The terms listed in the title to my contribution, which at the same time serves as an introduction to the entire journal issue, really should be interpreted as questions: which world or worlds, and which times of any such worlds are we talking about when we talk about world literature?

A first answer, that no one would accept any more now, but that for the longest time went without questioning, is – or was – that ‘world literature’ in fact, or at least in practice, was European literature, or literature in European languages – a confirmation of the field’s ingrained Eurocentrism. An avowed aim of the project on writing a world history of literature upon which an international set of literary scholars, myself being one, embarked in 2006, and which finally resulted in the four-volume Literature: A World History (henceforth LAWH) published in 2022 under the general editorship of David Damrosch and Gunilla Lindberg-Wada, was to do away with such Eurocentrism and to make for a more balanced representation of the world’s literatures. To this end we divided the globe into six so-called ‘macro-regions’, with each given equal weight in terms of number of pages. The regions in question are Africa, the Americas, Europe, East Asia, Central and West Asia and South and Southeast Asia, with the latter also covering Oceania.

While I still concur with the project’s rationale of wanting to do away with any hint of Euro- or Western-centrism, when re-reading the entire set of volumes I have come to question the wisdom of LAWH’s macro-regional arrangement. Even if the project in some ways does away with Eurocentrism, it seems to me less successful when it comes to removing the fences between the various macro-regions, and the various literatures within the macro-regions. In fact, the choice for geographically defined macro-regions, while doing away with more traditional ways of cutting up the world’s literary space, institutes new boundaries that risk ending up as rigidly and finally unsatisfactory as the old ones, just differently so.

Moreover, it seems to me that LAWH insufficiently incorporates more recent, and sometimes even not so very recent, developments that cut across the macro-regional borders we set up: the input of postcolonialism (Young Reference Young, D’haen, Damrosch and Kadir2012; Boehmer Reference Boehmer2014, Reference Boehmer2018), decoloniality (Quijano Reference Quijano2007; Mignolo Reference Mignolo2007a, Reference Mignolo2007b, Reference Mignolo2011, Reference Mignolo2021; Maldonado-Torres Reference Maldonado-Torres2007, Reference Maldonado-Torres2011), littérature-monde (LeBris and Rouaud Reference Le Bris and Rouaud2007), literatura-mundo (Buescu Reference Buescu2020), the rise of China (Zhang Reference Zhang2015, Reference Zhang2024; Wang N Reference Wang1997, Reference Wang2010; Shih Reference Shih2010), followed by India (Dharwadker Reference Dharwadker2001; Mufti Reference Mufti2016) and probably shortly also Vietnam, Indonesia, Malaysia, and more generally what has come to be called the ‘Global South’, including the Arabic or more generally the Islamicate world (Hassan Reference Hassan2018) and Africa (Helgesson Reference Helgesson2014, Reference Helgesson2022a, Reference Helgesson, D’haen, Damrosch and Kadir2022b). I myself have, on several occasions, held a plea for greater inclusion of so-called ‘minor’ or ‘small/er’ literatures, also European (D’haen Reference D’haen, Parks and Zuccato2013, Reference D’haen2014, Reference D’haen2016, Reference D’haen2021).

Do I see any solution? There is the relatively recent alternative approach to literary historiography pioneered by Denis Hollier with A New History of French Literature in 1989 and since followed by several more instances detailing other literatures: German (Wellbery Reference Wellbery1998), US-American (Marcus and Sollors Reference Marcus and Sollors2009), Modern Chinese (Wang DD-W Reference Wang2017), Dutch (Schenkeveld-Van der Dussen Reference Schenkeveld-Van der Dussen1993). All of these consist of collections of short essays, by a wide variety of contributors, chronologically arranged and keyed to specific dates marking, for instance, the appearance of certain works, the birth or death dates of important writers or events that somehow impacted literature. All of the works mentioned concentrate on one national literature, or a literature in one language even if spanning – as in the case of the German- and Dutch-language volumes – several countries.

Although it would involve a major effort of soliciting and coordinating the hundreds of contributions required, I see no reason why a similar undertaking could not be envisaged for a world literary history. An obvious instance of a significant date would be 1492, with Columbus reaching the Americas and the fall of Granada, the last Moorish kingdom in Iberia, but also the publication of Antonio de Nebrija’s Spanish grammar, the first such work dedicated to a vernacular language. Another instance would be the year 1832, with the deaths of Walter Scott and Johann Wolfgang (von) Goethe, the publication of Alexander Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin, Carl Clausewitz’s Vom Krieg (On War) and Frances Trollope’s The Domestic Manners of the Americans, and the births of Horatio Alger, Louisa May Alcott and Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson. While, because of my own evident limitations, I could only trace references to events mainly in and of Europe or more generally ‘the West’, I am sure the same can be done for other parts of the world, and interesting and illuminating links, in the form of resemblances and differences, and possible cross-links, can be established. For instance, from a Chinese point of view, 1919, with the May Fourth Movement and the role Lu Xun played in the New Culture Movement, might be an apt choice, while in the West in the same year there are significant publications by Marcel Proust, Sherwood Anderson, André Gide, Virginia Woolf and John Maynard Keynes, whose The Economic Consequences of the Peace gauged, and heavily criticized, the outcome of the 1919 Paris Peace Conference.

Of course, simply listing dates, events and literary or other works is not enough: what counts are the links to be established between the mere facts, the narratives binding them into productive meaning. My point is that such an approach might offer a more productive way of ‘connecting literary cultures’ – an avowed aim of the Literature: A World History project and the final of the 12 points all contributors were asked to address when engaging upon their tasks. It would also make room for paying more attention to popular literature, a kind of literature often overlooked in ‘official’ literary histories, but, as I have argued on several occasions (D’haen Reference D’haen, Krajenbrink and Quinn2009, Reference D’haen2022), may well tell us more about what is ‘really’ going on in society at particular moments in history than ‘high’ literature. In any case, such a ‘New Literary History of the World’ might be a welcome complement to LAWH and make for a more truly ‘comparative’ world literary history.

Questions of representation (geographical, gender, etc.) dominated discussions of world literature until roughly the early 2010s. Since then, these discussions have taken a different turn. Under the influence of postcolonialism and decoloniality the stress has shifted to ‘worlding’ in the sense used by Edward Said (Reference Said and Said1983). With Pheng Cheah (Reference Cheah2014, Reference Cheah2016), for instance, the term world literature is no longer used in a descriptive sense; instead, it assumes a prescriptive quality in that it implies a normative duty steered by postcolonial concerns. Correspondingly, the focus shifts to different phenomena, events, writers and works. The determining question is now no longer whether a work, or its writer, are ‘world class’, or whether they are sufficiently representative of a certain region, country, linguistic entity, etc., but whether they contribute to furthering the agenda of postcolonialism as an instrument toward greater racial and social justice. Again, this involves shifting geographical parameters: Jean-Marc Moura (Reference Moura2016) proposes the Atlantic as a theatre for literature, following Paul Gilroy’s (Reference Gilroy1993) coining of the ‘Black Atlantic’, but oceanic or maritime studies, Indian Ocean, Pacific, etc., also gain increasing attention (Frydman Reference Frydman, D’haen, Damrosch and Kadir2022; Ganguly Reference Ganguly and Ganguly2021).

Of late, attention with some scholars has shifted further from racial and social justice to including economic justice, especially as linked to what I will call ‘natural’ justice, i.e., environmental justice linked to economic imbalances – ‘one but unequal’ as both Casanova (Reference Casanova2004, Reference Casanova2005) and Moretti (Reference Moretti2000, Reference Moretti2005, Reference Moretti and Lindberg-Wada2006, Reference Moretti2013) said, but not just in literature as an ‘autonomous’ (Casanova) or ‘hybrid’ field (Moretti), but as inevitable consequence of ‘capital’ in its most basic sense and not just ‘cultural capital’ (Bourdieu Reference Bourdieu1992; Casanova Reference Casanova2004; Guillory Reference Guillory1993). Of course, the two are intimately linked in, for instance, the work of the Warwick Research Collective (WReC 2015 – Sharae Deckard, Stephen Shapiro, Michael Niblett), Sarah Brouillette (Reference Brouillette2014, Reference Brouillette, Helgesson and Vermeulen2016) or Jennifer Wenzel (Reference Wenzel2020). In the words of Ursula Heise, it ultimately comes down to the ‘material foundations of markets, including literary ones’ (Reference Heise, D’haen, Damrosch and Kadir2022: 349). With respect to the latter, in retrospect I think in our literary history we could – and perhaps should – have paid more attention to issues of production and circulation of texts, again, for instance of popular literature, but also of translated texts, now a growing field, but then ‘book history’ was hardly a household word in 2006, when the groundwork for LAWH was laid; things are different now. As to the former, we enter into the discussion about the Anthropocene and its possible overlap with, or even replacement by, the more recently termed Capitalocene (Moore Reference Moore and Moore2016).

Several dates have been put forward for the start of the Anthropocene/Capitalocene: 1500, 1800 or 1945–1960. The early dates are familiar to us as (roughly) the start of, respectively, Early and Full Modernity, but they also correspond to various phases in economic and especially financial management history tightly linked to Western colonialism and imperialism. As to the more recent date of 1945–1960, I have to make a little personal detour. In 2023 I attended a symposium in Cascais, Portugal, on CO₂ emissions, temperature rise and the demographic explosion. To appropriate to myself the personal note one of the speakers (a biologist and expert on climate change impact) volunteered: the world I was born into in 1950 is not that of today because the changes happening in these grosso modo 75 years have been greater than anything that went before, and they were all set in motion in the post-Second World War period. As now we have reached the limits of our planet’s sustainability, mankind’s survival all at once becomes the issue.

Immediately, the questions, and the corresponding resentments and revindications that, to a greater or lesser degree, lie hiding under the geographical and other representational issues I addressed hitherto, take on a different hue. It is no longer a question of whether Shakespeare is the greatest, whether Homer will survive for ever, whether Nepal’s literature receives sufficient attention in the great world literature framework, or whether Amitav Ghosh’s fictions promote the postcolonial cause. As Reinhart Koselleck argues in Futures Past (Reference Koselleck2004), the present is not just the present, nor is the past just the past. The past changes with each new present, and the present changes as a function of what in our present we expect the future to be. So, the past changes with our present future expectations – T.S. Eliot’s ‘Tradition and the individual talent’ raised to a globally or even planetary existential level, so to speak.

If, as another speaker at the same symposium put it, we need to take care of our common cultural heritage to bequeath our children and grandchildren a liveable, in the sense of understandable, present, what does that mean in terms of the future that looms from climate predictions? Which past, also literary, does such a future impose upon us? In other words: which LAWH should we write for future generations, perhaps even the future generation if the direst predictions prove true? Instead of worrying about issues of representation should we not rather focus on how literature offers scenarios – past, present, future – for coping, or not, with comparable disasters or catastrophes? Instead of arranging our material according to centuries, literary movements or geographical perimeters, should we not rather go by ecological markers tied to either natural or, perhaps more importantly, human causal events? And I am not talking here of events such as wars, however terrible they may be – as the war in Ukraine, or the events in Israel, the Gaza Strip and Lebanon, remind us on a daily basis – but of environmental ‘tipping points.’

These may apply on a local scale, such as the destruction of natural habitats on Caribbean islands resulting from the introduction there of monocultures such as sugar and tobacco by European colonizers (Ortiz Reference Ortiz1940, Reference Ortiz1995). Said in Culture and Imperialism (Reference Said1993) showed how the landscaped gardens of the eponymous landed estate in Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park were financed by the family’s Caribbean plantation possessions, at one and the same time impoverishing Caribbean nature and the English tenant farmers displaced by the enclosures turning arable land into parkland. But such tipping points may reach global dimensions. Think of CO₂ emissions, the extinction of entire species or the island nations in the Indian Ocean and Pacific under threat of permanent inundation by rising sea levels. Peter Frankopan (Reference Frankopan2023) traces how climate changes over several millennia have influenced human history. Think also of human tipping points such as the Black Death of the fourteenth century (Frankopan Reference Frankopan2015, Reference Frankopan2018, Belich Reference Belich2022), the mass extinction of native populations in the Americas through European diseases (Schama Reference Schama2023) or how history may be determined by germs rather than the actions of mankind (Kennedy Reference Kennedy2023). In Literature for a Changing Planet, Martin Puchner (Reference Puchner2022) offers a sweeping view of how literature past and present can give us unexpected insights into such developments. Earlier, I invoked the name of Ursula Heise, who is also very active in this respect (Heise Reference Heise2008, Reference Heise2013, Reference Heise and Heise2017, Reference Heise, Nardizzi and Werth2019, Reference Heise, D’haen, Damrosch and Kadir2022), and I could mention Karen Thornber, with books on Ecoambiguity (Reference Thornber2012) and Global Healing (Reference Thornber2020), and volumes in preparation on Narrating (Environ)mental Distress.

It should be obvious, then, that there is more than one way of writing a history of world literature, different from how we did it in Literature: A World History, paying attention to other, and perhaps in these times already more pressing, concerns involving not just the fate of literature but of mankind, and indeed of the planet – ‘worldly’ concerns in the largest sense of the word.