Herder's Theory Of Comparative Literature

Herder’s view on poetry is that it is proteus in nature, that is, it changes form according to the peoples’ language, customs, habits, according to their temperament, the climate, even according to their accent. Thus the art of poetry changes not only among different nations’ but also within one people. He also speaks about how poets are to be compared. According to him, poet’s art should be compared with respect to the producer. Everybody assesses and ranks poets according to his favorite notions, according to the fashion in which he got to know them, according to the impression that one or another has made on him. So he says that we must not blame any nation for preferring their poets to all others and for not wanting to relinquish them

He was a member of Prague linguistic circle, which intended in extending the insights of structural linguistics to literature. He became a professor of Slavic and Comparative Literature at Yale University. With Austen Warren, he co-authored Theory of Literature (1949), a pioneering and highly influential approach to the study of comparative literature in which history, theory and criticism are intimately linked. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, Wellek made a great impact on comparative studies through a series of searching, polemical essays on problems of defining literary terms and the discipline of literary studies. . In “The Crisis of Comparative Literature”, Wellek defends a broad and multivalent definition of the discipline against the strict emphasis on the study of direct and verifiable influences, represented by scholars as Marius- Francois Guyard and Jean- Marie Carre. The essay became a manifesto of sorts for what came to be known as the “American School” of comparative literature, which emphasized the importance of literary theory and championed cosmopolitan humanism over cultural

It is broad area that spreads its hand all over the world. The only way to trace the origin and development of comparative literature is to go through the works of the philosophers like Herder, Goethe, Nietzsche, Wellek, et al… who had touched upon the world literature and recorded their opinion on the need of universalizing literature rather than sticking on to National literature. In simple words, comparative literature is a branch which encompasses comparison of different literatures across the world without the limit of time and space. Since the practice of comparing two literatures is very less, we could say Comparative Literature rather as a study of works of those people who had a close reading of literature produced across the