Whereas the role of space in literary narrative has been frequently studied, its functions in literary historiography have attracted scant attention. Focusing on 19th century French literary histories from a comparatist perspective, this essay examines how literary historiography attributes a literature's identity, like a hero in a novel, largely to the production and consumption of space. The essay is intended as a contribution to the developing field of literary geography. Many historical studies in the nineteenth century portrayed Spain as the "Orient" of Europe and the south of Spain as the "Orient" of Spain. Similar patterns can be found in accounts of the literatures of the Italian and Balkan Peninsulas. Literary histories have traditionally been based on the supposed authenticity of national literary borders; their contradictions and shortcomings are revealed by the transnational thinking and geocultural perspective of modern comparative literature. The essay concludes with a summary of my main remarks on the global pattern encompassing these local literary areas.

This article examines the dispute between Anna Seward and William Cowper over the 1784 Handel Commemoration in Westminster Abbey as a symptom of their allegiance to two distinct cultures of poetry. In broader terms, representing Seward's poetics as "Handelian," that is, modeled on the sociable rituals of music culture, and adhering specifically to the nationalist consensus surrounding Handel's oratorios, clarifies her contempt for Cowper, whose proto-romantic narrative of "retreat" and satiric "misanthropy" constructs a newly fashionably anti-social persona. What Seward calls Cowper's "egotism" likewise belongs to the cultural politics of the new periodicals, which deliberately set themselves against the Augustan traditions of sociable (and, implicitly, effeminized) art, and displayed contempt for Seward's literary-musical salons at Batheaston and Lichfield.

J. G. Herder and Friedrich Nietzsche are commonly associated with the foundation of historicism and modernism, respectively, as major discourses within European culture. Thus they appear as fundamentally opposed thinkers: for modernism explicitly rejected the "turn to the past" that historicism understood as vital. Nonetheless, there are surprisingly extensive parallels between Herder and Nietzsche. The present article explores how both use vitalist rhetoric to critique decadence and "formalist" thought. It argues that such parallels reveal more than just an under-acknowledged affinity between two otherwise very different thinkers. For historicism emerges not as the "opposite" of modernism, but rather as its prevenient stage: Herder's historicist critique of formalism lays conceptual foundations for much of Nietzsche's modernist critique of historicism.