ABSTRACT
World literature is the site of a complex renegotiation of the object of literary studies. Cultures and literatures that had worked on very different premises, either as part of closed political systems or restrained by limited resources, were opening up and becoming affluent and free enough to take a greater interest in literature. The criticism of world literature has been quite explicit from scholars working with both postcolonial literature and translation studies. The “civilization of the universal” — which Rabindranath Tagore contrasted against imperialist forms of “universal civilization” — became his central concern in the 1960s and 1970s, and retraces all the familiar challenges of human diversity and the self-other dialectic. The revival of world literature seems in hindsight to be an almost logical consequence of how the world opened after 1989 and globalization gathered pace. The chapter also presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in this book.
