Can a poem create a world? Among other poets, Wallace Stevens affirms a poem's capacity to make a mountain or even a planet. This chapter examines the history behind the idea of the poem as worldmaking, from Renaissance ideas rooted in antiquity, through Enlightenment concepts such as heterocosm, to modernist ideas of autonomy, including W. H. Auden's “secondary worlds.” Allowing for subsequent historicist, political, and poststructuralist critiques of such ideas, it argues for the enduring value of the concept of poem as worldmaking. Some theorists of lyric have advanced a notion of the poem as a ritualistic event of enunciation and others have held that the poem, even if not primarily mimetic, still evokes a world. This chapter argues for a synthetic model of the poem as enacting an event in language and as also producing a polyspatial, polytemporal world, as exemplified by poems by Patience Agbabi, Margaret Atwood, Tracy K. Smith, and others. Drawing on the field of world literature, it explores how the poem's transnational and transhistorical travel worlds the world. Analyzing a poem by A. K. Ramanujan, it asks about the ethical implications of a poem's worldwide reach.

Chapter 31 scrutinises the term Weltliteratur (world literature), often invoked but little understood. Weltliteratur is a motif in Goethe’s oeuvre, rather than a unified theory, and it either describes the increased international literary exchanges which are the result of modernisation, or it has a normative charge, suggesting that Weltliteratur enables intercultural understanding. The chapter considers the origins of and various sources for the concept, together with its key resonances and concerns; it also reflects on the role played by the term in the establishment of the modern academic discipline of comparative literature.

Chapter 1 argues that V. S. Naipaul’s works are critically co-extensive with world literary formations and demonstrably foundational to the conception of the modern idea of world literature. Naipaul’s entry into world literature is via a writing that reads the literary world as an aesthetic totality. Kant’s critique of judgement is critical here even if Naipaul departs from Kant who read human cognition as discursive and not intuitive. Naipaul’s aesthetics is grounded in an intuitive mode of human cognition. His idea of “seeing” (and here he means “critical seeing”) via a “sensible intuition” is the basis of all his writings. Naipaul’s declaration of the primacy of the intuitive intellect – Proust is cited as exemplary – in the artistic process has no need for concepts or guiding principles, a prior idea or even a politics. However, Naipaul heeds Kant’s warning that if we were to rely purely on intuition – which would generate a non-contingent world with no distinction between objects that are real and those merely possible because all objects for the intuitive intellect are real – there would be no universal concepts generated by understanding and only individual representations grasped directly and immediately.

My wager in this book is that the modern idea of the literary as a sovereign order of textuality since the late eighteenth century – autonomous, autotelic, and singular – was coproduced with an extraordinary model of colonial sovereignty in the far-flung colony of British India. I track the proliferation of this model of the literary sovereign then through the conceptual grid of Weltliteratur or world literature and show how this colonial history made its mark across literary cultures in Europe. From the eighteenth century onward, this colonial history shaped and reshaped literary cultures on a global scale, and laid the foundations of what can be defined as the modern culture of letters.

In Chapter 4, I discuss the idea of Weltliteratur and argue that it was one of the most successful tools through which Europe negotiated with and made sense of the colonial history of the literary sovereign. Though mostly associated with Goethe, its clearest outlines were available through a combination of Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment (1790) and Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (1798). Weltliteratur, I argue, is the culmination of a set of ideas Kant introduced to account for the peculiar nature of the power of judgment or taste – that such judgments cannot have any a priori or universal principles and yet claim universality. Whether framed as the beautiful or the sublime, he suggested, such claims remained contingent, relying on a communal consensus that could have been established only according to anthropological principles. Kantian aesthetics is “impure” as it always and already relies on something external to it, that cannot be made sense of within the borders set by aesthetic judgment itself. Similarly, Weltliteratur was a combination of aesthetic and anthropological principles, advocating a form of comparative judgment replicating the Kantian model.

This chapter is a synchronic snapshot of the way that poems, speeches, sociability, and bureaucracy coalesced at Stalinist literary occasions. Here, literary representatives made their claims to representative authority and, on that basis, lent legitimacy to the multinational state and the international revolutionary project. The chapter follows the Iranian émigré poet Abu al-Qasim Lahuti through his performances at three multinational and international events over the course of 1934–1935: the First Soviet Writers’ Congress in Moscow; the Congress for the Defense of Culture in Paris; and Stalin’s Kremlin meeting with Tajik and Turkmen collective farmers at which the multinational “friendship of peoples” was declared. Lahuti’s exchanges at these events with writers such as Maxim Gorky, Romain Rolland, and André Gide contributed to the articulation of the role of the Eastern literary representative and the ceremonial of authoritarian mass politics in the Soviet Union and beyond. As Persianate forms left their traditional contexts and entered this Russocentric world literature system, their utility as rhetorical tools for negotiating patron–poet power relations collapsed, and they came to be read in translation as simple flattery. This chapter thus presents Soviet multinational socialist realism as an illustrative early instantiation of institutionalized world literature.

The introduction sketches the history of literary internationalism in the communist East. Throughout much of Central Eurasia, South Asia, and the Middle East, modern socialist and anticolonial revolutionary movements have drawn on a shared non-European political, intellectual, and artistic culture whose canonical forms and models were born in Persian. For this reason, throughout the twentieth century, the fate of Persianate culture was deeply intertwined with the fate of communist internationalism in Eurasia. This introduction establishes the basis for the book’s basic conceptual categories: Persianate, Eastern, transnational, multinational, international, and world poetics. The Persianate functions in this book as a repertory of cultural forms rather than a civilizational unity. The distinction between transnational and international is also crucial to the book that narrates the process by which a transnational cosmopolitanism of ordinary people was replaced by an international friendship between nations performed by an elite corps of literary representatives and the practical commons of Persianate forms turned into the reified political unity of the revolutionary East. For this process, the introduction provides a periodization based on generations of Eastern internationalist writers, each illustrated by several short biographical examples.

The Conclusion highlights that there are common characteristics and trends that allow us to talk about ‘Mediterranean crime fiction’. Partially belonging to the family of European crime fiction, Mediterranean crime fiction is more exclusive, because it excludes northern and central European crime fiction. At the same time, it is more inclusive because it includes northern Africa and the Middle East. This book's approach considers southern European, northern African and eastern Mediterranean crime fiction as part of a common tradition, and more importantly gives each component equal significance. It avoids suppressing cultural diversity and contributes to a decentred crime fiction universe by creating a centreless map that does not point at specific countries or cities but at the liquid mass of the Mediterranean Sea. Finally, it shows how Mediterranean crime fiction contributes to the development of the crime genre at large with a concern for environmental issues, a complex discourse on identity and historical responsibilities, and a celebration of transculturality in a genre known for portraying conflict, violence and divisions.

The Introduction positions this book as part of the new critical move to map and interrogate crime fiction’s transnationality. The main point is to combine a sustained focus on individual texts and their particular local and national contexts with a broader, comparative approach that explores the ways in which the translation, circulation and reception of crime fiction within the Mediterranean basin produces a more complex portrait of the genre than would be possible if one just focused on national crime fictions as discrete entities. This chapter argues that by considering southern European, northern African and eastern Mediterranean crime fiction as part of a common tradition, and more importantly giving each component equal significance, this book contributes to the debate about the Western and Eurocentric dimension of world literature. This introduction also argues that, for the relatively limited dimension of the region as opposed to the global, a regional approach is able to give close attention to particular languages and specific texts, while at the same time providing ‘peripheral literature’ with more critical mass and cultural power.

This essay proposes that the English literary anthology is a genre that triangulates the canon, the curriculum, and the classroom. Its colonial legacy is undeniable, and the core processes of anthology editing – selection, excerption, arrangement, and framing – do closely replicate the decontextualizing and objectifying practices of imperial epistemologies. Nonetheless, the anthology remains an affordable textbook and is most popular in nonelite universities and college classrooms where survey and general literature courses are taught as important parts of the English literary curriculum. Rather than dismiss the anthology as a pedagogical tool, the author presents editorial strategies for decolonizing it and for presenting literary tradition in the English language in more equitable ways. Drawing upon her experience editing the eleventh edition of The Norton Anthology of English Literature (NAEL), the author offers a reappraisal of critical theories of anthologizing alongside strategies for reframing the global diffusion of English literature through the power dynamics of territorial, educational, and cultural imperialism.

Beginning with an account of how Marxism fared in two historical contexts of decolonization (South Africa and India), the chapter then focuses on one recent influential mode of Marxist literary analysis: “world-literature” – with a hyphen – as elaborated the by Warwick Research Collective. How does this approach square with the current push for decolonization? In response to that question, the chapter contrasts WReC with claims from current “decolonial theory” to illustrate differences between their presuppositions. In conclusion, the suggestion is that Marxim’s specific contribution contemporary debates on decolonization might be to question tendencies to reify concepts such as “race,” “culture” or the “West” as metaphysical categories. That contribution, in turn, is best received on the understanding that there are experiential dimensions relating to aesthetics, language, race, gender, sexuality and religion that the Marxist framework is ill-equipped to account for in a non-reductive fashion. Hence, it is perhaps the dialectical method that is the enduring lesson of Marxism – a method that may bracket and then reintroduce the Marxist optic in the unending labour of making sense of the world.

This chapter will explore the entangled histories of postcolonialism, world literature, and global anglophone as pedagogical and institutional rubrics. The English curriculum in the Anglo-American academy has in various degrees been reconfigured by these rubrics since the 1980s, but each has often been perceived as antagonistic to the other two, and scholars have devoted volumes to staking their territorial claim on each. Rather than wage partisan battles that perceive the rise of global anglophone as a threat to postcolonial studies, or world literature as a neoliberal takeover/erasure of the literary riches of the non-European world, it is worthwhile, I argue to trace their collective impetus to decolonize English and comparative literary studies.

Writings about East Asia provide an invaluable archive to study 1890s understandings of cosmopolitanism. In this period that predated the extensive translation of East Asian literatures into English, the work of cultural and literary mediation was carried out largely by nonspecialists. Focusing on Japan and China respectively, this chapter compares the representation of East Asian cultures in Lafcadio Hearn’s Kokoro (1896) and Wo Chang’s Britain Through Chinese Spectacles (1897). Both writers sought to widen the aesthetic, ethical, and political horizons of English-speaking readers. This chapter argues for the need to look beyond orientalism in order to appreciate the complexity of writers’ critical engagement with cosmopolitanism, and to understand the aspirations and failures of cosmopolitanism in this period. 1890s writings about East Asia affected the world consciousness of the 1890s and simultaneously contributed to the processes of literary networking that opened English literature to wider exchanges and connections.

Over the past twenty years, as W.G. Sebald’s influence and prestige has grown, the Sebaldian has grown beyond a descriptor for traits evocative of Sebald’s works to a bona fide genre, with dozens of representatives in several continents, including Carlos Fonseca, Daša Drndić, and Maria Setapnova. Aspects of the Sebaldian include embedded photography, spurious photographs, and incorporation of archival matter.

Thomas Pynchon is frequently read as an American author who writes American novels about American reality, but this chapter argues that he can fruitfully be considered one of our leading novelists of globalization, and it establishes the considerable benefits – and perhaps even the necessity – of considering his largest novels, Gravity’s Rainbow, Mason & Dixon, and Against the Day, one coherent world-historical trilogy about the gestation and global progression of modernity. After positioning this argument in discussions of world literature as well as in the larger field of Pynchon studies, the chapter identifies a number of parallels between the three novels in the trilogy, and it argues that in order to reveal the coherent nature and full scope of Pynchon’s historical project, his three global novels are best read not in their sequence of publication, but in an order that reflects the historical periods they depict. Reading Pynchon’s novels in this order has precedents in the critical work of Samuel Thomas, Sascha Pöhlmann, and Dale Carter, and it paves the ground for the book’s elaborate analysis of the progressive historical narrative in Pynchon’s trilogy.

This chapter begins from a concern about the extent to which “diaspora” is one of a number of concepts that threatens to be swallowed up by the newly-dominant institutional category of “world literature,” and goes on to discuss what stands to be lost as a result, as well as how we might proceed differently. Forgetting diaspora, it argues, impoverishes our attempts to think literature in an internationalist framework; this contribution is thus an attempt to assist in the act of remembering. In particular, the chapter makes a case for reading Palestinian literature diasporically as a move toward a world literature that reads work not just “globally,” but with an eye toward internationalism.