ABSTRACT
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe had envisaged an important role for German literature as intermediary, via translation, for what he saw as the coming era of world literature. Concurrently, the only "modern" vernacular literatures that were deemed worthy of study were those of Europe. A "core" made up of Western European literatures included in the first instance French, English and German, with, somewhat more tenuously but because of their undeniable importance in Early Modernity, Italian and Spanish. However, postcolonialism at first strictly limited itself to English-language literatures, with only belated extensions to French-language literatures, and can therefore hardly be said to have encompassed "the world". Peter Frankopan underlines in his The Silk Roads how interest increased in China from the late seventeenth century. Within each "national "space, then, the "natural" object of cultural study from the middle of the nineteenth century became, and remained, its "national" literature.
