Introduction

While most of the people on our planet continue to live in nation-states, these states are undergoing changes within their borders and beyond them. Many of these changes are the result of globalization—economic and cultural procedures that have “intensified exchanges across national, ethnic, and territorial borders.”¹ Others are the result of an electronic revolution that has changed methods of communication and organization in personal and public life. It is especially appropriate that a journal entitled New Literary History should undertake an inquiry into “Literary History in the Global Age.” “Literary history” and “the global age” have been intertwined in numerous ways, and contributors have been left to decide what they consider “literary history” to be, what aspects of globalization, if any, influence it, and how electronic transformations have participated in such changes.

I have divided the papers into three groups: histories, revisions, and alternatives, even though several could easily fit into more than one category. Following the papers, there are commentaries upon them by Hayden White and Jonathan Arac.

I. Histories

Globalism has made possible the exchange of literature and literary views throughout the world. Electronic developments have made literature accessible internationally, with or without translation. But even before globalization, there were references to and even a history of world literature. Indeed, globalism has a history of disciplinary change before nation-states existed. Brian Stock writes that “[l]iterary history begins to be written seriously in the early modern period,” and he points out that such history was “one form of expression of national identity” (389). His essay explores three themes that fall within the boundaries of literary history and the history of reading. These are globalism, national identity, and pluralism. In dealing with the modern period, he envisages a “working partnership between the scientific and nonscientific dimensions of reading in which each contributes to . . . a foundation for understanding modes of interpretation in their Western and non-Western configurations” (406). His carefully developed argument in which readership changes the interaction between scientific and nonscientific dimensions of reading leads to issues of medical information controlled by some of the same corporations that also fund research.

Nadia Al-Bagdadi supports Stock’s view of multiple globalization by describing three types of globalization in Arabic literary history. She writes that it is “useful to discern three distinct phases and types of globalization. The first comprises oikumenical globalization of late antiquity to the end of the Abbasid period; the second, expanding globalization of the Imperialist age of the late eighteenth to the twentieth century; and, finally, dispersal globalization of the current age” (448–49).

Walter F. Veit also agrees with Stock that literature has been a global “phenomenon as old as the world’s oldest heroic epics and historical narratives” (415). He notes that the term “global literature” has a variety of uses, and he points out that today “global literature denotes a progress of dissemination and ingathering in which not only the book market plays a dominant role, but in which the positions and functions of the writer, the reader, the critic, and other mediating institutions have to be considered and assessed since all have come under attack for various reasons at one time or another. Above all, there is the task to describe the relationship between existing national literatures and an emerging global literature” (416). His essay here is devoted to “the theory and practice of historians of literature who maintain that the understanding of a literary work as a system of aesthetic argumentation and, therefore, as an institution of human communication, is no longer restricted to a national border and language” (416). He notes that the whole issue has been approached in terms of “world literature” and with it the possibility of a new history of literature, namely comparative literature, which involved “comparing aspects of and mutual influences between several national literatures” (417). It is important to note that literary history has moved from literary history as a national history to a “world literature.”

He traces the objections that were raised against this comparative literature, especially against its approach to “mythical binary oppositions and antitheses” and its view of progress (419). He...