World Literature and the Global Literary Market
World literature studies how texts circulate, are translated, and gain value across an unequal global literary space.
Definition
The study of the global circulation, translation, and valuation of literature, including the institutions and inequalities of the world literary market.
Scope
This topic examines the renewed field of world literature: how literary works travel beyond their cultures of origin, the hierarchies of prestige and translation that govern this circulation, and methods such as distant reading. It connects postcolonial concerns with the unequal structures of the global literary market.
Core questions
- How do literary works circulate and gain value globally?
- Who controls prestige, translation, and consecration?
- How should world literature be read and studied?
Key theories
- The world republic of letters
- Casanova described an unequal global literary space in which dominant centers consecrate value and peripheral writers struggle for recognition.
- Distant reading
- Franco Moretti proposed analyzing world literature through large-scale patterns and the unequal diffusion of forms rather than close reading of a canon.
History
Reviving Goethe's idea of Weltliteratur, world literature became a major field around 2000 through interventions by Moretti, Casanova, and Damrosch, which foregrounded circulation, translation, and the inequalities of the global literary system.
Debates
- Circulation versus the local
- Critics ask whether emphasizing global circulation neglects the specificity of texts and risks flattening difference, against close-reading approaches.
Key figures
- Pascale Casanova
- David Damrosch
- Franco Moretti
Related topics
Seminal works
- casanova2004
- damrosch2003
- moretti2000
Frequently asked questions
- What is 'world literature'?
- In current usage it refers less to a fixed canon of masterpieces than to literature that circulates beyond its origin through translation and global readership, studied with attention to those flows and their inequalities.