The introduction by Fang Weigui discusses the key subject of the book, world literature, largely from the point of view of historical semantics, but it also touches upon the dialectics of the universal and the local, world literature and national literature, the question of "minor literatures," literatures that appear as hybrid, "bi-national" or "cross-cultural," and so on.It also gives an overview of the approach chosen to the subject by the contributors to the book and offers some comments.