Featuring leading scholars in their fields, this book examines receptions of ancient and early modern literary works from around the world (China, Japan, Ancient Maya, Ancient Mediterranean, Ancient India, Ancient Mesopotamia) that have circulated globally across time and space (from East to West, North to South, South to West). Beginning with the premise of an enduring and revered cultural past, the essays go on to show how the circulation of literature through translation and other forms of reception in fact long predates modern global society; the idea of national literary canons have existed just over a hundred years and emerged with the idea of national educational curricula. Highlighting the relationship of culture and politics in which canons are created, translated, promulgated, and preserved, this book argues that such nationally-defined curricula were challenged by critics and writers in the wake of the Second World War. 

Introduction: “Reading the Past Across Space and Time: Receptions and World Literature,” Brenda Deen Schildgen and Ralph Hexter.- Epic Receptions.- Chapter 1 “Epic Worlds,” Ralph Hexter.- Chapter 2 “Recycling the Epic: Gilgamesh on Three Continents,” Wai Chee Dimock.- Chapter 3 “Wheels Working Together: The Popol Wuj and Time Commences in Xibalbá as Markers of a Maya Cosmovision,”Arturo Arias.- Chapter 4 “Reception Configurations: The case of European Epic in India,” Brenda Deen Schildgen.- Chapter 5 “Formal Experiments in Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad,” Zina Giannopoulou.- Greek Philosophical Receptions.- Chapter 6 “Disagreement and Reception: Peripatetics Responding to the Stoic Challenge,” Jan Szaif.- Chapter 7 “ ‘Now we must consider that some of the ancients discovered the truth’”: Reception and Antiquity in Ancient Neoplatonism,” Michael Griffin.- Chapter 8 “Reading and Commenting on Aristotle’s Rhetoric in Arabic,” Uwe Vagelpohl.- Drama and Receptions.- Chapter 9 “A Third Antike: Hans Henny Jahnn’s Medea and the Introduction of the ‘Sumerian’ to Modern German Literature,” Adam Siegel.- Chapter 10 “American Bushido: A Kabuki Play Transplanted,” Robert Borgen.- Chapter 11 “Tamil Translation, French Orientalism, and Indian Dramatic Traditions in Louis Jacolliot’s La Devadassi (1868)”, Kristen Bergman Waha.- Lyric Receptions.- Chapter 12 “Goethe’s Chinesisch-deutsche Jahres- und Tageszeiten: Vernacular Universal, Erotica Sinica, and the Temporality of Nachträglichkeit,” Chunjie Zhang.- Chapter 13 “The Mediterranean Metaphor,” Kevin Batton.- Chapter 14 “Inventing China: The American Tradition of Translating Chinese Poetry,” Michelle Yeh.- Politics and Sociology of Reception.- Chapter 15 “Meaning, Reception, and the Use of the Classics: Theoretical Considerations in the Chinese Context,” Zhang Longxi.- Chapter 16 “The Sociology of Reception,” Gisèle Sapiro.- Bibliography.