Glossy wrote:English has been the world’s most important language since 1945, so of course modern lists overrepresent English.
As late as the 17th century Spain and the Netherlands, for example, seemed more important than England. I’m not even talking about France, Germany or Italy.
Well, in an alternative history where Dutch became the world’s lingua franca by the 20th century, lots of Dutch writers most of us have never heard of would have been retroactively promoted to the status of global classics.
I think that’s what happened to English lit. That’s why English tops the lists in this thread. In the 18th and 19th centuries everyone in Europe looked up to French literature. It was kind of the model. Before that everyone read the Greek and Latin classics.
A list of what’s considered important now is very different from a list of what was considered important in every one of the periods covered. Very different from a list of what was considered important on average, over the entire period.
"The appearance in 1669 of the first literary society (dichtgenootschap) was an omen of a decline in Dutch literature lasting through the 18th century. Material well-being sapped the vitality of the nation. Even the talented poet Hubert Poot suffered from the delusion of his day that rococo flourish and prescribed form were the criteria of poetry. Prose, too, consisted almost exclusively of translations and bombastic disquisitions."
https://www.britannica.com/art/Dutch-literature
"Jonathan Swift has had a profound impact on almost all the national literatures of Continental Europe."
The Reception of Jonathan Swift in Europe
"English authors such as Daniel Defoe, James Thomson, Edward Young, and especially Samuel Richardson influenced French writers, who carved plots from ..."
Encyclopedia of the Romantic Era, 1760-1850, Volume 2
"Reputation of Clarissa
On the Continent, Clarissa was widely read and influential; two generations of European writers imitated him. Diderot not only admired Richardson in Eloge de Richardson(1762) but even judged friends using Clarissa as his yardstick. For Rousseau, "no one, in any language, has ever written a novel that equals or even approaches Clarissa"; his Julie, ou la Nouvelle Heloise (1761), one of the most important French novels of the eighteenth century, showed Richardson's influence. That influence also extended to Germany, most notably in Lessing's plays and Goethe's novels."
http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/engli ... index.html
