World literature
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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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.
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.
World literature is conceptually similar to world cinema and world music.
See also
- Classic book
- Comparative literature
- Literature by country
- List of world folk-epics
- History of literature
- Print culture
- Translation
