ABSTRACT
World history offers an understanding of the maturation of global networks over time that is important to the way literature and the arts are periodised. One example can be found in Christopher Bayly’s now classic The Birth of the Modern World. Although the concept is certainly not unique to Bayly, he devotes a section on literature and the arts entitled “Towards World Literature?” (question mark rightly included) to trace the way that modernity pushed literature, like other forms of human production, to develop into a global scale of uniformity with a sub-stratum of hybrid forms. Bayly’s conceptualisation of chronology illustrates an historical understanding of sequence, a move from one point in time to another on a global scale, that operates on temporal, geographical and individual levels.
