Writing histories of world literature was, for the longest time, an almost exclusively European, or in any case Western, enterprise. Moreover, it was overwhelmingly centred on European, or again Western, literature. To do away with such Eurocentrism was the avowed aim of the project upon which an international set of literary scholars embarked in 2006, and which resulted in the four-volume Literature: A World History published in 2022. In the articles to follow, five scholars (Pettersson, Trivedi, Utas, Zhang, D’haen) directly involved with the project look back on their experience and reflect on the pros and cons, the successes and the failures, the achievements and the shortcomings, of the enterprise. As counterbalance, six scholars (Ette, Hajdu, Hawas, He, Larsen, Rydholm) not involved with the project reflect on the (im)possibilities of writing world histories of literature.

The first comprehensive history of World Literature to be published in English was Literature: A World History (4 vols, 2022). As an editor-contributor of this work, I here examine in retrospect the decisions we collectively took about basic structural issues such as periodization, division of the world into six macro-regions, their proportional representation, and the multi-tier process of writing, editing and coordination. In the process, I point out several aspects of our project that in my view did not go as well as they could have, and conclude by acclaiming nonetheless the undoubted success of our pioneering endeavour.

In much of its history from the nineteenth century to the last decade of the twentieth, comparative literature remained largely Eurocentric, and surveys or histories of the world’s literatures were mostly written by Western scholars from a West-centred perspective. Literature: A World History (LAWH) took the first step in writing a history of literature of the world from a non-Eurocentric point of view by having the voices of the world’s different traditions heard and by distributing the proper space to macro-regions more equally than ever before. That is the most significant contribution this long and arduous project made for a better understanding of the world’s literatures.

The concept of literature is central to histories of literature, but ‘literature’ is less of a unitary notion than one might think: what is literature according to one established usage may not be literature according to another conventional way of considering the term. It is, in reality, a problem for the writing of literary history with large historical scope that the concept of literature is traditionally used in a much broader fashion about works from – very approximately – before 1800 than about more modern works. I argue that this problem is in fact inescapable – it cannot be overcome without breaking with the genre expectations on a history of literature – but that writers of literary history should at least not hide it but be fully attentive to this state of affairs and adopt an explicit attitude to it.

This chapter is based on the assumption that conflicts between separate ethnolinguistic identities and imperial cultures have existed throughout history, and often played important roles. The four-volume work, Literature: A World History, serves as a starting-point for a discussion of the effects of such conflicts on various literatures. Examples are taken from, in particular, literatures written in Iranian and Slavonic languages, but the Chinese, Arabic and Turkic/Turkish impact on various literatures is also mentioned. Finally, it is questioned what this four-volume work has done to address the problem of literature and such conflicts, and what can be done to avoid spreading narratives that are – perhaps unconsciously – imperialistic. After all, this work is written in English, the most broadly used imperial language ever, and it is questioned what it means that it is being presented in this language.

This article examines the narrative strategies employed in the representation of world literature history, departing from the chronological and geographical divisions used in the recently published four-volume work, Literature: A World History. The separation of the narrative paths by continents may appear overly mechanical, but the work demonstrates remarkable flexibility in this regard. The example of classical literature is particularly illustrative. Despite the chapters belonging to the ‘Europe’ category, the work discusses literature produced in all three continents around the Mediterranean together and without any mechanical separation. Although divisions in a narrative of such a vast scope are unavoidable, it is essential to apply them in a flexible manner.

Most literary histories with a global ambition attempt to map the world, often tilted toward a European/Western perspective and written as a teamwork by individual experts on a variety of regions – and maybe originating from those regions – each of them taking responsibility for their own linguistic and regional specialty. Often, the regional or local chapters offer few new insights for readers from that region, but useful insights for people from other parts of the world. A project along those lines follows what I will call a mapping strategy, which often leaves out an idea or a concept of what ‘world’ means in this context apart from the sum total of separate localities. This is, however, a necessary conceptualization which allows for a rethinking and rewriting of literary history, leading it in new directions beyond the aim of achieving global coverage. This article attempts to sketch an alternative to the mapping strategy.

‘No nation has produced more anthologies or collections of women’s poetry than late imperial China’, according to Kang-i Sun Chang. Indeed, the open-access database of Ming–Qing Women’s Writings at McGill University Library includes 5239 women writers and 431 poetry collections. Yet virtually no trace of this phenomenon, or of these women writers, can be found in transcultural literary histories and anthologies of world literature published in the West in the twentieth century and beyond. How is this possible? The reason is not simply the lack of translations of many of the poems, but rather it has to do with the lack of canonization of these women poets in Chinese literary history until the late twentieth century, when they were ‘rediscovered’. This article investigates this neglect with the aim of showing that there were several different reasons for it, related to poetics, genre hierarchies, anthology editing practices, etc., in the imperial era, and to aspects of Chinese literary historiography in the twentieth century. Two women ci poets, Liu Shi and Qiu Jin, are briefly introduced to show that the reasons for their exclusion, as well as their later inclusion in the national literary canon, also need to be addressed on an individual level.

While the previous studies of the world history of literature are mostly concerned with the cross-cultural dissemination of literature, this article intends to analyse the intermediality of world literature in light of intermedial studies. It argues that the cross-cultural transmissions of literature are often entangled with and empowered by the intermedial interactions between literature and different forms of art. Under the theoretical framework of cross-cultural and intermedial studies, two representative Chinese literary works are discussed at length, namely Mulan ci (The Ballad of Mulan, sixth century) and Hong gaoliang (Red Sorghum, 1987). In addition to a careful analysis of their respective history of overseas transmissions, a comparative study of the two, an ancient poem and a modern novel, is carried out to show how the evolution of media has contributed to the cross-cultural transmissions of literature.

The tendency to dismiss history in favour of close reading by twentieth-century British critics has cast a long shadow over critical practice. Yet the tendency to revere a formalist, a-historical, even a-political critical method primarily for its own sake seems to be singularly strong in English studies. This somewhat self-isolating tendency has not, for example, appeared as a noteworthy part of critical practice in comparative literature. Of course, the two fields have built up over time a mutual suspicion of each other’s critical methods, though it wasn’t just about the necessity of multilingualism but also about the value of history.

When Johann Wolfgang von Goethe coined the term ‘world literature’ (Weltliteratur) in 1831, he made it clear that this epoch had begun in his time and, like every epoch, would come to an end. This article is about the end of that epoch and the future of comparative literature in an era after the end of world literature. It is easy to see that we are now living in the era of world literatures. In a world in which, at first sight, literature counts for less and less, it must emphasize its unique selling point: it is the only form of human discourse that has actively expanded the realm of knowledge over several millennia. Only comparative literature, which draws on the most diverse literatures of the world, is able to bring this uniqueness into focus and highlight its social relevance.