There is a certain antipathy between world literature and literary history. Both trace their origins to, or through, the early nineteenth century and the era of nationalism, each in a different way a response to that stimulus. But theories and models of World Literature have had a striking tendency to be transhistorical, or even ahistorical, in their approach, to breach chronological barriers even more readily than they have broken through geographic ones. Why is that? And does it have to be thus? My goal in this paper is to suggest that this tension can be resolved in some way, that there is some way to write a literary history of the world—or, better, multiple ways to write multiple literary histories of the world. This goal is thoroughly self-interested: I am myself in the midst of writing a book entitled A Global History of Literature, and while I suppose completing the project will constitute proof of its possibility, I have a self-evident interest in confirming the theoretical possibility, even desirability, of completing the task. In what follows, I begin with a brief discussion of the history of literary history itself, followed by a review of selected theories of world literature from the perspective of how they negotiate the historical. I then consider several extra-disciplinary possibilities, before outlining the approach I am attempting to take myself.