Subproject of the Cluster of Excellence "Temporal Communities: Doing Literature in a Global Perspective": The Invention of the Modern Religious Bookshelf: Canons, Concepts and Communities
The aim of the project is to analyse the formation of ‘religious literature’ as a special case of discursive practices in the transition from traditional to modern knowledge formations. It will reveal the specific ways in which religious literature has been excluded from the canon of “literature” in the narrower sense (especially from the canon of national literatures in the 19th century). More importantly, it will focus on the question how religious literature was given a new, peculiar place in the modern system of knowledge that opened a universal horizon – much in contrast to the new canons of national literatures and in interdependence with the new discipline of general and comparative religious studies that emerged in the 19th century.
