In the continuing debates about the cultural dimensions of globalization, the question of 'literature' has been something of a poor relation. This volume seeks to redress the balance. Its starting point is Goethe's idea of <em>Weltliteratur</em>, from which it travels out to various parts of the globe at different historical junctures. Its concerns include the legacy of Goethe's idea, variable understandings of the term 'literature' itself, cross-cultural encounters (the contact of the oral and the written, the paradoxes of 'exoticism'), the nature of 'small literatures', and the cultural politics of literary genres (poetry and the novel). The underlying objective of the volume is to transcend the pieties and simplifications of polemic in a seach for the complexity embodied in the linking of the two terms 'world' and 'literature'.