There is a certain antipathy between world literature and literary history. Both trace their origins to, or through, the early nineteenth century and the era of nationalism, each in a different way a response to that stimulus. But theories and models of World Literature have had a striking tendency to be transhistorical, or even ahistorical, in their approach, to breach chronological barriers even more readily than they have broken through geographic ones. Why is that? And does it have to be thus? My goal in this paper is to suggest that this tension can be resolved in some way, that there is some way to write a literary history of the world—or, better, multiple ways to write multiple literary histories of the world. This goal is thoroughly self-interested: I am myself in the midst of writing a book entitled A Global History of Literature, and while I suppose completing the project will constitute proof of its possibility, I have a self-evident interest in confirming the theoretical possibility, even desirability, of completing the task. In what follows, I begin with a brief discussion of the history of literary history itself, followed by a review of selected theories of world literature from the perspective of how they negotiate the historical. I then consider several extra-disciplinary possibilities, before outlining the approach I am attempting to take myself.

Premodern literary circulation resembles premodern trade in material goods in that it covers the planet less completely than does the modern world-system. Instead, different kinds of literary texts circulated on different scales and in different networks. Short, simple, easily translated and adapted texts such as beast fables and frame-tales, travelled the most widely and crossed the most linguistic borders. Religious scripture, and other highly valued texts, also travelled great distances, thanks to the huge resources occasionally invested in their transmission and translation. By contrast, denser patterns of literary circulation took place in smaller, more clearly-defined, regions. A key index of such regions in pre-modern literature is the adaptation of specific poetic forms, tied to the distinctive prosodic qualities of a major literary language, and requiring sustained investment and effort to carry over successfully into new languages, typically vernaculars culturally dependent to some degree on the source language. This phenomenon is traced through the gradual circulation of two poetic forms, the Arabic qasida and the sonnet.

The inadequacies inherent in tracing literary history in purely national terms have been apparent ever since the emergence of national literature in the early nineteenth century: the problems caused by multilingual nations, authors, and texts; by multinational languages, and so on. If world literature is not merely to replicate the errors of national-literary analysis on a larger scale, then new geographies will be needed. Various options exist, from the “areas” of Area Studies (linked to a dubious model of “civilizational” contact and conflict), to “-spheres” and “-phones” (the Sinophone, the Anglosphere, etc.), to hemispheric and oceanic studies. Each of these approaches opens new perspectives – and creates new blind spots. I review an alternative model, which I have earlier proposed in my An Ecology of World Literature (Verso Books, 2015), which seeks instead to identify typological similarities between the “ecological” contexts in which literatures exist. These similarities are transhistoric and trans-continental, and while they do not provide a perfect substitute for geographically-based models in all circumstances, my ecological typology suggests new comparative possibilities for world literature.

Where the self-effacement of the epic poet presented considerable challenges to the reverse biographical fallacy, “lyric” poetry, broadly conceived, would seem more fruitful territory. In the case of a poet such as Sappho, for whom the ancients possessed substantial bodies of poetry in which a strongly personal voice was expressed, such was indeed the case, as has already been demonstrated persuasively by others. Clearly, the substantial body of lyric poetry expressing profound emotion was fertile ground for biographical readers. That said, substantial categories of biographical material concerning Archaic Greek lyric poets clearly exceed the reach of naïve biographical criticism. In the latter half of this chapter, I will explore aspects of the biographical accounts of Alcman and Sappho that, I believe, can be explained more usefully in terms of implied poetics than of the biographical fallacy. With Alcman, I will examine the question of his birthplace, whether in Lydia or Sparta; with Sappho, I will consider a curious episode in Herodotus concerning abusive poetry she is said to have composed on the subject of her sister-in-law.

In making my arguments on these two more famous figures, I will draw on my reading (in the first part of this chapter) of an extreme case of the mismatch of biographical anecdote to poetic text, Terpander. He is representative of a category that might be labeled virtual poets, that is, poets to whom no poetry was ever attributed, or none of whose poetry survives to our time, or for whom doubts were cast in ancient times on the meager materials associated with their names.

In one of the most fascinating moments of the intersection of philosophy and poetry in ancient Greek literature, Plato has his Socrates correct himself in the Phaedrus after having delivered a speech exhorting young men to give themselves to non-erasteis rather than to erasteis. In so doing, he wades into the debate about whether or not Helen actually went to Troy, a debate with serious implications for Panhellenic epic:

So, my friend, I need to be purified. There is an ancient purification for those who have erred in the telling of myth (muthologia), one that Homer did not perceive, but Stesichorus did. For when he was robbed of his eyes because of his slander of Helen, he was not ignorant like Homer, but because he was close to the Muses (mousikos) he knew the cause, and composed immediately,

And when he had created the whole of the so-called Palinode he recovered his sight immediately.

ἐμοὶ μὲν οὖν, ὦ ϕίλε, καθήρασθαι ἀνάγκη· ἔστιν δὲ τοῖς ἁμαρτάνουσι περὶ μυθολογίαν καθαρμὸς ἀρχαῖος, ὃν Ὅμηρος μὲν οὐκ ᾔσθετο, Στησίχορος δέ. τῶν γὰρ ὀμμάτων στερηθεὶς διὰ τὴν Ἑλένης κακηγορίαν οὐκ ἠγνόησεν ὥσπερ Ὅμηρος, ἀλλ᾽ ἅτε μουσικὸς ὢν ἔγνω τὴν αἰτίαν, καὶ ποιεῖ εὐθὺς –

In the final chapter, I turn to the final section of the Songs, the Hymns. The subject matter of the Hymns, like that of the Court Songs, is largely drawn from the predynastic and foundational years of the Zhou. Some of the poems constitute what one scholar has titled the Weniad, a quasi-epic recitation of the events of the life of King Wen; others deal with events earlier or later than Wen's reign. In all cases, these narrative poems have generally received less attention in Western studies of the Canon of Songs, in large part perhaps because their lesser degree of strangeness from a Eurocentric perspective makes them less interesting to accounts of Otherness.

More surprising, perhaps, is that even the Mao tradition itself is by implication less interested in these poems; the poetics developed by the Preface seems clearly designed to account for the Airs, but accounts badly for the other poems (how, exactly, are we to imagine ritual hymns and narrative poems about charter-myths of the dynasty as the spontaneous overflowing of popular emotion?). This lack of interest in the Court Songs and Hymns may be explained by the fact that, because these texts are explicitly ideological in function, there is little need to construct a reading strategy that will allow one to find implicit political content within them. A significant section of the Songs seem to have been performed as quite explicitly mimetic (at least in the pre-Platonic sense) dances.

Poetics, Explicit and Implicit

As we saw in Chapter 1, if we want truly to understand even the explicit poetics of either Greece or China, we must pay close attention at every moment to the fact that these poetic treatises are discussing verbal art that even they conceive of as taking life, not on the page, but in performance. I attempt throughout at least to sketch some of the possible directions such attention to performance might take, and some of the insights we might be able to gain thereby. At the same time, and in a related way, I observe that (especially when read with a sensitivity to performance) the poetic traditions of Greece and China are not as distinct as they seem at first. Certainly, elements of the doctrines espoused by the Poetics and by the Mao preface are quite distinct, but an examination of the implicit poetics of the scenes of authorship I have discussed throughout the book offer ample evidence to the contrary. The story of Terpander, for example, shows that the Greeks were fascinated with the idea that poetry could regulate human and interstate relations and could be constitutive of the state. The Great King Wu dance, likewise, shows that the Chinese were also convinced of the important role verbal art (as one of the performing arts) could play in reenacting foundational cultural myths.

The Scene of Diplomatic Authorship: Ritual and Historical Backgrounds

As I have suggested in the previous chapter, the Chinese classics can best be understood as an attempt to create a totalizing system of human (especially elite male) behavior and speech, creating a universal system of ritual and discourse that both facilitates interaction among peer polities of the Huaxia world and marks as outsiders those who do not know the correct practices. The classics seem mostly to have begun as performance practices, as an elite system of education more or less analogous to that of the symposium in archaic Greece. As Michael Nylan has suggested, the gradual textualization and canonization of the classics may have democratized their influence; once available in textual form, the ritual and linguistic practices encoded by the classics became accessible to all who were literate. In the same way, the textualization of ritual may have eased the admission of new states in the south into the Huaxia sphere.

Dating is, predictably, a problem. The texts we know as the classics are highly “sedimented;” that is, they accreted and took textual form over a long period of time, and the ritual texts in particular did not take their final form until well into the Han.