Around the year 940 A.D., a Chinese poet, Zhao Chongzuo, contributed to an anthology of lyric verse called Huajian ji, for which he also wrote a preface. This work, translated into English by P. P. Thoms in 1824 under the title Chinese Courtship: In Verse, found its way into the hands of Goethe and was the occasion for his celebrated conversation with Johann Peter Eckermann in 1827, in which the sage of Weimar claimed that the age of national literatures was drawing to a close, and that “the epoch of world literature [Weltliteratur] is coming.” As Martin Puchner, a professor at Harvard and the general editor of the six-volume Norton Anthology of World Literature, explains in an article of 2017 for the digital magazine Aeon, in making this prediction Goethe sought “an alternative to both metropolitan culture and German nationalism”; Weltliteraturwas to be “the cultural expression of a political order.” Recast in economic terms by Marx and Engels, national literatures were viewed as commodities available for international import and export: their intrinsically bourgeois nature, which had served the purposes of imperialism and colonialism, could be diverted to cosmopolitan ends. In the academy, comparative literary studies enjoyed a boom in the last decades of the twentieth century, while today there is a World Literature Institute at Harvard, and courses in that subject are offered on many American campuses. The globalization of media via digital technology has allowed this process of cross-fertilization