ABSTRACT
The debates over world literature's market dynamics appear in this chapter as symptomatic articulations of the kind of self-consciousness. There is a popular take on the market for world literature that author will be recounting in a very summary way. Scholars discusses world literature's status as an elite commodity for a number of years now, beginning perhaps with Timothy Brennan's important critiques, first expressed in the late 1980s, of celebrated Third World writers. For Damrosch, rather, any work that has travelled across a border to meet its readers in localized moments of consumption can be deemed a work of world literature. In the English language, World Literature has its signature writers: Rushdie and Coetzee at the lead, and Kiran Desai, Mohsin Hamid, and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie among the younger charges. An understudied aspect in the existing commentaries on world literature's market dimensions is the nature of intellectual labour and how writers themselves acknowledge it.
