ABSTRACT
“World literature” is usually traced back to the late eighteenth century, the most famous proponent being Goethe, who wrote himself into the fourteenth-century Persian poet Hafiz. In the twenty-first century, “world literature” has flourished, with a remarkably good representation of a wide variety of languages and traditions. The only thing that defines “premodern world literature” is that it is “not modern” or “notyet-modern.” “Antiquities” is a useful topic in premodern world literature in that it produced the culture-bearing texts, either as memorization corpora written down or simply composed in writing, that came to define a community. Although scholars have focused on vernacularization around the turn of the second millennium, older vernaculars followed close upon the spreading classical languages of antiquity, in some cases preceding them in general use.
