ABSTRACT
In literary studies the re-emergence of world literature can be seen as a reaction to and a critique of other ways of addressing the international dimensions of literature. The golden age of literary history in the second half of the nineteenth century took place during a period when literature was a dominant medium. The prominence of national literature in Western academic circles began to wear off at the beginning of the twentieth century. Comparative literature should entail an approach to literary studies that would make world literature unnecessary as a revitalised paradigm. In place of postcolonial studies’ often dark and driven preoccupations, its exploited peripheries, disruptive interfaces, partitions, and schisms, world literature upheld stable literary entities like canons and classics, bulwarked by tried-and-tested procedures of formal and comparatist literary analysis. Writers and readers alike often turn to world literature to provide resources and aesthetic experiences beyond what is available at home.
