ABSTRACT
This introduction overviews key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. One of the main charges has been that the "world" in world literature is "studiously neutral" and thereby inattentive to the convoluted, unequal structuring of the world as a lettered and political space. The book sets out to accommodate such criticism in a series of investigations of the multiple ways in which world literature comes to be. World literature in both the Goethean and Marxian senses has been shaped in the ambit of a geographically expansive planetary consciousness and an ambivalent temporality of progress and historicism. The stakes of world literature rose around the turn of the millennium. Three scholars are typically associated with this development: Pascale Casanova, Franco Moretti, and David Damrosch. It is also crucial to underline at least three other developments that point to the multi-sited emergence of the world literature: translation studies, book history, and the sociology of literature.
