the name and nature of comparative literature.doc

The Name and Nature parative Literature
R. Wellek
The term “comparative literature” has given rise to so much discussion, has been interpreted so differently and misinterpreted so frequently, that it might be useful to examine its history and to attempt to distinguish its meanings in the main languages. Only then can we hope to define its exact scope and content. Lexicography, “historical semantics,” will be our starting point. Beyond it, a brief history parative studies should lead to conclusions of contemporary relevance."Comparative literature" is still a controversial discipline and idea.
There seem no particular problems raised by our two words individually. “Comparative” occurs in Middle English, obviously derived from parativus. It is used by Shakespeare, as when Falstaff denounces Prince Hal as “the parative, rascalliest, sweet young prince,” Henry IV, .
Francis Meres, as early as 1598, uses the term in the caption of “parative Discourse of Our English Poets with the Greek, Latin and Italian Poets.” Elizabethan Critical Essays, ed. Gregory Smith, 2 (2 vols. Oxford, 1904), 314.
The adjective occurs in the titles of seventeenth-and eighteenth-century books. In 1602 William Fulbecke published parative Discourse of the Laws. I also find parative Anatomy of Brute Animals in 1765. Its author, John Gregory, published parative View of the State and Faculties of Man with hose of the Animal World in the very next year. Bishop Robert Lowth in his Latin Lectures on the Sacred Poetry of the Hebrews (1753), formulated the ideal parative study well enough: “We must see all things with their eyes [. the ancient Hebrews]: estimate all things by their opinions; we must endeavour as much as possible to read Hebrew as the Hebrews would have read it. We must act as the Astronomers with regard to that branch of their science which is parative who, in order to form a more perfect idea of the general system and its different parts, conceive themselves as passing