Fantastic Histories and Discursive Doubles

Abstract

Writing in 1828, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe declares Sir Walter Scott to be not only a writer of renown and skill but also, and more importantly, the epitome of his emerging paradigm of a World Literature in this period. Alongside Carlyle’s Life of Schiller, Scott’s essays in the Edinburgh Review and in the Foreign Quarterly Review were cases in point for Goethe of the productively different appreciation of various national literatures by other nations, as his joint review in Kunst und Alterthum outlines: “Vor allen Dingen berührt uns wie in dieser Zeitschrift die sittlich-ästhetischen Bemühungen der Deutschen aufgenommen und angesehen sind”.1 Just as Scott practiced in his criticism, Goethe suggests that in a Weltliteratur “die Nationen [nicht] überein denken [sollen], sondern sie sollen nur einander gewahr werden, sich begreifen, und [...] dulden lernen”.2 This can also lead to surprising reciprocal cases of cross-fertilization: “die Nationen werden sich geschwinder der wechselseitigen Vorteile bemächtigen können.”3 Goethe’s model is indicative of a developing infrastructure of cultural transfer in the first third of the nineteenth century and is itself, at least in part, a result of the kind of reciprocal processes of cultural transfer he describes here. Following on from the productive reception of German literature in Edinburgh by Sir Walter Scott and Thomas Carlyle, such as Scott’s essay on E.T.A. Hoffmann, “On the Supernatural in Fictitious Composition”, Goethe in turn becomes a mediator who re-introduces the cultural artefacts developed at this initial stage back into German literary discourse. Viewed thus, the cultural transfer between Germany