Introduction

World literature can arrive on your doorstep in any number of guises. Always seeming to come from afar, it may present itself as an adventurer, displaying the exotic spoils of distant lands, as a missionary, professing universal vales; as a commercial traveller, peddling the wares of a global market; or even as a broadband technician, offering instant worldwide connectivity. In spite of their differences in costume and itinerary, and in the goods and services they deliver, each of these figures attests to a world in which human societies are connected. If the first few come with a whiff of Victoriana, they do so as a reminder that, even in our days, world literature travels by routs established in the moments of industrialization and imperialism. This is all by way of saying that writers, scholars, critics, and students may well share reasons for grappling with the question of world literature, including the facts of existence in a globalized economy, but this does not mean that they are always speaking about the same thing. For some, world literature means exotic literature, verbal art of the world beyond their own; and, given the dominance of North American and European academic and literary institutions, such usage typically refers to literature produced beyond ‘the West’. For others, world literature means a universal canon of masterpieces: the proverbial best that has been thought and said across histories and cultures. For still others, world literature consists of innumerable works that travel globally, exposing themselves to readers in new places and languages and taking part in the flow of transcultural interaction and exchange. In their contemporary manifestations, such notions inevitably take us into the web of the global market. World literature, some therefore insist, compels us to reflect on the ways in which works are caught up in an unequal world-system made up of highly developed centres and underdeveloped peripheries.