources for the concept, together with its key resonances and concerns; it also reflects on the role played by the term in the establishment of the modern academic discipline of comparative literature.

Chapter Sixteen argues that late-Romantic literature also reflects Europe’s new global consciousness, a product of the modern nation-state rather than of cosmopolitanism. What Goethe referred to as Weltliteratur is updated here as global literature. The chapter first defends the historical and theoretical application of globalisation to the Romantic context, linking it with the development of nationalism and imperialism, and in particular the increasingly transnational book trade. It then analyses this ‘global imaginary’ from a British perspective in Scott’s The Field of Waterloo, Mary Shelley’s The Last Man and Felicia Hemans’ Records of Woman. These texts show among other things how Britons reacted to their nation’s new global power and interconnectedness, which made them feel more dependent and vulnerable, but also contributed to a sense of ‘global sociality’. The last section briefly looks at how other European literatures likewise reflected their national as well as imperial anxieties in the wake of Napoleon, examining Scott’s influence abroad in a novel by de la Motte Fouqué.