Book reviews 131

The 1940s remain integral to that side of Australian politics. Social democracy in one
country, independent in foreign policy and mindful of its neighbours: this is still the
Labor ideal. The further that they move from the conditions that sustained the wartime
consensus, the more difficult it is for actual Australian Labor Party governments to fulfil
the ideal. Yet it is still compelling, for through it the country was made better. The awful
truth suggested by Macintyre’s wonderful book is that in all the Anglo-American
democracies – not only in Australia – with their commitment to untrammelled mar-
kets and the freedom of capital to shape politics, it is only under conditions of extreme
national distress that collective commitment become possible on a sufficient scale to
hold down the monied elite and lift up the society. It is clear that neither the rational
science of global warming nor the fears engendered by the security apparatus are
sufficient to provide the conditions for wiser states to emerge and to reverse the hard
running tide to inequality. Yet states in the Nordic world, and to a lesser extent other
parts of Western Europe, achieve clearly superior levels of social mobility and social
care and equivalent levels of economic prosperity. One ingredient they share with 1940s
Australia is an active reflexivity for national improvement. Under Curtin and Chifley
that reflexivity was embodied in Coombs and the DPWR. It was vulnerable to isolation
and decline, once the war was over, because in contrast with the political cultures of
Northwest Europe today, it was not sufficiently entrenched in civil society.

Alexander Beecroft
An Ecology of World Literature: From Antiquity to the Present Day
(Verso, 2015)

Reviewed by: Andrew Milner, Monash University, Australia

DOI: 10.1177/0725513616678260

As a discipline, comparative literature suffers from a whole set of image problems. Per-
ennially overshadowed by the study of national literatures – ‘English’ in the Anglosphere –
it has long been suspect as potentially unpatriotic. Increasingly sidelined by more fash-
ionable pursuits such as cultural studies and media studies, it has also come to be perceived
as arcane and old-fashioned. Yet, many of the key figures in contemporary literary and
cultural studies were actually trained as comparatists: Fredric Jameson, Edward Said,
Gayatri Spivak. Moreover, for a discipline supposedly in decline, literary comparatism has
proven strikingly productive theoretically. Witness the recent debates over ‘world litera-
ture’, prosecuted by Pascale Casanova (1999), David Damrosch (2003) and Franco Moretti
(1998, 2013), and their attendant controversies (Prendergast, 2004).
Comparative literature inherited the term Weltliteratur from Goethe’s U¨ber Kunst
und Alterthum, which he had come to envisage as an organ for both Weltpoesie and
Weltliteratur (Goethe, 1950: 895). Twenty years later Marx and Engels would use
exactly the same word, in more or less exactly the same sense, in the opening section of
132 Thesis Eleven 137(1)

the Manifest der Kommunistischen Partei (Marx and Engels, 1959: 466). Its precise
empirical meaning remained distinctly problematic, however, since for Goethe, as for
Marx and Engels, world literature was essentially a work in progress rather than an
achieved reality. So it continues to be in the more recent debates, to which we can now
add Alexander Beecroft’s Ecology of World Literature, an ambitious attempt to subsume
Damrosch, Casanova and Moretti into a wider synthesis, a Jamesonian if not quite
Hegelian Aufhebung. As Beecroft explains: ‘these . . . are not so much competing models
for understanding how literature circulates, but rather different concrete answers,
emerging in specific contexts, to the same set of problems about the interactions between
literatures and their environments’ (p. 3). And the more general answer to the more
general question, it turns out, will be ecology.
By ecology Beecroft means not ecocriticism in the conventional sense, but rather
a quite literally ecological approach to the study of literature itself. ‘Ecologists’, he
explains, ‘examine the interactions between the different forms of life that exist in a
particular region, as well as the interactions of those living things with their non-living
environment’ (p. 18). By analogy, he continues, ‘any given literature must . . . be
understood as being in ecological relationship to other phenomena – political, economic,
sociocultural, religious – as well as to the other languages and literatures with which it is
in contact’ (p. 19). Why exactly this should be deemed ecology rather than, say,
sociology isn’t clear at this stage. But Beecroft pushes the analogy further, insisting that,
just as ecology distinguishes between ‘ecozones’ and ‘biomes’, so comparative literature
can distinguish between ‘civilizations’ and ‘literary biomes’, the latter understood as
‘particular patterns of ecological constraints operating on the circulation of literary texts
in a variety of different historical contexts’ (p. 25).
Beecroft identifies six main literary biomes, devoting a chapter to each: the epichoric,
or local, from the Greek epichôrios, as in the literature of the Greek polis or the Warring
States Chinese city-state (pp. 37–61); the panchoric, from Panhellenic, where a plurality
of small-scale polities are bound together in a wider cultural unity (pp. 63–99); the
cosmopolitan, where a single literary language is used over a relatively large area for a
relatively long period of time, as in the Roman and Han Empires or the original Islamic
Caliphate (pp. 101–144); the vernacular, where locally spoken languages generate their
own literatures from out of the cosmopolitan (pp. 145–193); the national, where ver-
nacular literatures combine with nationalism and the nation-state to produce the most
characteristically modern of literary ecologies (pp. 195–241); and the global, in which
literary circulation finally transcends all borders (pp. 243–299). The last is, as Beecroft
readily admits, ‘a hypothetical future ecology’ (p. 243), and this chapter thus is largely
speculative. Its conclusion, that we face a choice between, on the one hand, global
Anglophonocentric linguistic and literary homogeneity and, on the other, the develop-
ment of a new heterogeneity, capable of producing texts with ‘a cosmopolitan yet richly
detailed sense of place’ (p. 296), seems as uncontroversial as Beecroft’s own preference
for the latter. One cannot help but fear, however, that the smart money will be on
homogeneity.
The earlier chapters are necessarily less speculative and bring together an impress-
ively erudite understanding of theory and history, texts and contexts, languages and
literatures. Beecroft is by training an expert in ancient Greek, Latin and classical Chinese
Book reviews 133

literatures and is thus, unsurprisingly, at his most persuasive on epichoric, panchoric and
cosmopolitan literatures. As he rightly observes, Casanova and Moretti focus ‘almost
exclusively on the literature emerging from the modern West and from the non-West’s
reaction to Western modernity’ (p. 2). Moreover, their controlling metaphors are ‘eco-
nomic’ rather than ecological; and ‘where economics tends to simplify our under-
standing of complex systems in order to make them easier to understand, ecology is more
comfortable accepting that the complexity may be inherent to the system’ (p. 18).
Clearly, neither Casanova’s model, which derives from Pierre Bourdieu, nor Moretti’s,
which derives from Immanuel Wallerstein, can have very much purchase on pre-modern
literatures. But if this is a weakness, it is also a strange kind of localized strength. For,
however one might choose to theorize modernity, whether through Marx’s ferociously
competitive accumulation of capital or Weber’s iron cage of reason, or Adorno’s fusion
of both into the dialectic of Enlightenment, it is difficult not to interpret the history of
capitalism as a progressive triumph of economics over ecology. And this is as true for the
specifically literary mode of production as for the general mode of production itself.
Which leads us to the depressing conclusion that ‘if this goes on’, as the science fiction
writers say (Heinlein, 1940), the global literary future is more likely than not to be
homogenized, monopolized and Americanized. There is, nonetheless, much to be learnt
from Beecroft, as also perhaps from Gramsci’s famous borrowing from Romain Rolland,
for the masthead of L’Ordine Nuovo: ‘pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will’.
Two quibbles: the index is oddly inadequate (why an entry for Bourdieu, but not for
Raymond Williams?); and the text tends at times to exaggerate the peculiarities of English.
At one point Beecroft suggests that, unlike other languages, English as spoken in North
America and the United Kingdom has relatively clearly defined boundaries and cannot be
perceived as constituted out of a ‘dialect continuum’. This might well be so for Beecroft’s
native Canadian English – as, indeed, for Canadian French – but is surely not the case for
British English. Not only Scots and Ulster Scots, the partial exceptions he concedes (p. 4),
but also Welsh, Irish, Cumbrian, Geordie, Scouse, even my own native Yorkshire, all
typically exhibit characteristics Beecroft attributes to European Romance languages: ‘a
range of dialects shifting imperceptibly from village to village and town to town and more
drastically from region to region’ (p. 5). A minor point, but irritating nonetheless.

References
Casanova P (1999) La republique mondiale des lettres. Paris: Editions du Seuil.
Damrosch D (2003) What Is World Literature? Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Goethe JW (1950) Bezüge nach außen. In: Gedenkausgabe der Werke, Briefe und Gespra¨che.
Band 14. Zürich: Artemis-Verlag, 895–897.
Heinlein RA (1940) ‘If this goes on . . . ’. Astounding Science-Fiction, March, pp. 117–51.
Marx K and Engels F (1959) Manifest der Kommunistischen Partei. In: Werke, Band 4. Berlin:
Dietz Verlag, 461–493.
Moretti F (1998) Atlas of the European Novel 1800–1900. London: Verso.
Moretti F (2013) Distant Reading. London: Verso.
Prendergast C (ed.) (2004) Debating World Literature. London: Verso.