SOURCE: Pizer, John. “Heine's Unique Relationship to Goethe's Weltliteratur Paradigm.” Heine-Jahrbuch 41 (2002): 18-36.

In the following essay, Pizer discusses Heine's application of Goethe's theory of a “world literature.”

Transnational trends in the marketing, reception, and even writing of literature since the collapse of Soviet Communism have focused a great deal of scholarly attention on Goethe's conceptualization of Weltliteratur because his disparate formulations of this paradigm seem to anticipate such literary globalization. Revitalized interest in world literature as Goethe understood it can be traced back to Fritz Strich's monograph »Goethe und die Weltliteratur«. This book was published at the war's end and contains a useful compendium of Goethe's utterances on world literature.¹ Already in the 1952 Festschrift for Strich, one can see divergent attitudes developing toward the universalized book distribution and comprehensive international literary interchange Goethe seemingly anticipated. While Anni Carlsson maintained that Goethe positively highlighted the works specifically addressed to...