world literature
Cross-cultural written works
World literature refers to literary works considered significant across cultures and time periods—the collected masterpieces of human writing that transcend their original language and context.
The term also describes the academic field studying literature from a global rather than national perspective: The syllabus included world literature from five continents.
What counts as world literature shifts with changing canons and critical attention.
- translated worksTexts rendered into new languages
- literary translationText converted between languages
- lost in translationMeaning altered between languages
- mother tongueLanguage acquired from birth
- cosmopolitanismBelief in shared humanity
oral traditions · Goethe · cultural exchange · intertextuality · magic realism · canon · foreign · tragedy · Nobel · Borges · modernism · Tolstoy · universal · myth · literary · masterpiece · anthology · classic
world literaturepulp fiction
Sensational cheap literature
genre fiction · popular fiction · airport novels · penny dreadfuls · dime novels
world literatureoral tradition
Culture passed by speech
oral literature · folk tales · oral poetry · storytelling traditions · spoken word
world, letters, literature, worldly, literate, literacy, otherworldly, illiterate, underworld