Discussion Group: World Literature and Publishers’ Series: The Propyläen-Verlag's Werke der Weltliteratur (1920–1925)

The publisher’s series – a publication format that presents a collection of different texts in a uniform and often more affordable format, issued by a single publisher – is a publishing phenomenon that is closely associated with questions of canonicity, cross-cultural translation and literary value. The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries saw a proliferation of publishers’ series that explicitly marketed themselves as collections of ‘universal’ or ‘world literature’, including such well-known series as Reclam’s Universalbibliothek, Oxford’s World’s Classics, and Boni & Liveright’s Modern Library of the World’s Best Books. This talk focusses on the lesser-known series Werke der Weltliteratur, issued by the Berlin-based Propyläen-Verlag between 1920-1925, as a case study of the publishing of ‘world literature’ in Weimar Germany. Examining the conception, material format and marketing of the series, the talk explores how the Propyläen-Verlag’s Werke der Weltliteratur both shaped and reflected contemporary ideas about ‘world literature’. More broadly, it seeks to demonstrate how approaches grounded in book and print culture studies can contribute significant new insights to our understanding of the historical and cultural processes that shaped the meaning of ‘world literature’ in the twentieth century and beyond.

Evi Heinz is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Centre for British Studies, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. As a member of the ‘Boundaries of Cosmopolis’ research group, a collaborative effort between HU Berlin and the University of Oxford, her research investigates ideas of ‘world literature’ in the literary traffic between Germany and Britain in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Her broader research interests include literary modernism, comparative literature, publishing history and periodical print culture. She is a contributor to the Bloomsbury Handbook of Modernism in the Archive and co-editor of Whitechapel Moderns: An Anthology of Modernist Culture in London’s Jewish East End, under contract with Edinburgh University Press.