Comparative Literature in Britain

In our globalizing, post-colonial world, Comparative Literature is on the rise; but it is not new. It emerged in the nineteenth century as a countermovement to methodological nationalism in the philologies. The chequered history of its acceptance in the British Isles throws a fascinating light on the last two centuries, amid many intellectual cross-currents: the British politics of the ’Four Nations’, Imperial ethnography, and the complex relationship between literary critics and the university.

Leerssen addresses both the intellectual and the institutional aspects of this history of knowledge production. The example of Continental scholarship, and of champions like Matthew Arnold, gave the comparatist approaches increasing prestige; but it became an established academic discipline only in the internationalist climate after 1945. Since then, that discipline has been both challenged and enriched by new theoretical approaches and by the decline of Eurocentrism.

Joep Leerssen holds the chair of Modern European Literature at the University of Amsterdam. Among his books are Remembrance and Imagination (1996), National Thought in Europe (2006), Imagology and The Rhine (with Manfred Beller, 2007 and 2018), and Commemorating Writers in Nineteenth-Century Europe (with Ann Rigney, 2014). He is the editor of the Encyclopedia of Romantic Nationalism in Europe (2018).