ABSTRACT
Theories of world literature presuppose assumptions about what distinguishes literary texts from other modes of writing, about what constitutes their 'literariness'. Like other theories of world literature, Johann Wolfgang Goethe's idea of an international network of communication between literatures and authors presupposes a specific notion of the literary. The nation represents, as it were, the natural biotope for the free play of the literary imagination. Literary works were produced for a book market of an increasingly international orientation. They were traded as goods rather than exchanged as gifts. Written as a series of seemingly disparate fragments, the introduction includes, in addition to brief reflections on world literature, a few general observations on German-British literary relations and a portrait of Thomas Carlyle. By coupling the development of culture to the migratory movement of peoples and their intellectual products, Johann Gottfried Herder lays the foundation for an account of the cultural history of humanity as a global matrix of interconnected parts.
