As a result of the development of literary studies in the twentieth century, world literature is now a new wave surging everywhere in different places in the world. As Theo D’haen puts it: ‘No other approach to literary studies has known as spectacular a success in the new millennium as that which goes by the name of “world literature”’ (D’haen Reference D’haen2012: 1). The idea of world literature, however, is not new. In contemporary discussions of world literature, the idea is often traced back to a historic moment in the early nineteenth century, when the German poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe famously announced that ‘National literature is now rather an unmeaning term, the epoch of World-literature is at hand, and everyone must strive to hasten its approach’ (Goethe Reference Goethe2014: 19–20). Goethe, however, did not clearly define the concept, and that was partially the reason why world literature did not become an important area of literary studies for much of the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries. Claudio Guillén, for example, complained about Goethe’s Weltliteratur as too vague, a ‘wild idea, unattainable in practice, worthy not of an actual reader but of a deluded keeper of archives who is also a multimillionaire’ (Guillén Reference Guillén and Franzen1993: 38). World literature cannot be understood literally as the conglomeration of all the literary works put together, for the sheer number of literary works would render the concept impossible as a subject for reading and research. Nobody can read world literature in a quantitative sense. ‘Reading “more” seems hardly to be the solution,’ as Franco Moretti remarks. ‘It has to be different. The categories have to be different’ (Moretti Reference Moretti and Damrosch2014: 160, emphasis in original). Obviously, world literature must be defined or redefined before it can be taken seriously as a workable concept for literary studies, and that is exactly what has happened in the twenty-first century.

A number of factors have contributed to the rise of world literature. We may consider the external factor of the global economic and political situation, in which the world becomes increasingly interconnected in an unstoppable tendency towards globalization and international relationships and, even more importantly, the world order is being transformed into a more pluralistic and multipolar one. Moreover, there is an internal factor of the development of literary studies, which has formed an intellectual consensus of the critique of Eurocentrism and, even more importantly, of going beyond the dominance of literary theories and cultural studies in a strong tendency to return to literature. If Goethe’s Weltliteratur was too vague and the impossibly huge number of literary works rendered the concept impracticable, there must be a differentiating mechanism that makes world literature a meaningful concept in literary studies. In the effort to redefine world literature, David Damrosch is probably most successful by providing just such a mechanism in regarding world literature as encompassing ‘all literary works that circulate beyond their culture of origin, either in translation or in their original language’ (Damrosch Reference Damrosch2003: 4). In such a definition, a work of literature joins world literature only when it is read and appreciated by readers beyond its culture of origin, most likely in translation. Circulation and translation are thus two important and closely related elements in this redefinition of world literature.

When we look at the global literary scene, however, we quickly realize that literary works that enjoy a global circulation in today’s world are mostly canonical works of the major European or Western literatures, while non-Western literatures, and even the so-called ‘minor’ European literatures, remain largely untranslated, unknown and unappreciated despite the fact that many great works in these literary traditions are as valuable as the canonical works of major Western literatures. Western poets and writers from Homer and Virgil to Dante and Shakespeare, from Austen and Dickens to Balzac and Woolf, from Baudelaire and Eliot to Joyce and Kafka and many more, are truly world literature figures whose names are well-known everywhere in the world far beyond their cultures of origin, and whose works are circulating globally either in translation or in their original language. Most canonical poets and writers outside Europe and even of the ‘minor’ European literatures, however, are hardly known beyond their native linguistic and cultural environment, and therefore much of the world’s literatures remains what I have called ‘the yet-unknown world literature’ (see Zhang Reference Zhang2017: 53–57).

To make the world’s literary map clearly visible, so to speak, and to reveal the many rivers and mountains that are overshadowed by the major Western literary figures, we need to have a historical survey of the world’s literary traditions so that readers may have a basic overview of what the world looks like in its various literary manifestations. We need a historical survey free from the limited view of Eurocentrism or any other ethnocentrism. As no individual scholar can possibly have sufficient knowledge of the world’s various literary traditions, international collaboration is absolutely necessary to present the world’s literary map without much distortion. That was the motivating idea behind the ambitious project, Literature: A World History, abbreviated as LAWH, which started in 2004 at the initial conference in Villa Brevik, Stockholm and finally came out as a four-volume set published by Wiley Blackwell in 2022. As a member of the core group of this project, I can speak of the many challenges and the significance of writing such a World History of literature from my personal perspective.

Simply put, the writing of a history of the world’s literatures is a great challenge because it has never been done before. World histories of literature do exist, of course, but they are mostly written by Western scholars from a Western or West-centred point of view. ‘In fact,’ as Theo D’haen observes, ‘in most world histories of literature, hitherto without exception products of the Western world, non-European literatures were routinely neglected especially in their more modern manifestations, with attention given almost exclusively to early mythical and religious writings’ (D’haen Reference D’haen2016: 34). This is also what the eminent Slovak comparatist and Sinologist Marián Gálik noted when he reviewed many European works on comparative and world literature. For example, he found Manfred Schmeling’s collected volume Weltliteratur heute. Konzepte und Perspektiven (Schmeling Reference Schmeling1995) ‘symptomatic of much of the work in Europe and North America in comparative literature’, because it shows ‘an often explicit, more often than not implicit Eurocentrism’ (Gálik Reference Gálik2000: 4). The Eurocentric tendency can also be seen in the 25-volume German work edited by Klaus von See, Neues Handbuch der Literaturwissenschaft (See and Buck 1972–Reference See and Buck1984) or in the Russian-language volume Istorija vsemirnoj literatury (A History of World Literature; Berdnikov Reference Berdnikov1983). Gálik had called for an inclusive, truly global concept of comparative and world literature that would accept literary traditions in Asia and Africa, but he felt he was like ‘a vox clamantis in deserto’ (Gálik Reference Gálik2000: 6). For LAWH as a new and ambitious project, we were all very conscious that we must remove Eurocentrism and any other ethnocentric biases, and present the world’s various literatures as close as possible to how they are understood in their own traditions.

The first challenge we faced was to come up with a clear understanding of what counts as literature. We discussed and debated the notion and had to get rid of the idea that literature was a concept invented in nineteenth-century Europe with reference to written forms, which would make writing a world history of literature a moot point. Instead, we proposed the broad idea of ‘transferability’ in relation to verbal artistry without a narrow and delimiting definition. A work is literary when it is constructed as an artistic expression different from a work or text meaningful because of its practical functionality, and the meaning of such a work is ‘transferrable’ to refer to something different from the work’s actual words. The idea that literature was a European invention, however, still has a remarkable influence even in the study of world literature today.

A highly acclaimed book in comparative and world literature studies, Pascale Casanova’s The World Republic of Letters (Reference Casanova and DeBevoise2004), may offer an obvious example, in which the author described what she called the ‘world literary space’ as a centre–periphery global structure, and she understood world literary history as the radiation of literary assets and legitimacy from Europe (or more specifically, Paris) as centre to the rest of the world as peripheries. Casanova saw literature as a European invention: ‘It is the history of appearance, then of the accumulation, concentration, distribution, and diversion of literary wealth, which first arose in Europe, and subsequently became the object of belief and rivalry throughout the world’ (Casanova Reference Casanova and DeBevoise2004: 46). Casanova’s idea of world literary history began with Renaissance Italy as ‘the first recognized literary power,’ but was very quickly followed by France ‘with the rise of the Pléiade in the mid-sixteenth century’, which ‘produced a first tentative sketch of transnational literary space’.

After France, other Western European countries such as Spain and England acquired literary legitimacy, and then, in the nineteenth century, Central Europe and North and South America were also recognized as countries having literature. ‘Finally,’ says Casanova, ‘with decolonization, countries in Africa, the Indian subcontinent, and Asia demanded access to literary legitimacy and existence as well’ (Casanova Reference Casanova and DeBevoise2004: 11). In Casanova’s mind, Africa, the Indian subcontinent and Asia did not have their own literatures until the mid-twentieth century, and what she thought of African and Asian ‘literary legitimacy’ was probably Francophone, Anglophone, Lusophone and other such ‘phone literatures’ written in European languages in postcolonial conditions. As Alexander Beecroft remarks, Casanova’s depiction of how literature develops in history ‘cannot account for the full range of literary production across all cultures and times. … Forms of literary circulation which predate French literary culture, or which exist outside it today, have no real place in Casanova’s world-system’ (Beecroft 2014: 182). Such total erasure of African and Asian literatures in their native languages makes it all the more urgent that we must have a history of the world’s literary traditions without the Eurocentric distortion and erasure, presented in ways that will make the ‘yet-unknown world literature’ visible and knowable to the general readership in the world today.

The lack of knowledge of non-Western literatures constitutes a serious obstacle to the study of the world’s literatures, and given the current condition of world literature, what is needed is to present to readers the basic condition of the world’s various literatures, to provide them with the knowledge of what major writers and canonical works exist in those unfamiliar traditions. In other words, we need a historical survey of the world’s different literatures and to introduce those major but yet-unknown writers and works from the non-Western and ‘minor’ European traditions to a global readership. We need a map of the global literary space to have an idea of what the world looks like, a cultural cartography that will show not only the well-known places in Europe, but also the other areas, regions and continents that are still overcast by ignorance and prejudices. Writing a literary history to tell the story of literary traditions with their major authors and canonical works, however, is not the fashionable thing to do in the West at the present. The twentieth century was the century of literary theories, and the thriving of theory was not favourable for the writing of history, especially literary history.

Russian Formalism and American New Criticism made the literary text the centre of critical attention in close readings and regarded the historical context of the production of literature as an extrinsic factor at best. Structuralism always tried to find the deep structure underneath literary manifestations as something determinate and stable, not fluctuating in time and history; poststructuralism and deconstruction discarded causalities and certainties and put more emphasis on breaks and breakdowns than historical continuity and development. Feminism and postcolonialism attacked the past as dominated by dead white males and embodying the repressive ideologies of patriarchy or colonial power. With his argument that questioned the veracity of historical narratives as distinct from fictional narratives, Hayden White was probably the most effective in pulling the rug out from under the historian’s feet. Writing history, ‘the process of fusing events, whether imaginary or real, into a comprehensible totality capable of serving as the object of a representation,’ White argues, ‘is a poetic process. Here the historian must utilize precisely the same tropological strategies, the same modalities of representing relationships in words, that the poet or novelist uses’ (White Reference White1978: 125, emphasis in original). History is not just constructed in the same way as a novel and therefore fictional, but it is written by those in possession of discursive power and is therefore ideological. Historical facts are not considered relevant. ‘What is at issue here is not, What are the facts?’ says White. ‘But rather, How are the facts to be described in order to sanction one mode of explaining them rather than another?’ (White Reference White1978: 134). Once the objectivity and reliability of representation of the past are put in question, the disciplinary foundation of historiography is dissolved, and writing history becomes very difficult, if not impossible.

Historical narratives with a beginning, a middle and an end, and developed along a line of logical connection and causality fell out of favour, and a different kind of literary history became a new model and paradigm, represented by two books published in America, the Columbia Literary History of the United States (Elliott Reference Elliott1988) and the New History of French Literature (Hollier and Bloch Reference Hollier and Bloch1994). These books are not written by a single author as a consistent narrative history, but edited volumes of assorted essays on different aspects of the social condition of a historical period, written by a large number of authors working independently from one another. David Perkins, a well-known scholar and literary historian, the author of two volumes of A History of Modern Poetry (Reference Perkins1976, Reference Perkins1987), found these two volumes incoherent and hardly readable, a kind of ‘postmodern encyclopaedia’ that failed to provide meaningful historical knowledge. Indeed, he saw these two volumes as a symptom of the crisis of writing literary history in America, rather than offering a helpful model for writing literary histories. ‘Both are intended to respond to a genuine crisis in literary historiography,’ says Perkins:

David Damrosch reviewed a similar volume of multiple authors, History of European Literature edited by Annick Benoit-Dusausoy and Guy Fontaine (Reference Benoit-Dusausoy and Fontaine2000) and found it also a kind of encyclopaedic display of information, but not a coherent body of historical knowledge. This book ‘is impressive in its sweep, and yet is difficult to sit down and read through,’ says Damrosch. ‘The 150 contributors worked largely in isolation from each other, and the results are often more disconnected than one might wish in a book devoted to showing the interconnectedness of Europe’s literary cultures’ (Damrosch Reference Damrosch2008: 487). As coherence and totality are shunned, this history book becomes a collage of unrelated pieces without a line of narrativity. The book seeks to deviate from the usual narrative history and the usual canonical authors, but as a result it ‘often becomes a blizzard of names and passing references,’ as Damrosch comments, and ‘often starts to shade over from a history into an encyclopedia.’ (Damrosch Reference Damrosch2008: 488).

Under such circumstances, few have attempted to write a narrative history, and David Perkins expressed his pessimistic view by writing a small book entitled Is Literary History Possible?, to which he gave a negative but also ironic answer. Having reviewed many of the theoretical challenges to writing literary history, Perkins admitted that ‘I am unconvinced (or deconvinced) that it can be done’ (Perkins Reference Perkins1992: 11). If it has become almost impossible to write literary history in America, however, that does not mean that everyone in the international scholarly community must follow the ‘postmodern encyclopedia’, particularly when we are engaged in writing a history of literatures almost unknown in the West. For the LAWH project, the incoherent encyclopaedic form is definitely not helpful, and we must present the histories of the yet-unknown world literature in all its aspects with a clear historical line of development. Just as the rise of world literature represents the return to literature, LAWH represents the return to historical writing that provides readers with knowledge about the world’s literary traditions and their major authors and canonical works.

Literature: A World History, or LAWH, is written by a team of scholars from different parts of the world, in English as it is the global language, the de facto lingua franca in today’s world. Although not a problem for the contributors to LAWH, to write the history in English is a problem often debated in literary studies. Just as we are trying to introduce great works from the world’s yet-unknown literatures and make these works visible and circulating beyond their cultures of origin, some scholars in comparative literature and translation studies tell us that literature, particularly non-Western literature, is ‘untranslatable’. They cast a sceptical eye on translation and argue strongly against the ‘hegemony’ of the English language and translation into English. Aamir Mufti, for example, achieved quite a bit of fame by arguing against global English which, particularly in the Indian subcontinent, he says, has ‘consigned the languages of the global South, including formerly extensive and dispersed cultures of writing, to narrowly conceived ethnonational spheres’, and thereby ‘assumes the mantle of exclusive medium of cosmopolitan exchange’ (Mufti Reference Mufti and Damrosch2014: 335–336). He castigated Salman Rushdie for failing to find hardly any work written in India’s many vernacular and indigenous languages worthy of being translated into English and included in an anthology as representative works of post-independence Indian literature.

Rushdie chose mostly ‘Indo-Anglian’ works written originally in English by Indian authors, with the only exception being ‘the Urdu short story “Tōbā Tēk Siñgh” by Saadat Hasan Manto, a translation of which was consequently included in the collection’ (Mufti Reference Mufti and Damrosch2014: 337). But here is a problem in logic: Mufti argues against the ‘hegemony’ of English, but he criticized Rushdie precisely because Rushdie did not include more works written in India’s indigenous and vernacular languages for translation into English and thus kept those works untranslated and unknown, and the anthology Rushdie compiled fails to be representative of post-independence Indian literature. Mufti seems not to oppose translation into English at all and, after all, his own essay against the ‘hegemony’ of English was written in English and published in one of the top journals in the US. If it were written in one of India’s indigenous languages and published in that language in India, it would not have the kind of impact in American scholarly communities. Later, Mufti published a book entitled Forget English: Orientalism and World Literatures (Reference Mufti2016), which is again written in English and has the same irony playing around the logical inconsistency of being incapable of forgetting English while asking others to forget English. So the author does what he is arguing against and argues for what he does not do himself.

Another well-known argument against world literature and translation is Emily Apter’s critique of world literature predicated on the idea of untranslatability, not technical, but a conceptual untranslatability in a philosophical or theological sense. She refers to ‘Wittgenstein’s nonsense, with its attendant lexicon of das Unsagbare (the Unsayable) and das Unaussprechliche (the Inexpressible) encountered in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus … where the nonsense of mysticism and metaphysics prevails’ (Apter Reference Apter2013: 10). She also refers to the ‘legislation against blasphemy or historic prohibitions on the vernacularization of sacred texts’ (Apter Reference Apter2013: 12). As a theoretical notion, untranslatability applies to all translations from any language into any other, and that was a major reason for comparative literature’s traditional distrust of translation and insistence on working in the original languages. Traditionally, comparative literature’s emphasis on linguistic competence was limited to European languages, and Apter’s argument, as Lawrence Venuti notes, ‘risks turning back the clock in comparative literature, returning to the Eurocentrism that characterized the field in the past’ (Venuti Reference Venuti2019: 65).

Indeed, as a comparatist working with French, Apter has no problem with translating French into English, but as world literature is now expanding far beyond the usual trio of English, French and German, and to admit translation of many other languages, including non-European ones, she proposes untranslatability as a theoretical barrier between what is translatable (European) and untranslatable (non-European) languages. Wittgenstein, however, can hardly provide support to her argument of untranslatability, for the philosopher’s point is the precision in thinking, to ‘make clear and delimit sharply the thoughts which otherwise are, as it were, opaque and blurred’ (Wittgenstein Reference Wittgenstein and Ogden1983: 77). As all that is said in a natural language tends to be opaque and blurred, the only thing that can be said with precision, the ‘totality of true propositions,’ Wittgenstein declares, is ‘the totality of the natural sciences.’ (Wittgenstein Reference Wittgenstein and Ogden1983: 75). Philosophy, however, is not natural science, and therefore even philosophy is unsayable. ‘The right method of philosophy would be this,’ says Wittgenstein. ‘To say nothing except what can be said, i.e., the propositions of natural science, i.e., something that has nothing to do with philosophy’ (Wittgenstein Reference Wittgenstein and Ogden1983: 189). In that sense, then, Apter’s involvement in the translation of Barbara Cassin’s French Vocalubaire européen des philosophies: Dictionnnaire des intraduisibles into English would be totally pointless.

As for ‘historic prohibitions on the vernacularization of sacred texts’, the Vatican was historically opposed to any ‘vernacularization’ because the translation of the Bible into German and other ‘vernacular’ languages would corrode the Roman Church’s monopoly of the ‘sacred text’ and its interpretation. Ironically, however, the Vatican’s Latin Bible is itself a translation from Hebrew and Greek, not in the original language; and the Vatican has canonized Jerome, a translator, as a Catholic saint. Also ironically, despite all the theoretical argument, both Wittgenstein’s Tractatus and the Holy Scripture have been translated into English and many other languages, and many European works of literature from Homer and Dante to Rabelais and Balzac, from Goethe and Proust to Kafka and Camus, have all been translated into English and many other languages, which helped establish them as canonical works of world literature.

The opposition to the ‘hegemony’ of English and the emphasis on untranslatability may look theoretically sophisticated and politically correct, but what they really boil down to in practice is to prevent non-Western literary works from being translated and known beyond their cultures of origin, and thereby effectively keeping the Western canon as the only canon of world literature circulating all over the world. I find it dubious that just as the rise of world literature today offers the opportunity for non-Western works and even ‘minor’ European works to be translated and introduced to a global readership, we hear the clatter of untranslatability and the danger of turning everything into English and losing whatever ‘essence’ of non-Western literature. ‘Stop asserting that any text is untranslatable,’ as Venuti puts it forcefully. ‘Start realizing that every text is translatable because every text can be interpreted’ (Venuti Reference Venuti2019: x). It is through adequate translation and interpretation that works of the yet-unknown world literature can become known and part of world literature.

By writing in English, LAWH makes it possible for the world’s various literatures to become visible and known to more readers than ever before. For many non-Western and ‘minor’ European literary works, this is probably the first opportunity to become known outside their original linguistic and cultural environment. Despite all the challenges and difficulties, literary history is not only possible, but must be written to expand our horizon, increase our knowledge and enhance our understanding of all the important works of the world’s literatures. In working on LAWH, an important principle we tried to apply, to the extent possible, was to have a scholar from a particular literary tradition to write about that tradition so that the presentation of that literature would not be so different from the understanding of that literature in its own linguistic and cultural milieu.

For periodization, we differed from the usual and unmistakably European division of antiquity, medieval and modern times, but adopted a somewhat arbitrary division of before 200 (Vol. 1), 200–1500 (Vol. 2), 1500–1800 (Vol. 3) and 1800–2000 (Vol. 4). In space, we had six macro-regions that divided the world more or less equally in literary and cultural terms, in which Europe is one macro-region, occupying a space much less than all previous attempts by European or Eurocentric histories of world literature. The point of all these organizing principles is to make sure that LAWH becomes the first internationally collaborative work that presents to readers an overview of the world’s literatures as approximately true to the self-understanding of the various traditions as possible. What we have accomplished is certainly not perfect and many things can be revised and further improved, but one thing is certain, namely, LAWH is the first history of literature in the world that consciously moved away from the pervasive influence of Eurocentrism, it is a world map of all the major literary traditions visible without distortion or erasure, and is thus capable of offering the interested reader a reliable guide for exploring the world’s rich treasure of literatures.