Cultural Brokers, Forms of Hybridity and the Emergence of the First International Comparative Literary Journal

The research on the first international journal of comparative literary studies has usually foregrounded only one of the founders of the Acta Comparationis Litterarum Universarum, namely Hugo von Meltzl. This Romantically biased image of the sole founding father suppressed all the research questions regarding the extremely large and complex network of collaborators. The focus on the scholarly pool of wide geographic, cultural and ethnic variety of 120 collaborators could reframe our basic questions regarding the emergence and transnational transmission of early institutional comparative literary knowledge, but it would also lead to a more focused analysis on the way networking and various types of transnational networks produced diverse forms and notions of comparative literature. This paper investigates only one type of cluster/network and its consequences within the first international journal of comparative literary studies; it focuses on the role of ethnic and cultural hybridity, and its impact on imagining transnationality and comparative literature in the ACLU.

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