Alexander Beecroft 
An Ecology of World Literature 
From Antiquity to the Present Day

What is a literature? How do literatures of different countries interact with each other? In this groundbreaking study, Alexander Beecroft develops a new way of thinking about world literature. Drawing on a series of examples and case studies, the book ranges from ancient epic to the contemporary fiction of Roberto Bola�o and Amitav Ghosh. Beecroft identifies a series of literary ecologies, from small-scale societies to the planet as a whole, within which literary texts are produced and circulated. An Ecology of World Literature places in dialogue scholarship on ancient and modern, western and non-western texts, producing new and unexpected demands for literary study.

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Alexander Beecroft is an Associate Professor of Classics and Comparative Literature at the University of South Carolina. He has published extensively on topics ranging from authorship in ancient Greece and China, to theories of world literature, from the emergence of literary history as a discipline in the nineteenth century, to the origins of Canadian literature. His first book, Authorship and Cultural Identity in Early Greece and China, was published by Cambridge University Press.