The Challenge of Writing a World Literary History

Abstract

The writing of history has encountered many challenges in twenty-century theoretical discussions, and postmodernism and deconstruction in particular have made literary history all but impossible in the West. Because world literature today remains the canonical works of Western literature, while much of the non-Western literatures and even “minor” European literatures remain unknown and untranslated, a world history of literature is absolutely necessary to introduce the yet-unknown world literature to a global readership beyond the original linguistic and cultural milieux of those unknown literary works. Translating those yet-unknown works into English for a wider circulation is the first step to make world literature go beyond Eurocentrism, and writing a world history of literature will help us know the basic situation of the world’s literary traditions from a truly global perspective.