World literature

World literature is used to refer to the total of the world's national literature and the circulation of works into the wider world beyond their country of origin. In the past, it primarily referred to the masterpieces of Western European literature; however, world literature today is increasingly seen in an international context. Now, readers have access to a wide range of global works in various translations.
Many scholars assert that what makes a work considered world literature is its circulation beyond its country of origin. For example, Damrosch states, "A work enters into world literature by a double process: first, by being read as literature; second, by circulating out into a broader world beyond its linguistic and cultural point of origin". Likewise, the world literature scholar Venkat Mani believes that the "worlding" of literature is brought about by "information transfer" largely generated by developments in print culture. Because of the advent of the library, "Publishers and booksellers who print and sell affordable books, literate citizens who acquire these books, and public libraries that make these books available to those who cannot afford to buy them collectively play a very important role in the “making” of world literature".
History.
Johann Wolfgang Goethe used the concept of Weltliteratur in several of his essays in the early decades of the nineteenth century to describe the international circulation and reception of literary works in Europe, including works of non-Western origin. The concept achieved wide currency after his disciple Johann Peter Eckermann published a collection of conversations with Goethe in 1835. Goethe spoke with Eckermann about the excitement of reading Chinese novels and Persian and Serbian poetry as well as of his fascination with seeing how his own works were translated and discussed abroad, especially in France. He made a famous statement in January 1827, predicting that world literature would replace the national literature as the major mode of literary creativity in the future:
Reflecting a fundamentally economic understanding of world literature as a process of trade and exchange, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels used the term in their "Communist Manifesto" (1848) to describe the "cosmopolitan character" of bourgeois literary production, asserting that:
Martin Puchner has stated that Goethe had a keen sense of world literature as driven by a new world market in literature. This market-based approach was sought by Marx and Engels in 1848 through their Manifesto document, which was published in four languages and distributed among several European countries, and has since become one of the most influential texts of the twentieth century. While Marx and Engels followed Goethe in viewing world literature as a modern or future phenomenon, in 1886 the Irish scholar H. M. Posnett argued that world literature first arose in ancient empires, such as the Roman Empire, long before the rise of the modern national literature. Today, world literature is understood to encompass classical works from all periods, including contemporary literature that is written for a global audience.
In the postwar era, the study of comparative and world literature was revived in the United States. Comparative literature was seen at the graduate level while world literature was taught as a first-year general education class. The focus remained largely on the Greek and Roman classics and the literature of major, modern Western-European powers, but a combination of factors in the late 1980s and early 1990s led to greater access to the world. The end of the Cold War, the growing globalization of the world economy, and new waves of immigration led to several efforts to expand the study of world literature. This change is illustrated by the expansion of The Norton Anthology of World Masterpieces, whose first edition in 1956 featured only Western-European and North American works, to a new "expanded edition" in 1995 with non-Western selections. Major survey anthologies today, including those published by Longman, Bedford and Norton, showcase several hundred authors from dozens of countries.
Contemporary understandings.
The explosive growth in the range of cultures studied under the rubric of world literature has inspired a variety of theoretical attempts to define the field and to propose effective modes of research and teaching. In his 2003 book "What Is World Literature?" David Damrosch understands world literature to be less of a vast collection of works and more a matter of circulation and reception. He proposed that works that thrive as world literature are ones that work well and even gain meaning through translation. Whereas Damrosch's approach remains tied to the close reading of individual works, a different view was taken by the Stanford critic Franco Moretti in a pair of articles offering "Conjectures on World Literature". Moretti believes that the scale of world literature exceeds what can be grasped by traditional methods of close reading, and advocates instead a mode of "distant reading" that would look at large-scale patterns as discerned from publication records and national literary histories.
Moretti's approach combined elements of evolutionary theory with the world-systems analysis pioneered by Immanuel Wallerstein, an approach further discussed since then by Emily Apter in her influential book "The Translation Zone". Related to their world-systems approach is the work of French critic Pascale Casanova, "La République mondiale des lettres" (1999). Drawing on the theories of cultural production developed by the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, Casanova explores the ways in which the works of peripheral writers must circulate into metropolitan centers in order to achieve recognition as being world literature.
The field of world literature continues to generate debate, with critics such as Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak arguing that too often the study of world literature in translation smooths out both the linguistic richness of the original and the political force a work can have in its original context. Other scholars, on the contrary, emphasize that world literature can and should be studied with close attention to original languages and contexts, even as works take on new dimensions and new meanings abroad.
World literature series are now being published in China and in Estonia, and a new Institute for World Literature, offering month-long summer sessions on theory and pedagogy, had its inaugural session at Peking University in 2011, with its next sessions at Istanbul Bilgi University in 2012 and at Harvard University in 2013. Since the middle of the first decade of the new century, a steady stream of works has provided materials for the study of the history of world literature and the current debates. Valuable collections of essays include:
Individual studies include:
On the Internet.
The internet provides a medium for the global circulation of world literature, and many websites now enable global audiences to sample the world's literary productions. The website "Words Without Borders" offers a selection of fiction and poetry from around the world, and the Annenberg Foundation has created an ambitious thirteen-part DVD/web series produced by Boston's public television station WGBH, "Invitation to World Literature". Major survey anthologies have websites that provide background information, images, and links to resources on international authors. Globally-oriented authors themselves are increasingly creating work for the internet. The Serbian experimentalist Milorad Pavić (1929–2009) was an early proponent of the possibilities of electronic modes of creation and reading. Though Pavić remained primarily a print-based writer, the Korean/American duo known as Young-hae Chang Heavy Industries created their works entirely for internet distribution, often in several languages.
Publishers.
American publishers neglect to publish the work of world literature. Surveys by the National Endowment for the Arts Literature Program showed that only 297 translated books were published in the United States, out of 13,000 works of fiction and poetry published in the United States in 1999. As of 2019, only 3% of all books published in the United States are works in translation, compared to Italy, where translations represent more than 50% of titles published. Among the literary magazines that dedicate to world literature is World Literature Today (founded in 1970), which sponsors The Neustadt award.