[3] Goethe spoke with Eckermann about the excitement of reading Chinese novels and Persian and Serbian poetry as well as of his fascination with seeing how his own works were translated and discussed abroad, especially in France.
[5] This market-based approach was sought by Marx and Engels in 1848 through their Manifesto document, which was published in four languages and distributed among several European countries, and has since become one of the most influential texts of the twentieth century.
The focus remained largely on the Greek and Roman classics and the literature of major, modern Western-European powers, but a combination of factors in the late 1980s and early 1990s led to greater access to the world.
The explosive growth in the range of cultures studied under the rubric of world literature has inspired a variety of theoretical attempts to define the field and to propose effective modes of research and teaching.
Whereas Damrosch's approach remains tied to the close reading of individual works, a different view was taken by the Stanford critic Franco Moretti in a pair of articles offering "Conjectures on World Literature".
[9] Drawing on the theories of cultural production developed by the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, Casanova explores the ways in which the works of peripheral writers must circulate into metropolitan centers in order to achieve recognition as being world literature.
Other scholars, on the contrary, emphasize that world literature can and should be studied with close attention to original languages and contexts, even as works take on new dimensions and new meanings abroad.
Since the middle of the first decade of the new century, a steady stream of works has provided materials for the study of the history of world literature and the current debates.