Senior Fellow in Research Area 3: "Future Perfect"

June–July 2025

World Religions and Folklore Studies: Max Müller, Franz Boas and the Prehistory of Comparative Literature 

Like other academic disciplines that emerged during the nineteenth century (such as anthropology), early comparative literature derived its methods of comparison from more established scientific fields, such as morphology, comparative biology, comparative philology, comparative religion and ethnography. Among these, comparative philology – known as the "king of the sciences" in the nineteenth century and emerging principally from colonial Britain and German-speaking Europe (William Jones, Friedrich Schlegel, Wilhelm von Humboldt, Franz Bopp, Max Müller) – provided one of the most dominant and influential models of comparison. Related to comparative philology were two additional fields that played key roles in the early formation of Comparative Literature and so-called 'world' literature: folklore studies (Völkerkunde) and comparative religion. Both coincided with colonialism, missionary activity and the rise of travel literature, being based on the ethnographic collection of oral and written narratives from cultures around the world.

Working within the subproject entitled The Invention of the Modern Religious Bookshelf: Canons, Concepts and Communities, this project examines two landmark publication projects that attempted to compare a diverse range of European and non-European cultures on a grand scale. The first is the fifty-volume collection of Asian religious texts translated into English by a team of scholars under the general editorship of Max Müller: The Sacred Books of the East (1879-1910). The second is the Journal of American Folklore, co-founded by Franz Boas in 1888 and still published to this day. Both projects took their bearings from comparative philology, and both explicitly engaged with questions of literary comparison and the establishment of a global literary canon, with 'literature' being understood here in a capacious sense that incorporates both oral and written sources. This work is part of a larger monograph project entitled The Science of Comparative Literature in Global German Thought: A Nineteenth-Century Story.

Angus Nicholls is Professor of Comparative Literature and German at Queen Mary University of London. Nicholls works at the intersections between literary studies, philosophy and other humanities disciplines such as critical theory, anthropology and psychoanalysis, and his work is mostly concerned with the German and Anglophone traditions from the late eighteenth century through to the twentieth century. His publications include Goethe’s Concept of the Daemonic: After the Ancients (2006), Thinking the Unconscious: Nineteenth-Century German Thought (co-edited with Martin Liebscher, 2010), Myth and the Human Sciences: Hans Blumenberg’s Theory of Myth (2015) and Friedrich Max Müller and the Role of Philology in Victorian Thought (co-edited with John R. Davis, 2017). He was formerly co-editor of two refereed journals: Publications of the English Goethe Society (Routledge) and History of the Human Sciences (Sage). His current focus is the early history of comparative literature in nineteenth-century German-speaking Europe.