ABSTRACT
To invoke Raymond Williams is to suggest that the theorizations of world literature have their roots in traditions of cultural materialism, best encapsulated in Williams's work and others such as the Brazilian Marxist critic Roberto Schwarz. 1907 marks the year of the Indian poet and philosopher Rabindranath Tagore's lecture on visva-sahitya or 'world literature'. Tagore and Mao Zedong represent two ends of a shared dialogue in India and China during the interwar era that was remarkable in putting forward distinctive conceptual framework for modern literature and articulating the relationship between progressive aesthetics and politic. In visva-sahitya, Tagore freely articulates what we can call a parallel Asian vision to that of Giambattista Vico and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel in Europe, namely an idea of 'socialist universalism'. Tagore's notion of world as historically formed, as is the "truth" of the world, which is "fashioned by many people through many years", alerts us to the materialist rather than idealist underpinning of his thought.
