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What Was Early Modern World Literature?

Did world literature exist during the period that scholars writing in English have come to call early modernity? How did early modern authors perceive or imagine relations between far-flung literary cultures? Answers to these questions depend on what is meant by world literature, a category whose meaning, scope, history, and value have been contested in recent scholarship. In this essay, we reconstruct concepts of world and world literature that were held independently by two poets: Bidel of Delhi (1644–1720) from Mughal India and Thomas Traherne (1636–1674) from rural England. During Bidel’s and Traherne’s lifetimes, projects of enlightenment and self-knowledge were driven by thinking with worlds. Taking this blurring of self and world as our point of departure, we begin by examining how Traherne’s and Bidel’s concepts of world name the relations that condition phenomenal appearance and epistemic endeavor. We then show how each poet responds to experiences of diversity (across languages, religions, temporalities, and geographies) by articulating their own concepts of world literature. Finally, we argue that these notions of world literature are structured by practices of assemblage—a concept we borrow from the early modern album (muraqqaʿ). As objects that collect varied specimens of art and calligraphy, albums solicit creative engagement with diverse materials, encouraging readers to attend to similarities and differences in style, medium, and content without imposing hermeneutic principles. We reflexively activate this early modern concept of assemblage in order to retune current scholarly approaches to world literature and early modern studies.