World literature is sometimes used to refer to the sum total of the world's national literatures, but

usually it refers to the circulation of works into the wider world beyond their country of origin. Often
used in the past primarily for masterpieces of Western European Literature, world literature today is
increasingly seen in global context. Readers today have access to an unprecedented range of works from
around the world in excellent translations, and since the mid-1990s a lively debate has grown up
concerning both the aesthetic and the political values and limitations of an emphasis on global
processes over national traditions.

Johann Wolfgang Goethe used the concept of Weltliteratur in several of his essays in the early decades
of the nineteenth century to describe the international circulation and reception of literary works in
Europe, including works of non-Western origin. The concept achieved wide currency after his disciple
Johann Peter Eckermann published a collection of conversations with Goethe in 1835.[1] Goethe spoke
with Eckermann about the excitement of reading Chinese novels and Persian and Serbian poetry as well
as of his fascination with seeing how his own works were translated and discussed abroad, especially in
France. In a famous statement in January 1827, Goethe predicted to Eckermann that in the coming years
world literature would supplant the national literatures as the major mode of literary creativity:

I am more and more convinced that poetry is the universal possession of mankind, revealing itself
everywhere and at all times in hundreds and hundreds of men. ... I therefore like to look about me in
foreign nations, and advise everyone to do the same. National literature is now a rather unmeaning
term; the epoch of world literature is at hand, and everyone must strive to hasten its approach.[2]

Reflecting a fundamentally economic understanding of world literature as a process of trade and

In place of the old wants, satisfied by the productions of the country, we find new wants, requiring for
their satisfaction the products of distant lands and climates. ... And as in material, so also in intellectual
production. The intellectual creations of individual nations become common property. National one-
sidedness and narrow-mindedness become more and more impossible, and from the numerous national
and local literatures, there arises a world literature.

Martin Puchner has argued that Goethe had a keen sense of world literature as driven by a new world
market in literature. It was this market-based approach that Marx and Engels pick up in 1848. But while
the two authors admire the world literature created by bourgeois capitalism, they also seek to exceed it.
They hoped to create a new type of world literature, one exemplified by the Manifesto, which was to be
published simultaneously in many languages and several locations. This text was supposed to inaugurate
a new type of world literature and in fact partially succeeded, becoming one of the most influential texts
of the twentieth century.[3]

Whereas Marx and Engels followed Goethe in seeing world literature as a modern or even future
phenomenon, in 1886 the Irish scholar H. M. Posnett argued that world literature first arose in ancient
empires such as the Roman Empire, long before the rise of the modern national literatures.[4] Certainly
today, world literature is understood as including classical works from all periods, as well as
contemporary literature written for a global audience. By the turn of the twentieth century, intellectuals
in various parts of the globe were thinking actively about world literature as a frame for their own
national production, a theme found in essays by several of the progressive writers of China's May Fourth
movement, including Lu Xun.

Over the course of the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth, the rising tide of nationalism led
to an eclipse of interest in world literature, but in the postwar era, comparative and world literature
began to enjoy a resurgence in the United States. As a nation of immigrants, and with a less well
established national tradition than many older countries possessed, the United States became a thriving
site for the study of comparative literature (often primarily at the graduate level) and of world
literature, often taught as a first-year general education class. The focus remained largely on the Greek
and Roman classics and the literatures of the major modern Western European powers, but a
confluence of factors in the late 1980s and early 1990s led to a greater openness to the wider world. The
end of the Cold War, the growing globalization of the world economy, and new waves of immigration
from many parts of the world led to several efforts to open out the study of world literature. This
change is well illustrated by the expansion of The Norton Anthology of World Masterpieces, whose first
edition of 1956 featured only Western European and North American works, to a new "expanded
edition" of 1995 with substantial non-Western selections, and with the title changed from
"masterpieces" to the less exclusive "Literature".[5] The major survey anthologies today, including those
published by Longman and by Bedford in addition to Norton, all showcase several hundred authors from
dozens of countries.

The explosive growth in the range of cultures studied under the rubric of world literature has inspired a
variety of theoretical attempts to define and delimit the field and to propose effective modes of
research and teaching. In his 2003 book What Is World Literature? David Damrosch argued for world
literature as less a vast canon of works and more a matter of circulation and reception, and he proposed
that works that thrive as world literature are ones that work well and even gain in various ways in
translation. Whereas Damrosch's approach remains tied to the close reading of individual works, a very
different view was taken by the Stanford critic Franco Moretti in a pair of articles offering "Conjectures
on World Literature".[6] Moretti argued that the scale of world literature far exceeds what can be
grasped by traditional methods of close reading, and he advocated instead a mode of "distant reading"
that would look at large-scale patterns as discerned from publication records and national literary
histories, enabling one to trace the global sweep of forms such as the novel or film.

Moretti's approach combined elements of evolutionary theory with the world-systems analysis
pioneered by Immanuel Wallerstein, an approach further discussed since then by Emily Apter in her
influential book The Translation Zone.[7] Related to their world-systems approach is the major work of
French critic Pascale Casanova, La République mondiale des lettres (1999).[8] Drawing on the theories of
cultural production developed by the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, Casanova explores the ways in which
the works of peripheral writers must circulate into metropolitan centers in order to achieve recognition
as works of world literature. Both Moretti and Casanova emphasize the inequalities of the global literary
field, which Moretti describes as "one, but unequal".
The field of world literature continues to generate debate, with critics such as Gayatri Chakravorty
Spivak arguing that too often the study of world literature in translation smooths out both the linguistic
richness of the original and the political force a work can have in its original context.[9] Other scholars, on
the contrary, emphasize that world literature can and should be studied with close attention to original
languages and contexts, even as works take on new dimensions and new meanings abroad. Once a
primarily European and American concern, world literature is now actively studied and discussed in
many parts of the world. World literature series are now being published in China and in Estonia, and a
new Institute for World Literature, offering month-long summer sessions on theory and pedagogy, had
its inaugural session at Peking University in 2011, with its next sessions at Istanbul Bilgi University in
2012 and at Harvard University in 2013. Since the middle of the first decade of the new century, a
steady stream of works has provided materials for the study of the history of world literature and the
current debates.

What is the importance of world literature

World literature is a way of communicating and preserving important details of culture, traditions and
attitudes. Literature is comprised of language, and language is a form of communication.

The act of writing is also an act of communication. Language is not fixed. Its meaning changes based on
how members of respective cultures interpret it, and this meaning also shifts over time. World literature
is a way of collecting those ideas in a way that reflects a specific group of people at a certain time in
history.

Since literature is reflective of predominant political and philosophical principles of the time in which it
is written, world literature is also a historical reflection of the evolution of world culture. It is a snapshot
of a region within a given time. This knowledge is not only used by societies to improve their dialogues
with each other but also to understand the struggles and priorities of those who are different and how
those struggles affect others.

World literature is sometimes presented as a statement of demands or as a critique of a society. In such

Introduction to World Literature

Literature is where I go to explore the highest and lowest places in human society and in the human
spirit, where I hope to find not absolute truth but the truth of the tale, of the imagination and of the
heart.

—Salman Rushdie

[I]s the capacity for the quiet use of leisure, something essential to reading, on the wane? Isolation and
insularity can afflict any land. One of the best cures is to read the finest literature from as many places
as possible. Louise Erdrich might call it 'life medicine.'

—Liesl Schillinger, New York Times Book Review, January 4, 2009

Welcome to Invitation to World Literature!

Our own time and place is a world shaped by all that has come before, not just the physical world we
inherit, but the world of our own imagining. The stories of previous ages and different places are part of
our heritage; perhaps, given our species' propensity for storytelling, they are part of our DNA
(figuratively speaking).

This multimedia series, Invitation to World Literature, offers you a passport to this rich heritage via
thirteen works from a range of eras, places, cultures, languages, and traditions. These are books that we
hope spark your interest, or satisfy long-standing curiosity about things you wished you had read, or
introduce works that are new to you, opening up a world of connections and experiences.