Abstract

Cultural phenomena never exist except in connexion with the agents of human life that make them possible and endow them with their authentic value. Culture is not of itself a fertilising rain—nothing human can be ‘of itself, an island of abstraction. Literary themes, then, are things that happen in and to someone's historical life. Their value is manifested to its full extent when the theme that interests us is seen as the expression, through an individual, of a particular people, who, in giving life to the literary theme, achieves its self-realisation in terms of a value structure. We have rather too frequently thought about comparative literature as if its motivating force were always some theme common to several literatures, and as if these literatures were limited to the historico-geographical space in which the migratory theme takes up residence and progressively ‘evolves’. This over-abstract and anti-vital idea leads to another, the notion of the theme in its pure state, the Urtema, in many comparative studies.