World Literature, World Times, Worlds

Writing histories of world literature was, for the longest time, an almost exclusively European, or in any case Western, enterprise. Moreover, it was overwhelmingly centred on European, or again Western, literature. To do away with such Eurocentrism was the avowed aim of the project upon which an international set of literary scholars embarked in 2006, and which resulted in the four-volume Literature: A World History published in 2022. In the articles to follow, five scholars (Pettersson, Trivedi, Utas, Zhang, D’haen) directly involved with the project look back on their experience and reflect on the pros and cons, the successes and the failures, the achievements and the shortcomings, of the enterprise. As counterbalance, six scholars (Ette, Hajdu, Hawas, He, Larsen, Rydholm) not involved with the project reflect on the (im)possibilities of writing world histories of literature.