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1. Emergence and dimensions of meaningSince the 19th century, the expression “world literature” has become one of the most important concepts in the study of an international (nation-transcending) literature, while also becoming one of the few philological terms to gain currency in social discourse. It can be traced back to an idea introduced by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe in the winter of 1826/27. The term “world literature” (German  Weltliteratur) itself was first used in 1790, in a handwritten revision by Christoph Martin Wieland of his own translation of the Epistles  of Horace…

1. Concept All currents of literature, music, and fine arts in western culture that are called “classical,” from the  Siglo de Oro in 16th/17th-century Spain to the 17th-century French  époque classique to Weimar Classicism (around 1800), developed in the early modern period. Three key factors go towards explaining this phenomenon.(1) The emergence of new, normative aesthetic and cultural canons that came to be called “classical” by later generations, sometimes even by contemporaries, was at first directly associated with a creative  rec…

1. Introduction 1.1. PrinciplesA literary language, also known as an official, high, standard, cultural, or art language, language of literature, etcetera, is a language used in literature shaped by aesthetic considerations. The development of literary languages in the early modern period displays two fundamental dimensions. First, in the transition from the Middle Ages to the early modern period there was an increasing use of the vernacular in place of Latin in literary texts, and secondly specifi…

1. TerminologyFrom the 16th to the 19th centuries in Europe, much sale of print media, printed ephemera, musical scores, books, newspapers, and gazettes took place not through the established book trade, but through the chapman, an itinerant peddler selling goods on the streets or from door to door. The chapman was particularly prevalent in rural areas, where he would peddle printed works together with a plethora of other commodities, in particular petty wares, paper, clocks, writing utensils, an…

1. CharacteristicsThe “Age of Revolutions” [8]; [7. 22 f.] from the 1770s to 1848 (German Revolution [1848/9]) left its mark in literary production and reception, even if this has yet to be adequately acknowledged in literary historiography. Revolutionary literature in the broad sense may be understood as all literature composed in the context of revolutionary movements and influenced by them in terms of production, aesthetics, and reception. The French Revolution (1789), with its direct impact on neighbouring European countries [21] and its catalytic effect on revol…

1. ConceptThe substantive form “exoticism” has been found in the European languages only since the mid-19th century, for example in French since 1846 [9], but the adjective “exotic” (from the Greek  exotikós, “foreign”) was used in the early modern period. Its first attestation is in François Rabelais' Quart Livre (1548), where it describes “various tapestries, animals, fishes, birds, and other commodities” offered for sale by “merchants from Africa and Asia” [9]. Diderot and d'Alembert's Encyclopédie relates the term solely to plants (French  plante/ arbre exotique) fro…

The term Pléiade is derived from the Greek term for the group of seven stars ( pleiás) after which a circle of poets was named in 3rd-century BCE Alexandria. It denotes a group of French poets of the Renaissance. In addition to its founders and driving forces – the theorist and lyric poet Joachim du Bellay and the poet Pierre de Ronsard, both of whome were pupils of Jean Dorat, the Humanist who taught at the Collège de Coqueret in the Quartier Latin in Paris – the group comprised (at various times) Dorat himsel…

1. Multicultural contextEarly modern societies were much more multilingual and multicultural than most modern societies. Translation played an important, sometimes pre-eminent role both in everyday life and in written and printed works. Much more than in the 19th and 20th centuries, dynastic boundaries made large portions of early modern Europe transcultural territories, in which several languages and cultures coexisted, and communication presupposed multilingualism, which also included the abilit…

1. Beginnings and institutionsThe systematic description and cataloguing of conditions and products of nature and of the populations, languages, and cultures of lands overseas were intrinsic to European expansion from the outset. In the wake of the modern European discovery of America by Christopher Columbus (1492) and that of the sea route to India by Vasco da Gama (1497/98), the Portuguese and Spanish crowns set up institutions to control trade between the homeland and the new colonies: the  Casa da Índia e Mina in Lisbon (founded 1498) and the  Casa de la Contratación in Sev…

1. Cultural phenomenonAs a cultural phenomenon, the landscape is a complex “integral system” [2. 14], in which looking at, depicting, and feeling the landscape are as important as its design and ecology (see below, 2.). Landscape in the early modern period (the word “landscape” itself was originally borrowed into English from Dutch  landschap in its artistic sense, extending to the wider sense in the 19th century; Landscape painting) was closely related to the concepts of garden and nature, which together reflect two different ideas and structura…