ABSTRACT
The conclusion teases out the vision of world letters in the English, Arabic and French writings of Taha Hussein, the most prominent Arabic-speaking scholar of the twentieth century, and brings his thoughts to bear on present theoretical debates of world literature. Writing at the peak of the Egyptian struggle for independence, Hussein envisioned a whole system of literary modernism that would be geared towards institutionalising Arabic literature as world literature. More importantly, he engaged with European and non-European comparatists from Goethe to Tagore to insist on the inevitable but also imperative internationalism and political cooperation of literary scholars in post-Second World War nations.
