ABSTRACT
ALBERT LÉON GUÉRARD (1880-1959) was a French scholar who, however, spent most of his adult life in the United States, primarily as Professor of Comparative Literature at Stanford University in California. Guérard was a staunch opponent of nationalism, and of the separation of the study of national literatures. Instead, in a Goethean spirit, he strove for bringing into being a world literature that would promote understanding among peoples of all nations and all cultures. In his writings of the 1930s, particularly after 1933 and up to 1940, when his Preface to World Literature appeared, Guérard blamed the German writer and philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder (17441803) for having laid the foundations of Romantic nationalism, the beginning of a development that Guérard saw leading straight to the excesses of National Socialism rampant in Germany at the time of his writing. Instead of to such starkly differentiated identities as posed by nationalism, Guérard adhered to the idea of universal humanity. In fact, for Guérard literature had always already been international, European-wide, and hence “world” literature, before the advent of Romanticism, which he blamed for the onset of nationalism and the study of national literatures as such. The Latin literature of the middle ages, the medieval fabliaux or romances, or the works of the Enlightenment philosophers, or in later ages children’s classics such as Pinocchio , fairy tales, or even popular literature, in fact all works freely circulating either before or after the onset of Romanticism, transcended the boundaries of a nation or a language group, and was the common property of humanity, and hence properly “world literature.” As he put it in Preface to World Literature : “The fi rst, and lesser, benefi t of World Literature is to reveal to us the picturesque, the delightful variety of mankind. The greater benefi t is to make us conscious of its fundamental unity” (Guérard 1940: 24).
