Nietzsche and Global Literature

Dear Colleagues,

Friedrich Nietzsche’s impact on twentieth-century European literature is of course massive. His innovative as well as provocative ideas on language, aesthetics, ethics, religion, cultural mores, etc. influenced major literary movements such as symbolism, art nouveau, expressionism, and various other strains of modernism. More specifically, he exhibits a profound presence in the work of authors such as Thomas Mann, Hermann Hesse, Robert Musil, Gottfried Benn, George Bernard Shaw, William Butler Yeats, D.H. Lawrence, André Gide, Miguel de Unamuno, Knut Hamsun––not to mention countless others.

This guest-edited Special Issue of Humanities, however, seeks to depart from Nietzsche’s already familiar tracks and traces in the European literary landscape. Though contributions in this vein are certainly welcome, especially if they shed new light on otherwise timeworn ties and affinities, the greater scope of the issue aims to embrace global literary texts and cultural contexts beyond the European and Anglo-American pale. Some of the guiding questions one might wish to address include (but are by no means limited to): How has Nietzsche and his Greco-Roman-inspired (read: quintessentially Western) worldview been received in other parts of the world? How do some of his radical notions or so-called “thoughts out of season”, as first articulated over 150 years ago in a European intellectual setting, resonate, for example, in contemporary Latin American, East Asian, or sub-Saharan African literature? How have international authors, especially from countries that have long struggled to establish functional democracies, dealt with his aristocratic if not outright anti-egalitarian views? Does his critique of Christianity and attendant project of revaluating all values have productive parallels or approximate analogues in literary texts from other cultures? Finally, how have non-Western writers reacted to Nietzsche’s notorious misogyny, which the philosopher-provocateur cultivated to the rhetorical extreme, especially in the face of nineteenth-century women’s liberation and other democratization movements?

Conversely, essays addressing the crucial influence of prior literary figures and/or works on Nietzsche are also pertinent. These could include European examples by the likes of Goethe, Hölderlin, Heine, Stendahl, Dostoevsky, or others. Alternatively, given Nietzsche’s academic training and (albeit brief) professional career as a classical philologist rather than actual philosopher per se, his indebtedness to ancient Greek and Latin literature might also prove a fruitful avenue of pursuit.

Please send an approximately 250-word proposal to the guest editor ([email protected]) beforehand, ideally by November 1, 2021.

Dr. Sean Ireton
Guest Editor

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• classical Greek/Latin literature
• global literature
• intertextuality
• literary influences
• modernism
• non-Western literature
• Nietzsche
• philosophy and literature
• world literature.