Capitalizing (on) World Literature Theo D’haen, University of Leuven/KU Leuven Published as “Capitalizing (on) World Literature,” in Echilibrul între Antiteze, Laura Mesina, Monica Spiridon, et al., ed., Bucharest: University of Bucharest Press, 2014, pp. 11-26. When citing please refer to the published version. Pascale Casanova, in her La République mondiale des lettres (1999) and Franco Moretti, in “Conjectures on world literature” (2000), and both of them in many more articles and works since then, have consistently maintained that Paris, for Casanova and for the period stretching from the seventeenth century to the immediate post-WW II years, and Paris and London, for Moretti and for the nineteenth century, which in this particular case we safely may assume to be identical to Eric Hobsbawms’s “long” variant, have functioned as the centers of an international, in fact worldwide literary system. 1 For Casanova, following a Bourdieuan logic, Paris, as the center of the earliest national literary system to establish itself as autonomous, that is to say independent from political or economic intervention, and with French serving as the uncontested lingua franca for the period she is interested in, in the guise of its critics, translators, and publishing houses functioned as the de facto worldwide clearing-house for the reputation of writers and works. In order to become a “world author” any writer, and particularly so non-French writers, had to “make it” in Paris. For Moretti, Paris, and as a close runner-up London, in the nineteenth century serve as the fountainheads of literary innovation for the rest of the world, specifically so far as the novel is concerned, arguably the leading literary genre precisely as of that same nineteenth century. Both Casanova’s and Moretti’s views have been heavily criticized. Christopher Prendergast, David Damrosch and Helena Buescu, for various reasons and with regard to various instances, have challenged Casanova’s claims for the pre-eminence and centrality of France, the French language, and Paris. Efraín Kristal, Shuh-mei Shih and Djelal Kadir have done the same for Moretti’s methodology of “distant reading,” and for his view of the central role of Paris and London during the nineteenth century. Still, within the very parameters they themselves define, and granting that in each case there are probably, indeed almost undoubtedly, at least some exceptions to be found, it is difficult to claim that Casanova and Moretti are completely wrong. At the same time, we should be open to at least nuancing their more absolute claims as to the centrality of Paris and London. Both Casanova and Moretti seem to see Paris and London as “global” counterparts to national literary systems centered upon a national capital, with a national literature written in a national language. Instead, I think we should be allowing for the fact that, iIf Paris and to a lesser extent London indeed functioned as the capital centers of a transnational literary system that during the preriod 1860-1940 encompassed at least most of Europe, or even of the Western world, or of the then “modern” world, there were 1 This artiĐle is ĐoŵpleŵeŶtary to aŶother artiĐle of ŵiŶe,  ’To ďe Fleŵish iŶ order to ďeĐoŵe EuropeaŶ’ – August verŵeyleŶ aŶd Fleŵish Literature, which is to appear in a volume edited by Angelo Pagliardini and Alexandra Vranceanu, and which focuses specifically on August Vermeylen. In the present artcile I have re- used, though not without some changes, some paragraphs of the earlier article.