An Ecology of World Literature From Antiquity to the Present Day

What constitutes a nation’s literature? How do literatures of different countries interact with one another? In this groundbreaking study, Alexander Beecroft develops a new way of thinking about world literature. Drawing on a series of examples and case studies, the book ranges from ancient epic to the contemporary fiction of Roberto Bolaño and Amitav Ghosh.

Moving across literary ecologies of varying sizes, from small societies to the planet as a whole, the environments in which literary texts are produced and circulated, An Ecology of World Literature places in dialogue scholarly perspectives on ancient and modern, western and non-western texts, navigating literary study into new and uncharted territory.

Alexander Beecroft is an Associate Professor of Classics and Comparative Literature at the University of South Carolina. He has published extensively on topics ranging from authorship in ancient Greece and China to theories of world literature, from the emergence of literary history as a discipline in the nineteenth century to the origins of Canadian literature. His first book, Authorship and Cultural Identity in Early Greece and China, was published by Cambridge University Press.