Building Blocks of World Literature: The Case of Romanticism and Its Afterlives

Building Blocks of World Literature: The Case of Romanticism and Its Afterlives

At the heart of this paper is the desire to understand how discourses and ideas are transposed in time, indeed how entire domains of ideologically constructed meaning are relocated and operate across cultural borders. I offer a case study of this complex and evasive process: post-romanticism as a discursive formation that modifies the Romantic legacy and responds to it from the perspective of new, previously unknown, social, economic, and political challenges. Ultimately, the theoretical concern here is captured in the question: how does one describe the life of discursive formations and the way in which they continue to accrue relevance? I propose to look at this from the perspective of world literature by asking how post-romanticism has functioned as one of its building blocks. My examples are drawn from the literary and cultural histories of Europe, Russia, and China.

Galin Tihanov has held visiting professorships at universities in Europe, North and South America, and Asia. He is the author of seven books, including The Birth and Death of Literary Theory: Regimes of Relevance in Russia and Beyond (Stanford UP, 2019) which won the 2020 AATSEEL Book Prize for “best book in literary studies”. World Literature in the Soviet Union (ASP, 2023), of which Tihanov is the lead editor, received the 2024 AATSEEL Book Prize for “best edited multi-author scholarly volume”. Tihanov has been elected to the British Academy (2021) and to Academia Europaea (2012). He serves on the Executive Board of the Institute for World Literature at Harvard University and as Honorary Scientific Advisor to the Institute of Foreign Literatures, CASS, Beijing, as well as on the advisory boards of universities, foundations, and journals in the United States, Germany, China, and other countries. He is also Past President of the ICLA Committee on Literary Theory. His current work is on world literature, cosmopolitanism, and exile.