Ben Etherington is Senior Lecturer in the School of Humanities and Communication Arts and a member of the Writing and Society Research Centre at Western Sydney University. His monograph, Literary Primitivism (2017) argues for a global conception of primitivism as a utopian reaction to the apotheosis of European imperialism. He is currently a Chief Investigator on the three-year Australian Research Council project Other Worlds, for which he is working with eminent Australian writers, including Alexis Wright and J. M. Coetzee, to explore the idiosyncratic ways in which writers create literary worlds. He is also known as a public commentator on universities and Australian literature. Jarad Zimbler is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Birmingham, and Marie Skłodowska-Curie Global Fellow at the University of Illinois, Chicago. His previous publications bring together a range of approaches, from narratology and stylistics, to book history and the sociology of literature. His first monograph, J. M. Coetzee and the Politics of Style (Cambridge, 2014), was shortlisted for the 2016 University English Book Prize. In his new research project, Literary Communities and Literary Worlds, he examines several mid-twentieth-century authors who moved from one literary field to another, and who re-shaped their practices in response to their new literary environments.

'The Cambridge Companion to World Literature helpfully pushes the boundaries of any idea(s) of 'world literature' - and, usefully, does so from a variety of angles, as it were. As the Introduction makes clear, there's no ambition to be comprehensive here; instead, the Companion presents a variety of perspectives and foci, and usefully projects beyond them, making for a nicely wide-ranging starting point …' M. A. Orthofer, The Complete Review (www.complete-review.com)

• Introduction Ben Etherington and Jarad Zimbler; Part I. Worlds: 1. Cosmopolitanism and world literature Timothy Brennan; 2. Nation, transnationalism, and internationalism Anna Bernard; 3. Scales, systems, and meridians Ben Etherington; 4. Literary worlds and literary fields Jarad Zimbler; 5. Translation and the circuits of world literature Stefan Helgesson; 6. Scriptworlds Sowon Park; 7. Ecologies of orality Liz Gunner; Part II. Practices: 8. Lyric universality Boris Maslov; 9. On worlding tragedy Ato Quayson; 10. The novel and consciousness of labour Neil Lazarus; 11. The worldliness of graphic narrative Charlotta Salmi; 12. Short story and peripheral production Shital Pravinchandra; 13. World cinema, world literature and dialectical criticism Keya Ganguly; 14. Publishing, translating, worldmaking Chris Andrews.