About the author:
Alexander E. Makhov, DSc in Philology, Leading Research Fellow, A.M. Gorky Institute of World Literature of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Povarskaya 25 a, 121069 Moscow, Russia.
ORCID ID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1675-5542
E-mail:
Abstract:
The first and second parts of this article consider the basic principles of the “history of national poetry” (Literaturgeschichte), which was one of the leading genres in 19th century German philology. It is shown that the orientation of the genre towards extraliterary concepts, primarily towards the idea of a unique “German soul”, has led this genre to a crisis. From this perspective, Ernst Robert Curtius’s book “European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages”, the main ideas of which are discussed in the third part of the article, appeared to be a solution of the crisis caused by the cultivation of a national approach to literature. Curtius productively inverted all the principles of this approach, replacing nationalism with Europeanism, stadiality with continuity, emphasis on content with primary attention to the aspects of form. In general, the history of literature has got a new life in a “historical topics”. The “science of European literature” created by Curtius was born from a negative reaction to the attitudes of nationally oriented Germanistics.