I eagerly joined this conversation when invited by Dilip Gaonkar and Neilesh Bose, because for some fifty years I have practiced literary studies—specifically, literary history—while closely attentive to dialogue with historians, both through reading and through colleagueship. As my work in this new millennium has increasingly turned to world literature, I have looked to important works of world history with which to develop this dialogue, and I have not found the resources as rewarding as I had in my earlier focus on English and American literatures and cultures. Therefore, I begin this paper by stating simply my longstanding expectations for the relationships between the disciplines of history and literature. These expectations have not controlled but certainly have guided my work for many years. Do they remain at all persuasive? I turn then to exemplify my dissatisfactions in looking to recent world historiography. Finally, I conclude with more extended discussion of Sheldon Pollock's The Language of the Gods in the World of Men, a work far from my immediate area of study in which I find great promise for better relations between historical and literary scholarship.

I start with a paragraph from The Communist Manifesto, which I consider the warrant for our topic of relations between World History and World Literature. The Manifesto sets its political goal within a powerfully influential conception of world history, within which resides world literature.