Introduction: What is world literature?

Abstract

As early as the 1820s, Johann Wolfgang Goethe declared that the epoch of world literature is at hand, and thus everyone must strive to hasten its approach. At that time, however, this could hardly be anything more than a vision of the future. Comparative literature, which opened up to the world, came into being in the nineteenth century, but it has not been able to escape from its Eurocentric limitations. It was challenged and questioned in its development in the twentieth century. Having been shaped more recently by critical theories, it has also moved increasingly away from literature itself, and this is perhaps another reason why it has fallen into an identity crisis as a scholarly discipline. The rise of world literature today may be seen as a response to the crisis in literary studies. Such a paradigmatic shift is not only a tendency in the internal development of literary studies, it is also a humanistic response to the increasingly intense racial, class and cultural conflicts we witness in the world today. In such a process, a series of contradictory factors, such as national culture and world ethics, regional experience and global consciousness, state interests and international justice, all tend to form a tension between the local and the universal. Therefore, the question of how we may have a firm grasp of that tension and reopen the conceptual richness of the idea of world literature constitutes a core issue in scholarly research today.