ABSTRACT
RICHARD GREEN MOULTON (1849-1924) was a professor at the University of Chicago who wrote several works on the history of world literature and on literary theory. In his works he reacts against the departmental division of the academic study of literature and urges us to recognize the unity of literature: “Only world literature – literature studied apart from distinctions between particular languages – gives a body of literary material from which it is safe to make generalizations, only in world literature can the life history of literature be fully revealed” (Moulton 1915: 92). Moulton applies the distinction between universal and world literature to distinguish the totality of all literature and literature seen from a particular point of view. Moulton’s claims are at once highly ambitious and modest; he both insists on the need to study all literature as being connected and he accepts the limits imposed by the history of cultures and individuals. His own work is thus anchored in British literary culture, and its rendering of a canon is simultaneously rather traditional and ambitious in scope.
