Comparative literature, does not examine primarily facts pertaining to the sciences of nature, but creates meanings of the "great stories". The impulse for a such "great story" came from the comparison of the ancient and the modern world in the French debate about the "Aristotelian" and "free" tragedy, as well as from the conflict between the advocates of "antiquity" and defenders of "modernity"at the end of the 17th century (the so-called "Querelle").
This comparison gives the basis of the "philosophy of history" in the German classical idealism