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ABSTRACT
When Goethe coined the phrase ‘world literature’, he did so after reading a translation of a relatively obscure seventeenth-century Chinese novel, Hao Kiou Choaan. That novel had come to Europe’s attention via an English translation which had been edited and published by the English clergyman Thomas Percy in 1761, before being translated in turn into French, German and Dutch. As such, Hao Kiou Choaan was one of the earliest of a series of editions and translations from all over the world that Percy put into print across the 1760s and 1770s, and which did indeed help ground the European idea of ‘world literature’. This article describes the background to Percy’s labours and argues that they are best understood within the context of an Anglican attempt to maintain the force of prophecy and literature’s authority by uncovering how literature worked outside of European modernity.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes on contributor
Simon During is a Professorial Fellow at the University of Melbourne. His books include Modern Enchantments: the cultural power of secular magic (Harvard UP 2004) and Against Democracy: literary experience in the era of emancipations (Fordham UP 2010). He is currently writing a book on the idea of the humanities.
Notes
1 Johann Peter Eckermann, Gespräche mit Goethe in den letzeten Jahren seines Lebens, Munich: Beck 1984, p 184.
2 Yujiao li was translated by the academic sinologist Jean-Pierre Abel-Remusat and published in 1826 in French as Iu-kiao-li ou Les Deux cousins. Goethe’s German can be translated: ‘ … to think, act and feel almost just as we do, and one very soon feels oneself to be their like [or “their equal”]’. The background of the actual discussion with Eckermann which established the category of ‘world literature’ is a little unclear since, although it is based on Goethe’s recent reading of Iu Kiao Li, it also refers back to other unnamed Chinese novels that Goethe knew, and in particular to Hau Kiou Choaan since Goethe refers to its plot. See Martin Puchner, ‘The Chinese Garden and World Literature’, Chinese Arts and Letters 1(1), 2014, pp 88–99 for a discussion of Goethe’s reading of Chinese fiction.
3 For more context on Goethe’s use of the term ‘Weltliteratur’ (which had, however, already been put into circulation by August Wilhelm Schlözer and others) see Daniel Purdy, ‘Goethe, Rémusat and the Chinese novel: Translation and Circulation of World Literature’, in German Literature as World Literature, Thomas Beeby (ed), London: Bloomsbury, 2014, pp 43–60 and Christine Wagner-Dittmar, ‘Goethe und die chinesischer Literatur’, in Studien zu Goethes Alterswerken, Erich Trunz (ed), Frankfurt: Athenäum, 1971, pp 122–228.
4 As Günther Debon has shown, Goethe carefully read and used a German translation of the English translation of Hau Kiou Choaan. See Günther Debon, ‘Goethe erklärt in Heidelberg einen chinesischen Roman’, in Goethe und China – China und Goethe. Bericht des Heidelberger Symposiums, Günther Debon and Adrian Hsia (eds), Bern: Peter Lang, 1985, pp 51–62.
5 On the fashion for things Chinese in the period see Eugenia Zuroski Jenkins, A Taste for China: English Subjectivity and the Prehistory of Orientalism, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.
6 Notable contributions to this scholarship which focus on China include Srinivas Aravamudan, Enlightenment Orientalism: Resisting the Rise of the Novel, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011; Ros Ballaster, Fabulous Orients: Fictions of the East in England, 1662–1785, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005; Robert Markley, The Far East and the English Imagination, 1600–1730, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009; Ning Ma, The Age of Silver: The Rise of the Novel East and West, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016; Eun Kyung Min, China and the Writing of English Literary Modernity, 1690–1770, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018.
7 For a detailed account of Hau Kiou Choaan’s publication, see, J Watt, ‘Thomas Percy, China and the Gothic’, The Eighteenth Century, 48(2), 2007, pp 95–109 and also the first chapter of Peter J Kitson, Forging Romantic China: Sino-British Cultural Exchange 1760–1840, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013.
8 Perhaps the best current account of the eighteenth-century enlightenment’s encounter with China and the East is to be found in Jürgen Osterhammel, Unfabling the East: The Enlightenment’s Encounter with Asia, Robert Savage (trans.), Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018.
9 See Bertram H Davis, Thomas Percy: A Scholar-critic in the Age of Johnson, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1989, pp 92–93.
10 See, for instance, Maureen McLane, ‘Ballads and Bards: British Romantic Orality’, Modern Philology 98(3), 2001, pp 423–443.
11 In the wake of Friedrich Meinecke’s groundbreaking Die Entstehung des Historismus (1936) the literary scholarship of Percy, Hurd, the Warton brothers et al. has usually been thought about as ‘pre-romantic’. This essay is revisionist in regard to that framing.
12 Percy’s tendency to polish his ballads came under attack by Joseph Ritson in the 1780s, a sign of another shift of literary values.
13 See David Damrosch, What is World Literature? Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003 and Pascale Casanova, The World Republic of Literature, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005.
14 For cultural nationalism in general see Joep Leerssen, ‘Nationalism and the Cultivation of Culture’, Nation and Nationalism 12(4), 2006, pp 559–578. For Ossian and the national epic, see Gerald Bär and Howard Gaskin (eds), Ossian and National Epic, Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2012. For Percy’s influence on Herder (rather than vice-versa) see Robert T Clark, ‘Herder, Percy and the Song of Songs’, PMLA 61(4), 1946, pp 1097–1100.
15 See, for instance, J H Pittock, The Ascendency of Taste: The achievement of Thomas and Joseph Warton, London: Routledge, 1973, pp 29–33.
16 See Susan Manning, ‘Ossian, Scott, and Nineteenth-Century Scottish Literary Nationalism’, Studies in Scottish Literature 17, 1982, pp 39–54.
17 On the commercial possibilities of Chinese design, commodities and artefacts see also David Porter, The Chinese Taste in Eighteenth Century England, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010.
18 It is worth noting that Percy’s publication of Hau Choaan Kiou may have been partly inspired by Goldsmith’s Citizen of the World (1760–1) which is narrated by a Chinese scholar who travels to England, and whose de-familiarizing descriptions of England have both satiric and cosmopolitan force.
19 Northern Antiquities: Or a Description of the Manner, Custom, Religion and Laws of the Ancient Danes, 2 vols, London: T. Carnan and Co., 1770: 1: p A2(2).
20 David Sorkin, The Religious Enlightenment: Protestants, Jews and Catholics from London to Vienna, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008, pp 25–65.
21 David Hume, The Life of David Hume, Esq. Written by Himself, London: W. Strahan and T. Cadell, 1777, p 15.
22 Richard Hurd, ‘A Discourse concerning Poetical Imitation’, in Epistola ad Augustum. With an English Commentary and Notes. To which is Added a Discourse concerning Poetical Imitation, London, 1751, pp 109–207.
23 Warburton attacks Collins in The Divine Legation of Moses demonstrated in Nine Books, Fourth Edition, Corrected and Enlarged, Vol. 1, London: A Millar and J. and R. Tonson, 1765, pp xxvi–xxxiv. In 1757, he and Hurd collaborated in a polemic against Hume’s Essay on the Natural History of Religion. See Richard Hurd, Remarks on Mr. David Hume’s Natural History of Religion, addressed to the Rev. Dr. Warburton, London: T. Cadell, 1777.
24 For an excellent recent account of Middleton see Robert G. Ingram, Reformation without End: Religion, Politics and the Past in Post-Revolutionary England, Manchester: University of Manchester Press, 2018, pp 105–180.
25 See Levitin, Ancient Wisdom in the Age of the New Science: Histories of Philosophy in England, c. 1640–1700, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015.
26 As both Levitin and David Sorkin have pointed out, Warburton’s arguments were much indebted to the work of the seventeenth-century Anglican humanist scholar, John Spencer, who argued for an ‘accommodationist hermeneutic’. See Levitin, Ancient Wisdom in the Age of the New Science, p 229 and Sorkin, The Religious Enlightenment, pp 47–48.
27 Warburton, The Divine Legation of Moses, Vol. 1, p 54.
28 Warburton, The Divine Legation of Moses, Vol. 1, p 95.
29 It is telling, however, that in his 1761 charge to his diocese in which Warburton recommends the ‘best method of studying Theology’ to his clergy does make concessions to natural religion. But this charge was neither finished nor published in his lifetime. See ‘A Charge to the Clergy of the Diocese of Gloucester, 1761’, in The Works of the Right Reverend William Warburton, D.D. Bishop of Gloucester. A New Edition, Vol. 9, Richard Hurd (ed), London: T. Cadell and W. Davies, 1811, p 371.
30 John Brown, A Dissertation on the Rise, Union, and Power, the Progressions, Separations, and Corruptions of Poetry and Music, London: L. Davis and C. Reymers, 1763, p 94.
31 Thomas Warton, Observations on the Fairy Queen of Spenser, Vol. 2, 2nd ed, London: R. and J. Dodsley 1762, p 33. This case about the meaning of romance for Hurd in particular is clearly made by Jonathan Kramnick in his remarks on Hurd’s Letters on Chivalry and Romance. See Jonathan Brody Kramnick, Making the English Canon: Print Capitalism and the Cultural Past, 1700–1770, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,1998, p 175 ff.
32 See John Jortin, ‘Christianity: the Preserver and Supporter of Literature’, in Sermons on Different Subjects, Vol. 7, London: Benjamin White, 1771, pp 153–172. Warburton and Hurd fell out with Jortin but he belongs to the looser group of literary parsons I am thinking about here.
33 John Brown, A Dissertation on the Rise, Union, and Power, the Progressions, Separations, and Corruptions of Poetry and Music, London: L. Davis and C. Reymers, 1763, p 45.
34 This philosophical anthropological understanding of literature also connects the Warburtonians to early enlightenment irreligious thought. They were drawing on texts like Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle’s, De l’Origines des Fables (1684) which argued that religious ‘fables’ were originally invented by priests to explain phenomena that could later be explained by reason/science. Examinations of religion’s original functions and contexts of religion of the kind that de Fontenelle, for instance, developed were an important source of the world literature concept, if in a general and indirect way.
35 John Brown, A Dissertation on Poetry and Music, pp 26 and 44.
36 See William Darby Templeman, ‘Warburton and Brown Continue the Battle over Ridicule’, Huntington Library Quarterly 17(1), 1953, pp 17–36.
37 In thinking about the Warburtonians’ relation to that debate and to English humanism generally, Sir William Temple’s essays ‘Of Heroic Virtue’ and ‘Of Poetry’ (as edited by Jonathan Swift) would appear to be especially important since they were widely circulated and adumbrate elements of the Warburtonian program.
38 Thomas Warton presents a vehement attack on Puritanism for instance in Observations on the Fairy Queen of Spenser, Vol. 2, p 236.
39 See, for instance, Stephen Taylor, ‘William Warburton and the Alliance of Church and State’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History 43(2), 1992, pp 271–286.
40 Brown, Poetry and Music, pp 81–82. And Thomas Warton, Observations on the Fairy Queen of Spenser, Vol. 1, p 95.
41 He resisted responding to Ritson’s attacks on him for that reason. See Davis, Thomas Percy, pp 280–281.
42 Robert Wood, An Essay on the Genius and Writings of Homer with a Comparative View of the Ancient and Present State of the Trade, London: T. Payne, 1775, p 89.
43 For Warburton’s argument about the geography of romance see his ‘A Supplement to the Translator’s Preface’, in Life and Exploits of Don Quixote de La Mancha. Translated from the original Spanish of Miguel de Cervantes by Charles Jarvis Esq. Now Carefully Revised and Corrected. To which is prefaced a Life of the Author, London: S.A. and H. Oddy, 1742, n.p. But the ‘Eastern origins of romance’ trope was being countered by the ‘Northern origins of the Anglophone epic’ trope. Mallet’s Northern Antiquities: or a Description of the Manner, Custom, Religion and Laws of the Ancient Danes was especially important to understandings of literature’s diffusion southwards and helped establish a familiarity with Icelandic orature and literature in particular. It was, of course, translated by Percy. See Ian Wood, The Modern Origins of the Early Middle Ages, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.
44 Brown, Poetry and Music, pp 41–42 on the entanglements of poetry and music in the early history of mankind.
45 For the marriage plot’s role in eighteenth-century culture see Lisa O’Connell The Origins of the English Marriage Plot: Literature, Politics and Religion in the Eighteenth Century, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019, pp 5–11.
46 William Warburton, ‘Sermon XX’ in The Works of the Right Reverend William Warburton, Vol. 10, London, pp 49–60.
47 Warburton, ‘Sermon XX’, p 59. Italics and capitalisation as in the original. This letter was written from Onaquaga, an Indigenous settlement on the Susquehanna River at what is today Windsor, New York. The village was lived in by Christianised native Americans (at first mainly Oneida) who had fled their natal localities. It was divided between Episcopalians and Congregationalists, the writers of this letter presumably being the former. The settlement was destroyed by the Continental army in 1778.