Schools of Comparative Literature

July 01, 2026

The French School

According to the teachings of Comparative literature and comparatists, there emerged different schools of comparative literature such as: European schools consisting of French, German, English, American, etc. Non-European like African Indian and so on. French school of comparative literature came under the influence of positivism: the movement which looks at the things skeptically and rationally etc. The two important aspects of this school are the national notions of influence and reception. The methodology adopted by the comparatist of this school does not attribute the superiority to the literature of one nation over another. They are least interested in making comparison for superiority or inferiority of one piece of literature over other. It emphasize on product.

Paul Van Tiegham 1931 has been considered as a father of French School by some well-known critics. He defines French school of comparative literature as, 
Comparative literature should involve the study of two elements, while general literature should involve the study of several literature. He set oral literature, folk lore and pre-renaissance literature outside the boundaries of his comparative literature. 
Another critic points out, 
French school failed to define terminologies and methodologies of comparative literature because of their focus on ‘outside impact' on literary works while ignoring the internal aspects of texts in questions.
French school’s common fields of study are the concepts of influence and that of reception. Influences maybe literary or non-Literary, or it may be direct or indirect influences. Enani believes that influence is seen as a movement of an idea, a theme, an image, a literary tradition, or even a tone from a literary text into another. M.M Enani also says that French school demands that the comparatist needs to be well versed in different languages, cultures and literary history in order to come up with sound conclusions.

Both Tiegham and Guyard  concur that the study of the writer’s impact on a foreign country cannot be divorced from studying the reception of this writers work in that country to a degree at which it becomes impossible to distinguish between reception and influence.( M. M Enani 2005) .For instance, Fitzgerald translation of Ommar Khayam’s  Rubaiyat or Pushkin’s adaptation of Byron elegy to Russian style or English sonnet, and Marathi sonnet are the examples of the concepts of reception, imitation, and borrowing in the study of comparative literature.

According to the French school, the fields of study are;
  • Literary schools and genres: classicism, romanticism, realism and surrealism etc. or epic, novel, drama etc. Early India English writing was influenced by English Romanticism.
  • Ideological Echoes: National History, philosophy, Ethics, Culture, Politics etc. cannot be divorced from literary history.
  • Image Echoes: country's image in the foreign writer’s work. For example, E.M Forster’s ‘Passage to India’. Image of certain character representing the nation. For example, dress, trade, culture, cuisine, procreation etc.
  • Verbal Echoes: give and take between languages; words and idioms which crept from border of one into another language.
  • Human models and heroes: literary characters collectors from myths, religious, history etc.
Thus, the French school of comparative literature emphasizes on the languages of literature so as to examine the mutual impact and influence. Therefore, influence and impact of one literature over other is a tool of the comparatists of French school. Rene Wellek notes, 
It is impossible to draw a line between comparative literature and general literature.  
Wellek also points out that comparative literature in the restricted sense of binary relations cannot make a meaningful discipline. There is no place in the post-modernist world for a subject that continues to quibble about weather W.B Yeats should be considered Irish or English and whether a study on the impact of Henrik Ibsen on modernistic drama can be properly termed ‘comparative’ or ‘general literature’.

The American School

The American school appeared in the 20th C. as a reaction against the French school. This school was founded by Henry Remak. He argues that comparative literature should be considered as a connecting link between subjects or subject areas rather than a proper discipline.  This school aimed to depoliticize comparative literature by going beyond the nationalism of literary texts. It mainly focused on universalism and inter-disciplinary. It deals with two types of studies or fields of study.

The Parallelism Theory

This theory was described by an Egyptian-born American critic, Ihab Hassan. He gave this theory against the theory of influence. This theory claims that there are affinities among the literary texts of different cultures having similar social evolution. Parallelism means similarity by virtue of correspondence. For example, the political, social, economic and religious relations during classic period resulted in similar patterns of thought, art and literature across the world.

The Intertextuality Theory

This theory focuses on the reference of a text to another text. It means that a story from a literary text can be drawn out in order to write more stories like the original one. The, the ways in which this particular story is repeated in different ways is called the intertextuality theory. Roland Barthes is of the view that text should be taken as a network. When a literary person interprets a text, the author is no longer the great originator or the creative genius. It becomes his task to put together linguistic signs or literary forms and structural patterns or structures “linguistic raw material”.

Another critic, Leon S. Roudiz refuses the idea of influence among author, interpreter, and sources of literary texts. He defines intertextuality as a mutual exchange of linguistic signs between two texts. In addition, it is compulsory to know that a text always has its literary ingredients like codes, formulas, rhythmic models, fragments of social language, ideas, etc. When a writer translates the original text into his own language, the original idea or the essence of the text does not broken into pieces. It is followed by the reader or the translator. A text always has an identity but its identity is always relational. Text is identified by its literary ingredients and literary ingredients are relational, in the sense of its context in which it is written.