World Literature, World Culture. Группа авторов

studied their books, which are the fountains of wisdom, translated them into their language and made their news common to all the nation.)

      Andrés thus broke with the earlier neoclassical tradition and with the emerging nationalist model. On the one hand, he played down the importance of Rome in the transmission of knowledge during the Middle Ages, attributing the key role to the Arabs instead – an unusual stand at the time. On the other hand, he rejected the quasi-mystical idea of the Middle Ages as the moment in which the spirit of the people came to light and shaped the nation through its literature, highlighting instead the importance of an external culture (and moreover one that was not European). Nobody today would be surprised by such a thesis, but it presupposed a huge leap forward in Abbé Andrés’ day, and was probably one of the reasons why he is largely forgotten today.

      Notwithstanding this universalist approach and the rationalist historiographical model that underlies it – a model based on the recognition of the value of each contribution, wherever it might come from – Andrés was also an apologist for Spanish literature. What we find in his Dell’Origine, progressi e stato attuale d’ogni letteratura is more than a comparative history of different literatures. It offers, rather, a “contrasted history of Spanish literature”, that is to say, a history of Spanish literature in which connections and relations are established with other literatures. But this focus on Spain is no reason to deny the universal and comparative nature of the work. Undoubtedly, there was an apologetic purpose to Andrés works, which related to the treatment of classical literatures: Andrés was seeking to absolve Spanish literature from the accusations levelled at it by the Italian scholars Tiraboschi and Bettinelli, who claimed that Spanish literature was decadent, and that in the person of Martial, Seneca and Lucan – all of them Latin writers born in Hispania – it had even provoked the decline of Latin literature. The notion of including these Latin authors in the history of Spanish literature was not new; it could be found, for example, in the very extensive, though unfinished history written by the Mohedano fathers. Until the second half of the twentieth century, it was also a popular element in Spain’s classical philology, and was usually referred to as “Spanish sennequism”. Andrés deconstructs the arguments of the Italian critics by showing that the decline of Roman literature cannot be attributed to a group of authors born on Spanish soil, but rather to internal factors within Latin literature. The argument demonstrates his ability to differentiate clearly between Spanish and Latin literatures as different kinds of literature, even though they are clearly related in the continuum of world literature. He thereby rejects the “geographic determinism” shown by the Italian critics and previously formulated by Montesquieu.

      CONCLUSION

      In conclusion, we may say that Andrés’ historiographic proposals are unique, especially in relation to the dialectic established between classical and “national” European literatures. His solution, as an heir to the historiography of the Enlightenment – albeit one who in many respects departed radically from its precepts – is not an attempt to define world literature as a category by eliding the differences between the various contributions to it, but rather to present these different contributions through the prism of rationality, which leads him to consider the classical literatures not as immovable models or closed realities but as important elements in the history of all literature, and to view the contributions of the Islamic world in the same light. In this sense, reading Juan Andrés undoubtedly helps us to understand the problems that still haunt the history of classical literatures, and to see how we might fruitfully advance towards a new form of literary history that could be equally applied to all the literatures of antiquity.

      WORKS CITED

      Andrés, Juan. Origen, progresos y estado actual de toda la literatura. Eds. J. García gabaladón, S. Navarro Pastor and C. Valcárcel rivera. Directed by P. Aullón de Haro. Madrid: Verbum, 1997.

TRANSLATIONS