ABSTRACT
As world literature grew in popularity in the past decades, the question often arose about why we needed it. This was the time when expanding our geographical coverage of texts, verifiable as it was on the boundaries of the physical map, was easy enough to attempt. An exposition of all the literatures of the world still lacks chronology. Braudel’s ecologically based description established his grounds for comparison, and with it he made inseparable the divided scholarly world of the Mediterranean of the north and the south. The real chronological inheritors of Hellenistic thought in world literature were, in fact, the Arabs, but that is another story. For Woolf world history remained very much in the kitchen.
