Abstract

This chapter sketches the genealogy of the modern concept of literature as imaginative fiction. It retraces its origins in the European enlightenment and points to the fact that, from the beginning, this notion of literature-as-art was systematically related to the concept of national literature. Literature was seen to be national in its primary alignment; the international dimension of literary communication, as codified by Goethe’s concept of ‘world literature,’ played a secondary role. This chapter proceeds to demonstrate, first, how the European concept of literature was globalized in the wake of Western colonial and imperial rule; second, how it has been transformed, on its part, as a result of recent processes of economic, political, cultural and communicative globalization. This transformation is shown to have taken place on three different levels: the level of literary institutions; the level of literary forms, techniques and topics; and the conceptual level.