I have been thinking, and writing, about world literature for the past 15 years or so. I was introduced to the topic in the early 1970s, when I was a graduate student in Comparative Literature first at Vanderbilt University and then at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. My PhD dissertation supervisor in Amherst was Sarah Lawall, then and throughout the early 2000s one of the editors of the Norton Anthology of World Masterpieces that eventually transmogrified into the Norton Anthology of World Literature. Sarah Lawall was also one of the first U.S. scholars to rekindle an interest in world literature with Reading World Literature: Theory, History, Practice, a 1994 collective volume she edited, and which resulted from a NEH workshop that she had organized in the late 1980s. Also teaching at UMass at the time were Mary-Louise Pratt, who had a keen interest in pragmatics as related to literature, and Donald Freeman, specializing in stylistics, but who both covered a wide array of literatures and brought to its study wider concerns of literature’s functioning in society. Pratt eventually moved in the direction of what we now would think of as postcolonialism. Also having a keen interest in matters loosely to be labelled postcolonial, although I think he never used the term himself, was another of my teachers at UMass, E.M. Beekman, a Dutchman born in what at the time had still been the Dutch East Indies, now Indonesia. He edited the Library of The Indies, a series of Dutch colonial classics on the Dutch East Indies, translating many of them himself. He also wrote a major scholarly volume on Dutch colonial literature. Although the teachings of these scholars, along with those of the other faculty at UMass at the time, undoubtedly came to influence my own thinking in various ways, at the time I turned to writing my dissertation I moved in a totally different direction. This undoubtedly had to do with my in the meantime having gotten a job teaching English and American literature at Utrecht University, where among my new colleagues featured Douwe Fokkema and Hans Bertens, both of whom I joined in an enthusiasm for the then emerging field of postmodern studies. My dissertation was essentially on postmodernism, and I still regret that I did not use that term in its title, because I think this might have given its trade edition a much wider circulation than it in fact received. In any case, for the remainder of the 1970s and throughout the 1980s, I worked mostly in postmodernism. By the mid-1980s I had moved to a full professorship at Leiden University. This university had, and continues to have, a strong tradition in the study of the Dutch East Indies/Indonesia, and together with the then rising tide of postcolonialism, I re-oriented my own scholarly interests accordingly. In the early 2000s I moved again, to the University of Leuven (KU Leuven) in Belgium. This was when the interest in world literature had just been rekindled, first by the volume edited by Sarah Lawall I mentioned already, and then, in rapid succession, by the publication of Pascale Casanova’s La République mondiale des lettres (1999), which however would have its greatest impact only with its English-language edition The World Republic of Letters (2004), Franco Moretti’s essay “Conjectures on World Literature” (2000), and David Damrosch’s What Is World Literature? (2003). My own interest in world literature resulted in my 2012 monograph The Routledge Concise History of World Literature (D’haen 2012) and in the collective volumes The Routledge Companion to World Literature (2012, co-edited with David Damrosch and Djelal Kadir, second edition 2022) and World Literature: A Reader (Routledge 2013, co-edited with César Domı́nguez and Mads Rosendahl Thomsen). Over the last decade or so discussions on world literature have been much concerned with the issue of “worlding” – succinctly put, this means that, whatever one writes from a world literature perspective, one should be aware of “where one is coming from,” and that one should situate one’s text “in the world.” I go into more detail on this in my first few chapters. For the time being, suffice it so say that the present volume gathers, in revised, updated and re-arranged versions, a number of essays of mine on world literature that since the completion of The Routledge Concise History of World Literature have appeared scattered in journals or collective volumes. Some were written as keynotes or papers for conferences or workshops, others for Festschriften for colleagues upon their retirement. I here have turned them into the consecutive chapters of a book that – while still continuing to address the various issues they were originally meant to address – seeks to “world” world literature. Some of the chapters – especially the earlier and later ones – are more theoretical or general than others, addressing what I see as questions troubling world literature studies. Others address more specific issues, sometimes focusing on one author or work looked at from a world literature perspective. If throughout what follows I regularly make mention of things Dutch, Flemish or Belgian, this is because as a scholar hailing from Belgium, having spent most of my career in the Netherlands, and being a native speaker of Dutch/Flemish, these are what I know best. I also do so because Dutch-language literature is seldom considered when it comes to world, and indeed comparative literature. But I will also often have occasion to refer to things American or Chinese. In fact, what animates the volume is precisely the intricate and often difficult, but also endlessly fascinating, relation between the two levels involved – the local and the global – when talking of world literature. My hope is that the book will bring home to the reader that the study of world literature is a “wordly” endeavour and that it will leave her or him with some sense of “world literature worlded.”
In thinking about and working on world literature I have had the benefit of conversations and collaborations with many colleagues. Too numerous to list them all, I here only mention, in alphabetical order, those that have been of particular importance to me: Jan Baetens, Hans Bak, Cedric Barfoot, Susan Bassnett, Hans Bertens, Jean Bessière, Elleke Boehmer, Michael Boyden, Sascha Bru, Helena Buescu, Gerd Buelens, Geert Buelens, Keith Busby, Shunqing Cao, Geert Claassens, David Damrosch, Dirk De Geest, Sarah De Mul, Reindert Dhondt, Lieven D’hulst, César Domı́nguez, Erica Durante, Annemarie Estor, Ottmar Ette, Cinzia Ferrini, Douwe Fokkema, Eep Franken, Paul Giles, Anke Gilleir, Iannis Goerlandt, Herbert Grabes, Jesper Gulddal, Kathleen Gyssels, May Hawas, Chengzhou He, Stefan Helgesson, Richard Hibbitt, Gerhard Hoffmann, Alfred Hornung, Siegfried Huigen, Wilt Idema, Raphaël Ingelbien, José Luı́s Jobı́m, Djelal Kadir, Assaad Khairollah, Youngmin Kim, Stewart King, Marieke Krajenbrink, Patricia Krüs, José Lambert, Svend Erik Larsen, Peter Liebregts, Nadia Lie, Gunilla Lindberg-Wada, Rolf Lundén, Marc Maufort, Brian McHale, Gisele Müller, Joseph Natoli, Birgit Neumann, Louise Nilsson, Ansgar Nünning, Liviu Papadima, Anders Pettersson, Bart Philipsen, Martin Puchner, Alistair Rolls, Manfred Schmeling, Monika Schmitz-Emans, Roger Sell, Biwu Shang, Anfeng Sheng, Werner Sollors, Steven Sondrup, Monica Spiridon, Micéala Symington, Mads Rosendahl Thomsen, Harish Trivedi, Delia Ungureanu, Bo Utas, Dagmar Vandebosch, Bart Vandenbossche, Hendrik Van Gorp, Kristian van Haesendonck, Pieter Vermeulen, Joris Vlasselaars, Sandra Vlasta, Branko Vranes, Ksenija Vulovič, Wang Ning, Tjebbe Westendorp, Bart Westerweel, Robert Young, Waldemar Zacharasewiecz, Lois Parkinson Zamora, Longxi Zhang, Xiaohong Zhang.
Of course, I alone remain responsible for the views expressed throughout this volume, and all errors are mine and mine alone.
Earlier versions of (sometimes parts of) chapters appeared as follows:
Chapter 1, Mapping World Literature, as “Mapping World Literature,” in The Routledge Companion to World Literature, Theo D’haen, David Damrosch and Djelal Kadir, ed., London: Routledge, 2012, 413-22.
Chapter 2, Worlding World Literature, as “Worlding World Literature,” in Recherches littéraires/Literary Research 32 (Eté 2016/Summer 2016), pp. 7-23 and re-uses passages from “Anthologizing World Literature in Translation: Global/Local/Glocal,” in Forum for World Literature Studies 9:4 (December 2017), 539-57.
Chapter 3, Why World Literature Now?, as “Why World Literature Now?” in University of Bucharest Review XIII (vol. I – new series): 1 (2011), 29-39; passages re-used from “European Identities, American Theories,” in Cadernos de literatura comparada 8/9 (2003), 287-304 and “European Pasts, American Presents: Literary memory, Period Theory, and Didactic Paradigms,” in Literature and Memory: Theoretical Paradigms, Genres, Functions, Ansgar Nünning, Marion Gymnich and Roy Sommer, ed., Tübingen: Francke Verlag, 2006, 29-39.
Chapter 4, Major and Minor in World Literature, as “Major/minor in World Literature,” in Journal of World Literature 1.1 (2016), 29-38.
Chapter 5, Major and Minor Players in World Literature, as “Major Histories, Minor Literatures, and World Authors,” in CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 15.5 (2013): http://dx.doi.org/10.7771/1481-4374.2342, which was itself partially based on “Minor Literatures and Major Histories,” in A World History of Literature, Ed. Theo D’haen, Brussels: Koninklijke Vlaamse Akademie van Belgie voor Kunsten en Wetenschappen, 2012, 101-108, and “La literatura en español en la literatura mundial,” in Insula 787-788 (2012), 16-19. Copyright releases to the author.
Chapter 6, Victor Klemperer Saves Europe through Weltliteratur, as “Saving Europe through Weltliteratur: Victor Klemperer,” in The Cambridge History of World Literature, Ed. Debjani Ganguly, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021 (in press).
Chapter 7, Brussels as Transnational Node for World Literature, as “Capitalizing (on) World Literature: Brussels as Shadow Capital of Modernism/Modernity,” in Other Capitals of the Nineteenth Century: An Alternative Mapping of Literary and Cultural Space, Ed. Richard Hibbitt, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017, 111-27, and “Capitalizing (on) World Literature,” in Echilibrul ı̂ntre Antiteze, Ed. Laura Mesina, Monica Spiridon, et al., Bucharest: University of Bucharest Press, 2014, 11-26. I also re-use some (revised) passages from “‘To be Flemish in order to become European’ – August Vermeylen and Flemish Literature,” in Rifondare la letteratura nazionale per un pubblico europeo, Ed. Alexandra Vranceanu and Angelo Pagliardini, Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2015, 131-45.
Chapter 8, Larger than Holland: J. Slauerhoff and World Literature, as “J. J. Slauerhoff, Dutch Literature and World Literature,” in Literary and Cultural Circulation, Ed. José Luı́s Jobı́m, Oxford: Peter Lang, 2017, 143-57. An earlier version was delivered as a paper at a conference on “Dialogue of Cultures” at the University of Belgrade in 2013. Some paragraphs, i.e. those analyzing Slauerhoff’s Het verboden rijk and “Lisboa,” earlier appeared in different form in Theo D’haen, “On how not to be Lisbon if you want to be modern – Dutch reactions to the Lisbon earthquake,” in European Review 14,3 (July 2006), 351-58.
Chapter 9, Adventures of Mark Twain in World Literature, as “Don Quixote on the Mississippi: Twain’s Modernities,” in Transatlantic Exchanges: The American South in Europe – Europe in the American South, Ed. Richard Gray and Waldemar Zacharasewiecz, Vienna: Austrian Academy of Sciences, 2007, 349-61, and in International Don Quixote, Ed. Theo D’haen and Reindert Dhondt, Amsterdam & New York: Rodopi, 2009, 237-50.
Chapter 10, Caribbean Exile into World Literature, as “Exile, Caribbean Literature, and the World Republic of Letters,” in Perspectives on the ‘Other America’: Comparative Approaches to Caribbean and Latin American Culture, Ed. Michael Niblett and Kerstin Oloff, Amsterdam & New York: Rodopi, 2009, 221-31, which is itself a revised version of “I piaceri dell’esilio,” in Esilio: Quaderni de Synapsis VII, Ed. Roberto Russi, Firenze: Le Monnier, 2008, 29-36.
Chapter 11, Anglo-phone Literature as World Literature, as “For ‘Global Literature’, Anglo-Phone,” in Anglia 135.1 (2017), 35-50.
Chapter 12, Re-Orient, as “Re-Orient?”, in Comparative Literature: East & West 3.2 (2019), 113-127; doi.org/10.1080/25723618.2019.1709341. This chapter also uses passages from “Routes, Roads, and Maps (of) Literature,” in The Routledge Companion to World History and World Literature, May Hawas et al., Ed., London and New York: Routledge, 2018, pp. 146-58, and “World Literature and World History,” in Comparative Literature & World Literature 1.2 (2016), 14-24.
Chapter 13, “Whither European Literature?” as “Worlding European Literature,” in CompLit: Journal of European Literature, Arts and Society 1.1 (2021), 193-207.
In all cases permission to re-use material has been secured. Copyright for the present edition rests with the author and Brill Publishers.