World literature

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History of Literature
Early Literature
Indian literature
Indian literature * Kannada literature * Sanskrit literature * Tamil literature
Chinese literature
Greek literature
Latin literature
Arabic literature
Persian literature
Pahlavi literature * Persian literature
The Medieval Period
Matter of Rome * Matter of France * Matter of Britain * Medieval literature * Arabic literature * 13th century in literature * 14th century in literature
European Renaissance Literature
European Renaissance Literature * 15th century in literature
The early modern period
16th century in literature * 17th century in literature
European literature in the 18th century
1700s * 1710s * 1720s * 1730s * 1740s * 1750s * 1760s * 1770s * 1780s * 1790s * 1800s
Modern Literature, 19th century
1800s * 1810s * 1820s * 1830s * 1840s * 1850s * 1860s * 1870s * 1880s * 1890s * 1900s
Modern Literature, 20th century
Modernism
Structuralism * Deconstruction * Poststructuralism * Postmodernism * Post-colonialism * Hypertext fiction
1900s * 1910s * 1920s * 1930s * 1940s * 1950s * 1960s * 1970s * 1980s * 1990s * 2000s
Modern Literature in Europe
European Literature
Modern Literature in the Americas
Argentine literature * Brazilian literature * Canadian literature * Colombian literature * Cuban literature * Jamaican literature * Mexican literature * Peruvian writers * Literature of the United States
Australasian Literature
Australian literature * New Zealand literature
Modern Asian Literature
Modern Asian Literature * Bengali literature * Chinese literature * Indian literature * Indian writing in English * Japanese literature * Hindi literature* Kannada literature * Malayalam literature * Marathi literature * Pakistani literature * Tamil literature * Urdu literature * Vietnamese literature
African Literature
African literature * Nigerian literature * Moroccan literature * South African literature * Swahili literature
Other topics
History of theatre * History of science fiction * History of ideas * Intellectual history * Literature by nationality * Centuries in poetry

World literature refers to literature from all over the world, including American literature, European literature, Latin American literature, Asian literature, African literature, Arabic literature and so on. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe introduced the concept of Weltliteratur in 1827 to describe the growing availability of texts from other nations. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels used the term in the Communist Manifesto of 1848 to describe the "cosmopolitan character" of bourgeois literary production.

Though today the term "world literature" is often used to denote the supposedly very best in literature, the so-called Western canon, recent books such as David Damrosch's What Is World Literature? define world literature as a category of literary production, publication and circulation, rather than using the term evaluatively. Arguably, this is closer to the original sense of the term in Goethe and Marx.

In order to understand the concept of world literature, it can be useful to explore the concepts of world cinema and world music.

[edit] Further reading

The Norton Anthology of World Literature, 6 vols., second edition, 2001-2003.
David Damrosch, What Is World Literature?, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003.
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party, 1848.
Jerome Rothenberg & Pierre Joris (editors), Poems for the Millennium: a Global Anthology of Modern & Postmodern Poetry, Berkeley: University of California Press, two vols., 1995, 1998.