From Great Books to World Literature: Anthologies as Institutional Supplements Around 1900 and Today

At the turn of the twentieth century, Great Books anthologies and essay collections began to create a coherent narrative of the world's literature, one that usually ended with the teleological arrival of its imagined reader: Euro-American man. This essay reads four such publishing projects—Charles Dudley Warner's Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern (1896), Henry Cabot Lodge's The Best of the World's Classics (1909), John Macy's The Story of the World's Literature (1925), and Charles W. Eliot's The Harvard Classics (1909)—in order to argue that justifications of their selections constitute a theorization of the relationship between the one (text, editor, or imagined reader) and the many (possible texts, editorial boards, or national citizenry). In this way, these anthologies are meta-institutional texts, generating theories that can help us understand how contemporary world literature anthologies might reimagine their role as mediating between the representative and the universal.